Elijah pierson kingdom of matthias

Truth, Sojourner

By: Nell Irvin Painter

Source:

Black Women in America, Second Edition What is This?

· Bibliography

Related Content

· Truth, Sojourner At a Glance

· Abolition Movement

· Douglass, Sarah Mapps

· Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

· Remond, Sarah Parker

· Slavery

Truth, Sojourner

Sex: Female

Born: Hurley, Ulster County, New York, United States c.1799

Died: Battle Creek, Michigan, United States 26 November 1883

Activity/Profession: Abolitionist, Slave, Women's Rights Advocate, Litigant

(b. c. 1797; d. 26 November 1883), abolitionist, women's rights advocate.

Sojourner Truth is one of the two most widely known nineteenth-century black women; the other, Harriet Tubman, was also a former slave without formal education. While Tubman is known as the “Moses of her people” for having led hundreds of slaves to freedom, Truth is remembered more for a few memorable utterances than for her acts. Before the Civil War, she was a feminist abolitionist; after the war, she worked in freedpeople's relief. Truth is closely identified with a phrase she did not utter, “and ar'n't I a woman?” She often made the point that women who are poor and black must be included within the category of woman, but not in these precise words. A white feminist journalist, Frances Dana Gage, invented these particular words in 1863. Truth's twentieth- and twenty-first-century persona worked most effectively within the politically-minded worlds of black civil rights and feminism, in which she gainsays assumptions about race, class, and gender in American society. During her lifetime, however, Truth was deeply immersed in the Second Great Awakening's propagation of Methodist-inflected and unconstrained religiosity known as Perfectionism, much of which resembled modern Pentecostalism. Hence, the making of Truth's modern reputation entailed the creative reworking of much of her life, an elaboration that she encouraged and that began during her lifetime. The emblematic character of Sojourner Truth is constructed on a peculiarly nineteenth-century life experience that is nearly as obscure as the symbolic figure is well known.

Truth, SojournerSojourner Truth, in a carte-de-visite (a small visiting card portrait), possibly from 1864. It was captioned “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” Library of Congress

The symbol of Sojourner Truth was born of two speeches delivered in the 1850s: one in Akron, Ohio, in 1851; the other in Silver Lake, a small town in northern Indiana, in 1858. Like everything that happened to Truth after 1849, both events are known only through reports from other people. Truth was illiterate, and even her Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1878) was dictated in the late 1840s. In Akron, Ohio, in May 1851 Sojourner Truth joined the exchange at a woman's rights convention. The secretary of the meeting, Marius Robinson, took these notes as she was speaking:

"I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and a man a quart—why cant she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much—for we cant take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they wont be so much trouble. I cant read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again…man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard."

(Antislavery Bugle, 21 June 1851, in Painter, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol: 125–126)

Truth's 1851 speech demands that definitions of female gender allow for women's strength as well as for their suffering from poverty and enslavement. Her 1858 gesture, recorded by abolitionist William Hayward, again reclaims her gender and defies critics who seek to silence an eloquent critic of slavery and sexism. Faced with a hostile audience that questioned a black woman's right to speak in public and that intended to shame her out of presenting her case, Truth confronted men who claimed she was too forceful a speaker to be a woman. After they demanded that she prove her sexual identity through a performance intended to humiliate, Truth bared her breast in public, turned the imputed shame back upon her tormenters, and, transcending their small-minded test, turned their spite back on them.

Based on these words and gestures, the symbol of Sojourner Truth is an eloquent, inspired, former slave who made her experience of work and victimized motherhood into an alternate model of womanhood. In a world that saw woman as white and black as male, she was a woman who was also black and a black who was also woman. Although several black women worked for the abolition of slavery and the achievement of women's rights in the middle of the nineteenth century, such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Remond, the former slave Sojourner Truth became the emblematic nineteenth-century black woman and the symbol of the conjunction of sex and race.

Sojourner Truth was born about 1797 in Ulster County, New York, on the west side of the Hudson River and some eighty miles north of New York City, in a region dominated culturally and economically by people of Dutch descent. She was the second youngest of ten or twelve children, and her parents, James and Elizabeth Bomefree, named her Isabella. Their first language was Dutch. As a child Isabella belonged to several owners, the most significant of whom was John Dumont, for whom she worked from 1810 until a year before she was emancipated by state law in 1827. She kept in touch with the Dumont family until they moved west in 1849.

When she was about fourteen years old, Isabella was married to another of Dumont's slaves, an older man named Thomas. Thomas and Isabella had five children: Diana, Sophia, Elizabeth, Peter, and, perhaps, Hannah. In 1826 to 1827, the year before she became free, Isabella had several critical experiences. She left her long-time master Dumont of her own accord and went to work for the family of Isaac Van Wagenen. When her son's owner illegally sold him into perpetual slavery in Alabama, Isabella went to court in Kingston, New York, and sued successfully for his return. She also had a dramatic conversion experience and joined the recently established Methodist church in Kingston, where she met a Miss Grear, with whom she journeyed to New York City after her emancipation. Leaving her daughters, who were still bound through indenture, in Ulster County at work or in the care of their father, Isabella took Peter, a troubled young teenager, with her.

