SOURCE: “Sojourner Truth: A Practical Public Discourse,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 227-45.

[In the following essay, Lipscomb contends that Truth's speeches and oratory were part of a practical public discourse tradition that sought to inspire action on issues important to the speaker.]

At a time when it was uncommon for women—and in particular black women—to speak publicly, Sojourner Truth was a major force in speaking on pressing matters of public policy. Much has been written about her as an abolitionist and as a champion of women's rights in the nineteenth century. To date, however, no research has focused on her oratory as deliberative rhetoric¹—the sort of rhetoric that many theorists place in “settings mainly civic” (Bitzer 71) and that “gives primary emphasis to communication on public problems” (Halloran 246). A former slave who remained illiterate all her life, Sojourner Truth commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day—slavery and suffrage.

Sojourner Truth was born a slave in upstate New York sometime around 1797. She was given the name Isabella by her owner, Charles Hardenberg, a wealthy Dutch landowner; the first language she learned to speak was Dutch. After passing through the hands of several owners, Isabella served from 1810 to 1827 in the household of John J. Dumont of New Paltz, New York, where she bore at least five children by a fellow slave named Thomas. After learning that Dumont intended to renege on his promise to grant her freedom prior to the 1828 mandatory emancipation of slaves in New York state, Isabella fled Dumont's household in 1827. She found refuge nearby with a Quaker family whose surname she took; Isabella remained with them until emancipated.

As Isabella Van Wagener, she arrived in New York City with her two youngest children around 1829 and secured domestic employment. Although she joined several churches, she did not find the religious satisfaction she sought until she aligned herself with Elijah and Sarah Pierson, wealthy patrons who had undertaken a widespread mission of conversion in New York City, especially among prostitutes. The Piersons and Van Wagener preached on the streets and attracted much attention; Van Wagener also assisted in the religious services of the Retrenchment Society, an organization that Elijah Pierson founded. Sometime between 1829 and 1831, she joined the Piersons' private household, where they “prayed together interminably and fasted for three days at a stretch” (Notable American Women 479-80).

For eight or nine years following her association with the Piersons, Van Wagener lived quietly in New York, maintaining a home for her two children, earning her living as a cook, maid, and laundress, and regularly attending the African Zion Church. Intensely religious but unhappy in New York City, she left her home in 1843 and set out to preach at camp meetings and private residences in New England and cities west of New York. Since she was leaving behind her years of servitude and making a fresh start, Isabella Van Wagener felt she needed a new name—one more reflective of her “calling.” According to her autobiographical narrative, she prayed for instruction (Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth 100; hereafter cited as Narrative) and the Lord commanded her to take the name “Sojourner.” Sometime later she decided that having a second name would be appropriate. “Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, 'cause I was to declare the truth to the people” (Narrative 164).

Sojourner Truth spent the summer of 1843 walking through Long Island and Connecticut, sleeping wherever she found shelter and working when she needed food. She sang and spoke at camp meetings, in churches, on highways, and in the streets of towns. By the winter of 1843 Truth had made her way to Northampton, Massachusetts. She became a member of a communal farm and silk factory, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, which had been founded by George W. Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison. Encountering the abolitionist movement for the first time, Sojourner Truth became an enthusiastic convert. When the association collapsed in 1846, she remained in the Benson household as a guest and continued to speak periodically throughout the state. The abolitionist leaders recognized her unique gifts for engaging crowds and publicized her travels in their periodicals.

Around 1850 Sojourner Truth traveled west, her growing reputation as a public speaker having preceded her. “She had a personal magnetism that drew great crowds, which were held by her homely, trenchant, seemingly random remarks, her gift for repartee, and her gospel songs” (Notable American Women 480). In Ohio the office of The Salem Anti-Slavery Bugle was her headquarters, and from there she toured Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas, at times sharing platforms with abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Parker Pillsbury. She supported herself by selling the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850).²

To appreciate fully the significance of Sojourner Truth's voice in the nineteenth century, one must understand the historical context in which she functioned. Janey Weinhold Montgomery describes the rhetorical setting from 1850 to 1875 as “characterized by an expression of rights. Continual controversy over slavery involved the right of the federal government to prohibit slavery, and the right of the states to protest in defense of their sovereignty” (12). The period preceding the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 was politically characterized by sectional controversy: the South was engaged in debate over expansion, a thinly veiled disguise for the acquisition of more slave territory in the West, while the North—not uniformly abolitionist—was strongly against the South's extension of slavery into Western territories. Meanwhile, Congress found that “efforts to enforce the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law added to the difficulties of the situation” (Hicks et al., in Montgomery 13).

