Home > Slavery > Harriet Ann Jacobs Biography

Born autumn 1813
Edenton, North Carolina
Died March 7, 1897
Washington, D.C.

Slave, fugitive in the South and North, freed slave,
writer, antlslavery activist, reformer

The story of Harriet Jacobs's life as a slave in the nineteenth-century United States, from her birth in 1813 to her freedom in 1852, was published in 1861 as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself Although the Civil War (1861-65) was about to begin and many slave narratives had already been published, Incidents was the first full-length autobiography published by an African American woman in the United States. It was also the only slave narrative that took as its subject the sexual exploitation of female slaves; and the only slave narrative that identified its targeted audience as female.