In New York City in the early 1830s, Isabella supported herself through household work. She attended the white John Street Methodist Church and the Black African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where she briefly encountered three of her older siblings. She also began to preach at the camp meetings held around the city and attracted the attention of white religious mavericks, some of whom became her employers. Through the dissident Methodist Latourette family, Isabella encountered the Magdalene Society, a mission to prostitutes founded by Arthur Tappan, who became a leading abolitionist in the mid-1830s. In the Magdalene Society, she met Elijah Pierson, and through Pierson, the self-proclaimed prophet Matthias (Robert Matthews).

Between 1832 and 1835, Isabella was a follower of Matthias and lived in his “kingdom,” a commune in Ossining underwritten by Pierson and another wealthy merchant family. The only black follower among Matthias's adherents, Isabella was also one of only two of the commune's working-class members. Like that of many other independent popular prophets of the early nineteenth century, Matthias's message was eclectic and idiosyncratic. Matthias, who had begun his public life as an ardent advocate of temperance and a fiery anti-Mason, advocated several of the enthusiasms that were current in the 1830s: He claimed to possess the spirit of God and taught his followers that there were good and evil spirits and that the millennium was imminent. The virtually corporeal existence of spirits was also a central tenet of the kingdom. Matthias and his followers did not believe in doctors, reasoning that illness was caused by evil spirits that must be cast out. Members of the kingdom fasted often and followed a diet that emphasized fresh fruit and vegetables and prohibited alcohol. Although other communities with which Sojourner Truth would be connected would hold many of these same convictions, Matthias's kingdom was the only one organized around so autocratic and charismatic a prophet.

Matthias's kingdom collapsed in 1835 after an accusation of murder and a free love scandal brought the community tremendous notoriety. Matthias left for the West, and Isabella resumed household work in New York City for another eight years. Her Narrative contains no record of her activities between the breakup of the Matthias commune in 1835 and her assumption of a new identity in the midst of economic hard times in 1843. The Narrative does indicate that in 1843 Isabella was profoundly influenced by the millenarian movement inspired by a religiously independent farmer named William Miller. Making his own calculations based on biblical prophesies, Miller had figured that the world would come to an end in 1843. Scores of itinerant preachers, who addressed hundreds of camp meetings, which were coordinated by several well-run newspapers (including the New York Midnight Cry), spread Miller's message. Believing herself to be part of what she called a great drama of robbery and wrong, Isabella felt that she must make a definitive break with her old way of life. On 1 June 1843, which was also the day of Pentecost, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth, which means “itinerant preacher.” Without informing her family or friends, she set out eastward, exhorting people to embrace Jesus, as the Spirit had commanded her. Following a network of Millerite camp meetings, she made her way from Brooklyn, across Long Island, into Connecticut, and up the Connecticut River Valley. By December 1843 the Millerites were facing the reality of the Great Disappointment, and Sojourner Truth had joined the utopian Northampton Association, located in what later became Florence, Massachusetts.

A utopian community dedicated to the cooperative manufacture of silk, the Northampton Association attracted relatively well-educated people whose reforming sentiments were broad and deep-running. Unusual at the time, the Northampton Association did not draw the color line, and there Truth encountered the retired black abolitionist David Ruggles, who was a permanent resident, and Frederick Douglass, who visited occasionally. William Lloyd Garrison also spent months at a time at the Northampton Association, staying with his brother-in-law George Benson, who was one of the association's founders. Between residents and visitors at the association, Truth lived for the first time in an environment permeated with liberal reforms like feminism and abolitionism. Even before the association collapsed in 1846 and its lands subdivided and sold, Truth began to address antislavery audiences, taking her preacher's speaking skills into a new field. After 1846, she stayed on in Florence, where she bought a house on Park Street. In 1849 she joined George Thompson, an antislavery member of the British Parliament, on the antislavery and women's rights lecture circuit, selling her Narrative to pay off the mortgage on her house. Florence remained her base until she moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1856.

As an antislavery feminist speaker, Sojourner Truth quickly gained a reputation for pungent wit and insight. Whether she said that women deserved equal rights with men, that slavery should be abolished, or that freed people should be allocated government lands in the West, she always prefaced her remarks and authenticated her authority by recalling her experience in slavery. In time, she overstated both the duration of her enslavement and the particulars of her suffering. After the Civil War, Truth routinely spoke of having spent her mother's forty, rather than her own thirty, years as a slave. Stressing her identification with slavery, Truth gauged her audiences well, for she, rather than her free, educated, and ladylike black colleagues, found a fond place in American memory.

