Sojourner Truth
Isabella Baumfree, better known as Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Ulster County, New York. She is one of 12 assumed children to her parents, Elizabeth and James Baumfree. People don’t know how many siblings she actually has because slaves weren’t considered to be human thus there is no written record of their birthdays. She was sold at age 9 to a man named John Neely for $100 along with a flock of sheep. A human being was worth $100 and a couple of sheep. She was subject to extremely harsh and physical punishment by Mr. Neely. She was bought and sold 4 more times after that and the final time to John Dumont. At around age 18, she fell in love with a slave named Robert and had her second child, Diana, with him but could not marry him because they were owned by different people. She was then forced to bear 3 more children to a man named Thomas under her then-slave owner, John Dumont. Their names were Peter, Elizabeth, and Sophia. Though she despised Dumont, his residence is also where she learned to speak English.
Dumont promised to free her on July 4th, 1826, if she were to “do well and be faithful”, but he did not stay true to his word and refused to free her. She then fled to a nearby home of an abolitionist family, the Wageners, with her infant in 1827. She's said previously that, she "did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.” The Wageners bought her for $20 and helped her sue for custody of my son, Peter, who was illegally sold to a slaveholder in Alabama. Baumfree was the first black woman in the history of the United States court to sue a white man and prevail.
In 1828, she moved to New York City and worked for a local evangelist preacher, Elijah Pierson. Soon after, she began housekeeping for Robert Matthews who had a growing reputation of being a con man and a cult leader. By 1830 she participated in multiple religious revivals and became a charismatic speaker. When Pierson died, Matthews was accused of poisoning Pierson by the Folgers, members of his cult, and attempted to implicate her in the crime. She was acquitted and filed a slander suit against the Folgers and won.
Until 1839, she and her son lived happily together. He then took a job on a whaling boat called the Zone of Nantucket. She received 3 letters from him from 1840-1841. When the ship returned in 1842, Peter was not on board and she never heard from him again.
In 1843, she felt she was called upon by God to speak the truth and nothing but the truth due to the endless stream of lies she was told during her life, so she renamed myself Sojourner Truth. In 1844, she joined a Massachusetts abolitionist group called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry where she met Frederick Douglass and became an equal rights activist.
She never learned to read or write, but she dictated her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, to a publisher named Oliver Gilbert. Truth lived off of the sales of my book for the rest of her life.
In 1851, Truth began her lecture tour and delivered her famous speech entitled “Ain’t I a Woman?”. Truth challenged racial and gender inferiority and inequality. She stated in the speech, “I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?". Unfortunately, she had to split with Douglass because he felt that suffrage for newly freed black slaves was more important than suffrage for all newly freed black slaves. Truth left him with the statement, “Now, if you want me to get out of the world, you had better get the women votin' soon. I shan't go till I can do that.”
As Sojourner Truth once said, “Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine Black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is Black? …. Does not God love colored children as well as white children? And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?”
Sojourner Truth National Women’s History Museum
Sojourner Truth History Channel
Sojourner Truth Biography