Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was born enslaved and never learned to read or write, and yet, driven by a keen intellect, a sharp-eyed view of the world, and rare oratorical skills, she became one of the preeminent fighters against slavery and for women’s rights in 19th-century America.

Early life

Sojourner Truth: A Life

• Birth date and place: Sometime about 1797; Ulster county, New York, U.S.
• Death date and place: November 26, 1883; Battle Creek, Michigan
• Education: No formal education
• Best known for: Fighting against slavery and for women’s rights in the 19th century
• Family: She married an enslaved man named Thomas. She had five children: James, Diana, Peter, Elizabeth, and Sophia. James died in childhood; Diana was born as the result of rape by Truth’s owner.
• Quotation: “But 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.”

Truth was born Isabella Baumfree, the daughter of enslaved parents James and Elizabeth Baumfree, on the estate of Dutch settlers. As such, Dutch was the first language she learned as a child. When she was about nine years old, she was sold, along with a flock of sheep, for $100. Separated from her parents, she was taken to a farm near Kingston, New York. She was sold multiple times before escaping to freedom in 1826. She spent most of that time as the property of New York farmer John Dumont, who beat and raped her. Her daughter Diana was the product of such a rape. She married an enslaved man named Thomas with whom she had her last three children.

Historic quest for freedom

By law, Isabella Baumfree should have become a free woman on July 4, 1827, but Dumont had promised to free her a year earlier. When he reneged on that promise, she took her infant daughter Sophia and fled from the farm. She was taken in by an abolitionist family, the Van Wagenens (sometimes spelled Van Wagener), that paid Dumont for her work until she officially became free in 1827. At this point, she changed her name to Isabella Van Wagenen.

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Showing the spirit and tenacity for which she would become renowned, Isabella Van Wagenen sought to regain custody of her son Peter, whom Dumont had illegally sold to enslavers in Alabama when he was just five years old. With the help of the Van Wagenens, she sued in Ulster county court for custody of Peter, and after a lengthy trial, the judge ruled that the

boy be delivered into the hands of his mother—having no other master, no other controller, no other conductor, but his mother.

Isabella Van Wagenen, the woman who would some 15 years later take the name Sojourner Truth, had just become the first Black woman in U.S. history to successfully sue a white man.

Becoming Sojourner

During her time in the Van Wagenen home, she became increasingly religious, saying she saw visions. After the landmark court case, Isabella Van Wagenen moved to New York City, where she worked as a housekeeper and became involved in a cultlike group called the “kingdom of Matthias.” In a bizarre incident, she was accused—and acquitted—of poisoning a member of the cult. By 1843 she had changed her name to Sojourner Truth because she had been inspired by God to “travel up and down the land showing people their sins and being a sign to them.” She moved to Massachusetts and became involved with a utopian society that advocated for abolition and universal voting rights. It was here that she met Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Even after the community disbanded, Truth continued to live in Massachusetts. She dictated her life story, which was published in 1850 as Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. She bought a house and raised money selling cartes-de-visite of herself captioned, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”

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(Read an excerpt from Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave.)

The speech that was not quite as remembered

In 1851, complete with books to sell in tow, Truth set off for Akron to speak at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. History would record it as the site of her most famous oratory, a speech that has become known as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” address. The only Black woman at the convention, she must have been a commanding presence when she stood—at almost 6 feet tall—to address the convention over the protests of some of the white women gathered ostensibly to promote the rights of all women.

Exactly what Truth said that day is largely lost to history. But in June 1851 Marius Robinson, with whom Truth was friends, published a transcript of the speech in the abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle. In it, Truth is humorous and self-deprecating, asking men at one point, “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.”

What she almost certainly never uttered was “ain’t I a woman?” which comes from an 1863 publication of Truth’s speech by Frances Gage, an ardent abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Gage’s version of the speech includes a Southern dialect that Truth almost certainly never used, as she had never been to the South. The repetition “ain’t I a woman?” was probably a well-intentioned literary device used for propaganda purposes.

Later life

Truth became an increasingly prominent and well-known abolitionist, successfully recruiting soldiers to fight for the Union during the Civil War and visiting Pres. Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864. She moved to Michigan, where she would spend the rest of her life. She continued to champion the causes of voting and women’s rights. In 1872 she actively campaigned for Pres. Ulysses Grant’s reelection, even going to the polls in an unsuccessful attempt to vote.

A lasting legacy

Truth died in 1883 in her Michigan home. Nearly a century and a half after her death, she has been remembered in almost innumerable ways, including:

• In 1986 the U.S. Postal Service issued a Sojourner Truth stamp.
• In 1997 NASA named its first rover to land on Mars Sojourner.
• In 2009 Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman to be memorialized with a statue displayed at the U.S. Capitol.

(To read Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Women’s Rights Convention of 1853, see What Time of Night It Is.)