Another issue whose time frame closely paralleled abolition was women's rights. Women's conventions and public meetings in the 1850s were held in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, but most of these gatherings were segregated by race. Because many nineteenth-century white women's rights advocates were active in the abolitionist movement, it is often assumed they were also antiracist. bell hooks claims that the first white women's rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women, but only for white women (124). When white women reformers in the 1830s chose to work to free the slave, says hooks, they were motivated by religious sentiment. On a moral platform they attacked slavery, not racism.³ While these white women strongly advocated an end to slavery, they never advocated social or political change that would allow the status of blacks to be equal to their own (125). In the 1850s, when many white female reformers complained that the issue of slavery and women's rights were being confused as one, most black abolitionists split from the white women's movement. Few black women seem to have been welcomed at white women's rights meetings. Sojourner Truth's presence at the second women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851, was thus exceptional.

Frances D. Gage, who presided over the 1851 convention, relates this account of Truth's presence at that meeting:

The cause was unpopular then. The leaders of the movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt, black woman, in a gray dress and turban, surmounted by an uncouth sun-bonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and such words as these fell upon listening ears—“An abolition affair!” “Woman's rights and niggers!” “Don't let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced.”

(Stanton 1:115-16)

Gage replied, “We shall see when the time comes” (115). Sojourner Truth did not speak that day, but in the succeeding days of the 1851 convention and in the many years that followed, her voice became a formidable force in deliberating both the issues of slavery and equal rights for women.

II

Historians often describe nineteenth-century American rhetoric as a classical tradition derived primarily from ancient Greek and Roman sources. This tradition is also depicted as a continuous thread, surviving without a break from ancient to contemporary times. For example, writes Christine Oravec, Marie Hochmuth Nichols and Richard Murphy sketch a scenario in which rhetoric changes, shifts, but grows ever “stronger” throughout the nineteenth century: “Through the age, now swift flowing, now quiescent, continued the main channel of classical rhetoric. Many tributaries fed it, and at times, indeed, rivaled the main stream in size and momentum—the science of voice, the quasi-scientific elocutionary system … the Delsartian systems. But the stream flowed on, and gathering momentum, at the end of the century cascaded into what we now know as the modern department of speech” (395). More recent scholarship argues that a “severe eclipse in the tradition occurs during the nineteenth century which accounts for the decline of rhetoric in American culture.”⁴ However, according to Oravec, both interpretations assume the continuity of a single, specifically classical rhetorical tradition.

Significantly, then, the classical or classical-belles lettres tradition described by many scholars resides primarily in the native textbooks, pedagogical practices, and curricula of universities and colleges. Hence, the dominant assumptions about American rhetorical theory are based upon the legitimacy of certain formal institutions. But, says Oravec, significant rhetorical theory may well have emerged in a much more responsive and politically volatile arena than in the textbooks and the curriculum (396). Alternatives to what we see now as an established tradition may have resided implicitly in the practical public discourse of the age.⁵ While Oravec maintains that “a well-articulated theoretical alternative to the classical-belle lettres tradition” emerged in nineteenth-century periodicals (397), I am suggesting that an alternative practical public discourse emerged in another form during this period. At no time, perhaps, in the history of American speech and amidst mass social turmoil was there a period more conducive to a rhetoric of practical public discourse.

Sojourner Truth offered such an alternative in her “practical public discourse,” a deliberative discourse that sought to inspire human action on the issues of slavery and women's rights. The ultimate goal of her practical discourse was to enact legislation, considered to be the most critical subject for deliberation because “it reflects and preserves the character of the regime, regulates the lives of all who live under its authority; and the ends of legislation encompass all the ends of human action, a category so broad as to include the final end of all action—happiness” (Arnhart 57). Implicit in Truth's rhetoric was the notion that if everyone in a democratic society were allowed to contribute, then the whole of society would benefit. Although she was not trained in formal rhetorical strategies, and although her platform style may have seemed “random” and extempore, Sojourner Truth nonetheless commanded sophisticated rhetorical strategies and knew quite well what she was doing. Nothing of hers was wholly unplanned or accidental. She had a goal—to effect action on suffrage and slavery. Her rhetorical strategies were consciously designed to help her achieve that goal. Her rhetoric was thus deliberative, and her religious beliefs were always at the helm of these strategies.

