This is the final part of a three-part series on Harriet Jacobs. Part 1 deals with her flight to the north. Part 2 deals with the recovery of Harriet Jacobs story.
When Harriet Jacobs finally escaped slavery in 1842, she boarded a ship departing Albemarle Sound and headed north. For the first time, she was out of reach of the man who had pursued and tried to control her for years.
But as Jacobs would soon learn, this new chapter would bring its own challenges.
In reality, it marked only the beginning of a more complex struggle.
Freedom… But Not Safety
Jacobs arrived first in Philadelphia, then quickly moved to New York City, where she worked as a nursemaid for writer Nathaniel Parker Willis’s family. The job provided stability, but freedom remained precarious for a fugitive.
Her former enslaver, Dr. James Norcom, insisted on his legal right to claim her and sent slave catchers after her. Twice, they confronted her—once in Manhattan, once in Brooklyn.
After this second confrontation, she was forced to flee again—this time to Boston, where the abolitionist movement provided a stronger network of protection. In Boston and Rochester, she met Amy Post, a woman who would become her dear friend and encourage her to write the book that would cement her legacy.
Amid all this uncertainty, Jacobs found hope.
She began to rebuild her family.
For years, Jacobs had lived with the agonizing separation from her children. After reaching the North, she was eventually reunited with them and with her brother John, who had also escaped slavery.
Her escape had never been only about herself.
It had always been about her children.
You see, her 7-year period of hiding in the upper attic came as Norcum stepped up his pressure on her. It was upon learning that he intended to make her children plantation slaves as punishment for her refusal to meet his demands that she went into hiding and eventually escaped, hoping that her flight would save her kids.
But it was after seven years and the flight to the north that she was finally reunited with her daughter.
A Journey Across the Atlantic
In the mid-1840s, Jacobs traveled to England with the Willis family while working as a nurse for their child. The experience was profound.
In England, slavery had already been abolished throughout. Jacobs later reflected that she did not encounter the same racial hostility she had known in the United States, and the experience reshaped her understanding of faith and society.
And that trip was part of why she fought for so long after her own escape to create a better nation. If England could do it, it could happen in the United States, too.
Finally Free
For years after her escape, Jacobs remained technically enslaved under American law. In 1852, the daughter of her former enslaver attempted to reclaim her in New York.
To prevent this, Jacobs’ employer, Cornelia Willis, purchased and then freed her.
Jacobs was firmly opposed to this act, as she was forever opposed to the very idea that one human would purchase another.
Jacobs refused to bow to the idea and principle of slavery, but Willis went through with it anyway.
And, while she had already been free for years through her own cunning, resiliency, and capability, with Willis’s act, she was now finally, legally, perpetually free.
Jacob’s story does not end there.
When the Civil War began, Jacobs did not remain safely in the North.
With the advent of the war, she and her daughter, Louisa, moved to Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Virginia, to provide food, clothing, shelter, schooling, and healthcare to refugees, including those escaping from slavery.
They helped establish schools for freedpeople and worked with communities struggling to rebuild their lives after generations of slavery.
And, she even went down to Savannah, Georgia, to continue the work, but with the death of a colleague, she returned north and eventually went back to England, where her book, now renamed The Deeper Wrong, had been widely and well received.
There, she raised money for homes and support for freedpeople in the South, but was unfortunately stymied by forces beyond her control.
Eventually, returning once again to Boston, she established a number of boardinghouses for Harvard students.
A Legacy That Endures
Harriet Jacobs lived until 1897, spending many of her later years continuing her work in support of education and freedom for formerly enslaved people.
Today, historians know far more about her life thanks to decades of research and the collection of letters and documents preserved in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, which reveal the remarkable network of family, friends, and activists who supported her struggle for freedom.
But long before historians pieced together those records, Jacobs had already given the world something extraordinary.
She had told her own story.
From a tiny attic in Edenton to abolitionist circles in the North, from England to the postwar South, Harriet Jacobs lived with courage, resilience, and an unwavering drive to protect her family.
And that story began right here in Edenton.
Today, visitors to Edenton can reflect on Jacobs’ remarkable life and her enduring voice for freedom.
