The amazing life of former slave, ardent abolitionist and pioneer suffragette, Sojourner Truth. Information on her life, influence, work and memory.
Sojourner Truth was born with the slave name Isabella in 1797 in Ulster county, New York. Her parents were Dutch speaking slaves and Dutch was the first language that young Isabella learned. For the first thirty years of her life she belonged to a number of different slave owners. When she was fourteen, Isabella married an older slave by the name of Thomas. At the age of seventeen she bore her first child. Four more were to follow over the next eleven years. The last child, however, died in infancy.
Isabella's life could have been just like countless other female slaves of the early nineteenth century, but for a series of events in the 1820's and thirties that changed her life. In 1826 her son Peter was illegally sold to an Alabama slave holder. Isabella was desperate for his return and, with the aid of some local Quakers, she took out a law suit for his return. Her case was successful and her son was returned to her. About this time Isabella also joined the Methodist Church. This occurred after, according to her own narrative "˜God revealed himself . . . with all the suddenness of a flash of lightening . . . showing that he pervaded the Universe and that there was no place where God was not.'
In 1827, New York abolished slavery. Isabella was a free woman. She decided to seek work in New York City, taking her son Peter with her, while her daughters stayed home in Ulster County with their father. She became a domestic cleaner by day and a lay Methodist preacher by night. She would speak at camp meetings about the salvation that could only come from giving oneself to the Lord. In 1832 she joined a cult led by a self proclaimed Messiah who called himself Matthias. Three years later the cult was broken up amid scandal and Isabella moved on. She aligned herself with a group known as the Millerites. These people believed that Biblical prophecy indicated that the world would end in 1843.
1843 was a year of transformation for Isabella. It was then that she changed her name to that which she believed God had given to her - Sojourner Truth. She preached tirelessly as the year unfolded, firmly believing that the end was nigh. However when 1844 came with no fulfilment of prophecy, she decided to move on from the Millerites. Next she joined up with a white Utopian community in Florence, Massachusetts, known as the Northampton Association. It was through this organization that Sojourner was to broaden her scope from religious matters to encompass social reform. It was also through the Association that she met Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison. When the Association broke up in 1846 she joined up with the Seventh Day Adventists.
Sojourner's speeches became more political in tone. From the start she championed the rights of blacks and of women. She had by now honed her skills as an influential and memorable speaker. For many years she spoke widely on the subject of women's rights, using her own example as a woman who has toiled in the fields and worked as hard as any man. During the American Civil War she traveled to Washington, D.C. for a visit with President Lincoln. Following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation she was an important part of the National Freedmen's Relief Association as well as the Federal Freedman's Bureau. These organizations gave vital assistance to freed slaves. From 1870 onwards she poured her energies into the women's suffrage movement, being a key player in the American Woman Suffrage Association.
Sojourner Truth's last major cause involved a move to give uninhabited lands in Kansas to destitute former slaves. The ageing advocate of disenfranchised minorities travelled extensively in order to build support for this cause. It was not forthcoming however. Despite this, in 1879, a group of ex slaves known as the Exodusters, moved to Kansas. Sojourner Truth offered them her full support and travelled to Kansas to give them her assistance. A year later she returned to live with her daughters at Battle Creek, Michigan. She died there on November 26, 1883. She was eighty six years of age.