Truth continued to lecture to antislavery and women's rights audiences until she went to Washington, DC, in 1863 to aid black refugees fleeing the warfare of northern Virginia and the continued slavery of Maryland. As she nursed and taught domestic skills among destitute former slaves, Truth realized that the old clothes and handouts of charitable aid could not address the fundamental causes of poverty among the freed people: lack of paying jobs and material resources. In 1867 she initiated a job-placement effort that matched refugee workers with employers in Rochester, New York, and Battle Creek, Michigan. When that operation became too cumbersome for volunteers to manage, she drew up a petition to Congress that demanded that western land be set aside for the freed people's settlement. In 1870 and 1871 she traveled throughout New England and the Midwest, including Kansas, collecting signatures on her petition, on which no action was taken. In 1879, however, scores of black southerners, called Exodusters, migrated to Kansas spontaneously. The Exodusters were acting independently on the same kind of millenarian fear of imminent transformation that Truth had experienced in 1843. Fearing (rightly) that ascendant Democrats would seek to reenslave them, Exodusters from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee flocked to the state that they knew as Free Kansas. By the late 1870s Sojourner Truth had fallen into poor health, but she applauded the Exodusters' venture, even traveling to Kansas to support them. She died in Battle Creek in 1883, mourned as a stalwart of antebellum reform.

Well before her death, Truth had begun to enter historical memory. Writing down Truth's autobiography, which Truth published in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Olive Gilbert (who also lived in the Northampton Association) preserved the first portrait of Sojourner Truth. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a widely circulated profile entitled “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1863 and reprinted in the 1875–1878 edition of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Stowe's article motivated Frances Dana Gage to write her own recollections of Truth, also in April 1863, which were republished in the 1875–1878 edition of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and volume one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Gage, who had chaired the meeting in Akron in 1851, invented the rhetorical question, “Ar'n't I a woman?” Subsequent Sojourner Truth biographies, long and short, mostly repeated material from these three mid-nineteenth-century sources.

So singular and so eloquent a personage appealed to educated American women, who embedded various versions of her in women's history. Because Truth left only fragmentary bits of autobiography, and her surviving children, also poor and illiterate, lacked the resources to create a stable historical character, Sojourner Truth's persona has changed to reflect the needs and tastes of her audiences since she entered the public realm in the early 1830s. In camp meetings around New York City, she gained renown as a preacher and singer, a reputation that she retained well after she became Sojourner Truth, the itinerant preacher, in 1843. In 1863 Harriet Beecher Stowe established Truth as a Christian of exquisite faith, in accordance with nineteenth-century evangelical sensibilities. By the end of the nineteenth century, the popularity of Stowe's version of Truth had begun to fade. Modern audiences are more likely to know Truth through Frances Dana Gage, as a feminist who redefines womanhood along contemporary lines. To reinforce the power of this black feminist persona, it became common practice to collapse her 1851 sentiments and 1858 actions into one event. This combination produces an angry, defiant character that may suit modern tastes but that does not match the evangelical qualities of the historic Sojourner Truth.

See also Abolition Movement.

Bibliography

· Collins, Kathleen. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth. History of Photography, July–September 1983.

· Fauset, Arthur Huff. Sojourner Truth: God's Faithful Pilgrim (1938). New York: Russell & Russell, 1971.

· Mabee, Carleton, with Susan Mabee Newhouse. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

· Mabee, Carleton. Sojourner Truth, Bold Prophet: Why Did She Never Learn to Read? New York History, January 1988.

· Ortiz, Victoria. Sojourner Truth, A Self-made Woman. New York: Harper Collins, 1974.

· Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojurner Truth, A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

· Painter, Nell Irvin, ed. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

· Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic. Gender and History, Spring 1990.

· Painter, Nell Irvin. Introduction to reprinted edition of Jacqueline Bernard, Journey Roward Freedom: The Story of Sojourner Truth. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.

· Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism: Difference, Slavery, and Memory. In An Untrodden Path: Antislavery and Women's Political Culture, edited by Jean Yellin and John Van Horne. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

· Pauli, Hertha. Her Name Was Sojourner Truth. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962.

· Stetson, Erlene, and Linda David. Glorying in Tribulation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994.

· Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Citation forTruth, Sojourner

Citation styles are based on the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Ed., and the MLA Style Manual, 2nd Ed..

MLA

Painter, Nell Irvin. "Truth, Sojourner." Black Women in America, Second Edition. Ed. Darlene Clark HineNew York: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford African American Studies Center. Tue Apr 18 20:45:22 EDT 2017. .

Chicago

Painter, Nell Irvin. "Truth, Sojourner." Black Women in America, Second Edition, edited by Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. Oxford African American Studies Center, http://www.oxfordaasc.com/article/opr/t0003/e0439 (accessed Tue Apr 18 20:45:22 EDT 2017)