Sojourner Truth

Enslavement in New York

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella, daughter of James and Elizabeth Baumfree (the name is also spelled Bomfree), in Ulster County, New York, around 1797. Her exact birth date is unknown. She grew up enslaved on the Hardenbergh estate and spoke only Dutch as a child. Around the age of nine she was sold, and she passed through several enslavers before John Dumont bought her in 1810. The National Park Service records that she suffered abuse in the Dumont household. She had children with Thomas, another enslaved man.

Freedom and a court victory

New York law set July 4, 1827, as the date for ending slavery in the state. Dumont broke a promise to free her before then, and in 1826 she left with her infant daughter Sophia, leaving her older children behind. She found shelter with the Van Wagenen family in New Paltz, who paid Dumont $20 for her labor until the emancipation date.

When Dumont illegally sold her young son Peter to an enslaver in Alabama, she went to court in Ulster County and won. Peter was returned to New York in 1828.

A new name and calling

While with the Van Wagenens she became a devout Christian. In 1829 she moved to New York City and worked as a housekeeper. In 1843 she said the Spirit had called her to preach, took the name Sojourner Truth, and began travelling to speak against slavery.

In 1844 she joined the Northampton Association, an abolitionist community in Massachusetts, where she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she dictated to Olive Gilbert, came out in 1850 and gave her both income and a national audience.

The Akron speech

On May 29, 1851, Truth spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Because she could not read or write, her words survive only as others recorded them. The earliest report, by Marius Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle that June, gives a short, pointed speech. The famous refrain "Ain't I a woman?" appears only in a version Frances D. Gage published in 1863, which also put Southern dialect in the mouth of a woman raised speaking Dutch in New York. Historian Nell Irvin Painter and the Library of Congress judge Robinson's account the more reliable, though Gage's became the best known.

Civil War and later work

Truth moved to Michigan in 1857 and later settled in Battle Creek. During the Civil War she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union. In 1864 she met President Abraham Lincoln and worked with the National Freedmen's Relief Association in Washington, D.C., where she challenged segregation on the streetcars. She later petitioned Congress for land grants for freed people, but Congress never acted. In 1872 she was turned away when she tried to vote.

She died at her home in Battle Creek on November 26, 1883, and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.