Sojourner Truth Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Enslavement
Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, entered life in bondage to Dutch-speaking slaveholders. Her parents, James (often called Bomefree) and Elizabeth (Betsey), were enslaved and raised their children under the constant threat of sale. Dutch was Isabella's first language, and as a child she lived through the trauma of being sold away from her family multiple times when the Hardenbergh estate changed hands. She endured hard labor, harsh treatment, and the casual separations that slavery imposed, experiences that gave her a lifelong sensitivity to the pain of family rupture and a fierce devotion to justice.

Escape, Legal Victory, and Religious Awakening
In the early 1820s Isabella was enslaved by John Dumont. He promised to free her before the date set by New York's gradual emancipation law, then reneged. In 1826, determined to claim her liberty, she walked away from Dumont's farm, carrying her infant daughter Sophia. She found refuge with Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen, who paid Dumont for her remaining term of service until emancipation took effect. When her young son Peter was illegally sold into the Deep South, she turned to the courts. With the support of the Van Wagenens, she pursued her case and won Peter's return in 1828, becoming one of the first Black women known to have prevailed in court against a white man to recover a child.

Isabella underwent a profound religious conversion, came to see herself as guided by divine purpose, and moved to New York City. There she worked as a domestic and entered evangelical reform circles. She was employed for a time by Elijah Pierson and became briefly entangled in the household of Robert Matthews, the self-styled Prophet Matthias, during a sensational scandal from which she emerged untainted. The conviction that God had called her to speak truth guided the rest of her life.

Taking the Name Sojourner Truth
On June 1, 1843, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth, signaling a mission to travel and testify. She ventured through the Northeast and into Massachusetts, where she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community committed to abolition and equality. There she met leading reformers, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and learned to wield her distinctive voice in public debate. In 1850 she published her life story as the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to Olive Gilbert and issued with Garrison's support, using the proceeds to fund her travels and activism.

Voice for Women's Rights and Abolition
Truth's oratory blended humor, personal witness, and scriptural argument. At the 1851 women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, she delivered a speech that later became known as Ain't I a Woman?, challenging racial and gender hierarchies with unsparing clarity. The earliest account, recorded by Marius Robinson, does not match the dialect-heavy version published years later by Frances Dana Barker Gage, a reminder that Truth's first language was Dutch and that her voice was often reframed by others. Nevertheless, the force of her argument carried nationally. She spoke alongside or in conversation with reformers such as Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, insisting that struggles against slavery and for women's rights belonged together.

Harriet Beecher Stowe helped bring Truth to an even wider readership, profiling her in a widely read sketch that portrayed her as a moral seer. Truth also adopted practical strategies to sustain her work, selling cartes-de-visite inscribed with the line, I sell the shadow to support the substance, turning her image into a means of financing her advocacy.

The Civil War and Work for Freedom
During the Civil War, Sojourner Truth recruited Black men for the Union Army and spoke at mass meetings to rally support for emancipation. Moving to Washington, D.C., she worked with the National Freedman's Relief Association and assisted newly freed people seeking food, work, and housing. In 1864 she met President Abraham Lincoln at the White House, a visit that underscored her national stature. She pressed authorities to desegregate the capital's streetcars and campaigned for federal protections for the formerly enslaved. Throughout, she kept her central emphasis on self-reliance, dignity, and education, even as she sought structural change.

Postwar Suffrage and Ongoing Advocacy
After the war, Truth supported universal suffrage and appeared at meetings of the American Equal Rights Association, where she engaged colleagues like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in debates over strategy and priorities. She urged that neither women nor Black men be asked to wait their turn. She petitioned Congress for land grants to enable freed families to build independent livelihoods, and she traveled widely on the lecture circuit, carrying both temperance and suffrage messages to audiences across the Midwest and Northeast.

Later Years and Legacy
By the late 1850s, and more permanently after the Civil War, Truth made Michigan her home, eventually settling in Battle Creek, which served as her base between speaking tours. Age did not diminish her willingness to confront injustice; she continued to visit communities, exhort congregations, and speak in halls, merging her personal testimony with a universal plea for human rights. She died in Battle Creek in 1883, mourned by neighbors and reformers who had long admired her courage and clarity.

Sojourner Truth's life traced a path from enslavement in a Dutch-speaking corner of New York to the center of the nation's conscience. Sustained by faith, sharpened by experience, and amplified by alliances with figures such as Garrison, Douglass, Stowe, and Lincoln, she fashioned a public identity that challenged the boundaries of race and gender. Her insistence that the claims of freedom and womanhood are inseparable remains one of the most enduring legacies of the nineteenth-century reform movements she helped to shape.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Sojourner, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Equality - Mortality.

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