Born Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth was one of the earliest
and most passionate of female abolitionists-for she herself had
once been a slave.
In the 1820s, when still quite a young woman, she escaped
from her New York owner after being brutally treated and sold
away from her family. By the 1840s, Truth had become a powerful
speaker against slavery, often moving her audiences to tears and
exclamations of horror with her firsthand accounts of what many
of her black brethren and sisters were enduring at the hands of
cruel masters. She would tell listeners of how some slaves were
kept cowed and afraid to act by beatings, sometimes with spiked
sticks and chains; she herself, as a teenager, had been taken
into the barn by her master one afternoon for absolutely no
reason and tied up by the wrists. Then he tore the shirt from
her back and whipped her with a bundle of sticks until her back
bled. In a voice contemporaries described as rich and deep, she
described how she refused to give him the satisfaction of
screaming, by clenching her fists so hard her fingernails drew
blood from her palms.
She also spoke of the living conditions many slaves were
forced to endure, crowded together into cabins with no privacy,
overworked, fed scraps in many cases, and clothed in threadbare
hand-me-downs. Her audiences must have felt the shame as Truth
recalled the auction block, upon which men and women alike were
frequently forced to strip and stand before potential buyers,
who would search their bodies for marks of the whip or of wrist
or leg irons, the presence of which would indicate the slave had
been frequently punished. The slaves would be forced to endure
impersonal and degrading inspections of their teeth, muscles,
and other body parts, depending on what the buyer was looking
for in the purchase.
Truth was self-educated, and much of her speaking bore the
stamp of a deep love of and acquaintance with Scripture. When
explaining to Harriet Beecher Stowe how she came to change her
name, Truth said she felt God had called her "to travel up and
down the land, showing the people their sins and being a sign
unto them." She also possessed a quick wit, coupled with an
ability to think fast and turn the unkind words of others
against them. Facing a heckler once who told her he did not care
for her anti-slavery talk anymore than he would for the bite of
a flea, Truth retorted, "Perhaps not, but Lord willing I'll keep
you scratching."
She was very involved in political causes, and strongly
supported suffrage. During the Civil War, she gathered supplies
for black volunteer regiments, and, in tribute to her efforts,
was received at the White House by President Lincoln in 1864.
Truth was appointed to the National Freedman's Relief
Association in 1864, where she worked diligently to better
conditions for African-Americans.
She lived long enough to see her people brought to freedom,
but never stopped in her efforts to win more equality for them.
Right up until her death, in Battle Creek, Michigan, she
continued to speak out for her race; when she died in 1883, she
went to her grave a much lamented and beloved figure in
abolitionist lore.