Profiles in Character #30: Sojourner Truth - Preacher for Rights

On Saturday, October 29, 1864 Sojourner Truth met with Abraham Lincoln in the White House.  This might seem a small footnote in history but it represented an astounding personal journey.

Isabella Baumfree was born into slavery about 1797 on a Dutch-speaking farm in Ulster County, New York. At nine, she was sold for $100 and beaten by her new owner because she didn’t understand English.  By her teens, she had been sold twice more, beaten by both new owners and sexually abused.  While state law provided for emancipation on July 4, 1827, she showed fierce independence when she fled in 1826 because her owner, John Dumont, refused to honor his promise to free her by then.     

As richly chronicled in Nelle Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A life, A Symbol, Isabella became a devout Methodist, “born again with an assurance of salvation that gave her the self-confidence to oppose the rich and powerful of this world.”

When she learned her six-year-old son Peter, still indentured to John Dumont, had been sold three times, ending up in Alabama, she went to court and got him back, unheard of for a Black and a woman.  She later recalled feeling “so tall within – I felt as if the power of a nation was within me!”

By 1829, Isabella was known as a gifted preacher.  Moving to New York City, she worked as a housekeeper and in 1832 came under the influence of Robert Matthews, who called himself Prophet Matthias and projected the Day of Judgment would come on July 9, 1836.  She lived in his house, gave him money and suffered his physical abuse and sexual abuse by his “claimed” wife, Ann Folger.  When Folger returned to her legal husband, they accused Isabella of poisoning them.  Undaunted, she sued for libel and won $125 in damages.

Isabella never learned to read or write, but refused to accept the nineteenth century’s view of woman’s role as being soft, gentle and subjugated to men.  On June 1, 1843, she announced she was now Sojourner Truth and left New York, “a “wicked city,” a second Sodom.”

“Sojourner” reflected seeing herself as an itinerant preacher. “Truth” reflected, as in her two lawsuits, that she was driven by the Holy Spirit of Truth.  The remainder of her life found her preaching to follow Jesus, abolish slavery and secure women’s rights.  As Painter writes, “[S]he saw God as an “all-powerful, all pervading spirit” who spoke to her directly, as a voice in her head or in the scriptures . . . She became a “great favorite,” adored for her “remarkable gift in prayer, and still more remarkable for singing.”

Settling in the communal Northampton Association in Massachusetts, she encountered abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.  Truth, Douglass would later recall, was “a “strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and flint-like common sense.”  While in Northampton, she dictated her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which Garrison published in 1850.

By 1845, Truth was giving antislavery speeches.  In 1851 she joined the antislavery/women’s rights speaking circuit, even though appearances by a woman were seen by men as scandalous.  On May 28, 1851 she gave what is known as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention. The now-popular version of her remarks, written down twelve years later to foster a myth about her Truth bears little comparison to a contemporaneous account of the speech.  Truth spoke perfect English.  As one example:

“And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him.  Man, where is your part.”

 Became:

"Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wan't a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?" 

Truth spoke to nearly all-white anti-slavery and woman’s rights gatherings, increasingly demanding full rights for both.  She spoke as a preacher, not a politician, but the Civil War brought her into work to recruit black troops and then to champion post-war efforts, through the Freedmen’s Bureau.  Into her early 80s, she sought, unsuccessfully, to get federal western land grants for freedmen.

So there is the symbolic Sojourner Truth – an escaped slave from the South who spoke in dialect – and the actual Sojourner Truth – a black woman from New York who spoke perfect English championed abolition and woman’s rights and achieved lasting fame through what she made of herself.

Nearing 70, the fire within her still burned.  In 1865, streetcars had been desegregated by federal law in Washington, D.C.  Still, conductors often refused to stop for black passengers.  Trying  to board one day Truth was dragged several yards by a conductor who wouldn’t stop. She contacted the president of the company, had him fired and then had him arrested.  He was convicted of assault.

That’s the Sojourner Truth who met with Abraham Lincoln and whose statue, in 2009, became the first African American woman to be placed in the U.S. Capitol.

Photo Credit: New York State Museum