While Sojourner Truth's association with the Quakers and the African Zion Church played a significant role in her rhetorical training, her religious instruction can be traced back to her youth. “In the evening, when her mother's work was done,” Truth recalled in her Narrative, her mother “would sit down under the sparkling vault of heaven, and calling her children to her, would talk to them of the only Being that could effectually aid or protect.” Her mother's teachings were in Low Dutch and, according to Olive Gilbert, the English translation “ran nearly as follows—‘My children, there is a God, who hears and sees you and when you are beaten, or cruelly treated, or fall into any trouble, you must ask help of him, and he will always hear and help you’” (Narrative 17). She taught them to kneel and say the Lord's Prayer.

Truth never forgot these instructions from her mother, and while she never learned to read, she always managed to have someone read to her. It is important to note that whenever she employed someone to read the Scriptures to her, she wished to hear passages without commentary. If adults read to her and she asked them to repeat a passage over and over again, many invariably began to explain by giving their version of it. This tried her patience exceedingly; consequently, she ceased asking adults to read to her and substituted children. Children, as soon as they could read distinctly, would reread the same sentence to her, as often as she wished, and without comment. In that way she could hear—and memorize—without interruption. She did not want the explications of others; she wanted to interpret the scriptures as she saw them (Narrative 108-09). Crucial to her being able to draw her own interpretations was the emphasis she placed on memorizing; this process—a conscious effort—was central to her ability to incorporate biblical precedents and biblical passages into her speeches.

Truth's independence of mind continued to play a major role in her activities when, in 1843, she met William Lloyd Garrison's brother-in-law and joined the abolitionist movement. She immediately aligned herself with members of major antislavery organizations. The aim of such societies was to develop a systematic program of agitation to bring about emancipation and full citizenship for Negro freedmen. Major antislavery societies employed agents, or public speakers, who toured the North and West promoting abolitionism. Some of the speakers were designated “local” agents and served part-time, usually speaking within a restricted geographical locality. Other speakers were designated “regular” agents and were employed on a full-time basis (Kennicott 18).

Initially, black speakers were not a part of the agent corps but, once employed, fugitive slaves were the most sought-after group of antislavery agents. A letter published in Garrison's newspaper, the Liberator, commented in 1842: “The public have itching ears to hear a colored man speak, and particularly a slave. Multitudes will flock to hear one of this class speak” (quoted in Kennicott 19). Henry Bibb, a Kentucky fugitive, began his speaking career in 1844 by telling an Adrian, Michigan, audience of his harrowing escape to freedom, his return to the South to rescue his wife, and his subsequent recapture and second escape. By 1844, Lewis and Milton Clark were touring the North and West with moving testimonies of the cruelties of captivity (19).

Among the other popular slave speakers, according to Patrick Kennicott, was Isabella Van Wagener who, “upon becoming an antislavery lecturer, adopted the name Sojourner Truth, the name she claimed God had given her” (19). Kennicott and Sojourner Truth's biographers place her with William Lloyd Garrison, fugitive slave agents, various antislavery societies, and antislavery activity (Gilbert; Fauset; Pauli). Her association with the antislavery societies provided Truth the opportunity to observe many polished religious and civic speakers who undoubtedly served as rhetorical models. Since she was not book-trained in rhetorical devices, she adapted the speaking techniques of the platform and pulpit orators of the early period of the antislavery movement: namely, establishing one's own good character (ethos), exhibiting biblical knowledge and moral rationale (logos), and relating one's personal trials (pathos). Indeed, these were the three means she utilized to establish her authority as a platform speaker in nineteenth-century America.

III

The convention atmosphere during the early platform period often produced hostile audiences. In fact, much of the time the audience was filled with hecklers provoked by the clergy and the press. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, authors of the History of Woman Suffrage, reported: “Gentlemen and ladies alike who attempted to speak were interrupted by shouts, hisses, stamping, cheers, rude remarks and all manner of noisy demonstration” (1:547).

During her address to what later became known as the “Mob Convention” in New York City on September 7, 1853, Sojourner Truth encountered one of the most hostile crowds imaginable. According to Stanton and Anthony, Truth “combined the two most hated elements of humanity: she was black and she was a woman, and when she spoke all the insults that could be cast upon color and sex were hurled at her” (1:567). In response, her opening remarks attempted to establish her own character as a good citizen:

Is it not good for me to come and draw forth a spirit, to see what kind of spirit people are of? I am a citizen of the State of New York; I was born in the State of New York; and now I am a good citizen of this state. I was born here, and I can tell you I feel at home here.

(Stanton 1:567)

By opening with a rhetorical question, Truth established an intimacy with her listeners and reassured them that she intended them no harm. By declaring herself a citizen of the state of New York, she was also identifying with the audience—she was more like than unlike them.

To further establish her ethos and moral authority to speak, Sojourner Truth often cited stories and passages from the Bible. At the Mob Convention, she told the story of Queen Esther, who “came forth, for she was oppressed, and felt there was a great wrong, and she said, ‘I will die or bring my complaint before the King.’” Sojourner Truth explained that women in the United States wanted their rights, just as Queen Esther had demanded hers. “The King raised up his sceptre and said, ‘Thy request shall be granted unto thee—to the half of my kingdom will I grant it to thee!’” “Should the king of the United States be greater, or more crueler, or more harder?” asked Truth. “Women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don't get 'em” (1:568).

In addition to establishing her ethos with the audience, Truth also developed logical forms of argumentation. Montgomery demonstrates how Truth, never having studied logic, “amazed her audiences with her refutation and constructive efforts” (55). Since Sojourner Truth had no formalized training in refutation, she listened to her opponent and applied what she heard to her own experiences or her knowledge of the Bible. This tactic amounted to “turning the tables,” a strategy she likely mastered from listening to polished black orators such as John Mercer Langston, a lawyer educated in Europe, Dr. James McCune Smith, a prominent New York physician, and the well-known abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

When “turning the tables,” Truth would repeat her opponent's statement and then use it to her own advantage. In her speech to the Women's Convention in Akron, for example, she heard a minister advance the argument that superior rights and privileges were claimed for males because of the “manhood of Christ” (Stanton 1:115). Truth replied:

Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wan't a woman! Whar did your Christ come from? Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin' to do wid him!

(Stanton 1:116)

Without introducing any other type of evidence, Truth had effectively rebuked her opponent. According to Truth, nothing more needed to be said. As Sojourner Truth stood there with “outstretched arms and eyes of fire, rolling thunder couldn't have stilled that crowd as did those deep, wonderful tones” (Stanton 1:116).

As part of her rhetorical strategy, Truth often used humor in her logical appeals. The humor of the argument was enough to destroy the effectiveness of her opponent's point. In her speech delivered to the Equal Rights Association Convention, Truth was advocating woman suffrage. She stated her opponent's stand as:

I am sometimes told that “Women ain't fit to vote. Why don't you know that a woman had seven devils in her; and do you suppose a woman is fit to rule the nation?” Seven devils ain't no account; a man had a legion in him (great laughter). The devils didn't know where to go; and so they asked that they might go into the swine. They thought that was as good a place as they came out from (renewed laughter). They didn't ask to go the sheep—no, into the hog, that was the selfishest beast; and man is so selfish that he has got women's rights and his own too, and yet he won't give women their rights, he keeps them all to himself.

(Stanton 2:222)

By continuing the argument and introducing humor into the story, she was able to “minimize” the effect of the original argument (Montgomery 56).

As these examples illustrate, Sojourner Truth had a strong sense of self and always spoke in the first person; she was never afraid to call attention to herself when advancing any argument. Arguing from example as a rhetorical strategy, she often exposed various parts of her body for dramatic effect: “Look at me! Look at my arm! … I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!” In addition to body parts, Sojourner Truth used her physical stature to her advantage as well: “Sojourner stood nearly six feet high, head erect and eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream” (Stanton 1:115-17). No doubt her physical characteristics impressed her audience while enhancing the effectiveness of her speeches.

Whereas argument from example, rhetorical induction, is “the foundation of reasoning,” rhetorical deduction uses the enthymeme, an abbreviated syllogism based on probabilities. Sojourner Truth often used the enthymeme in refutation as a constructive means of proof. When men claimed superior rights due to their superior intellect, Truth replied with this observation: “If my cup won't hold a pint and yourn holds a quart wouldn't it be mean not to let me have my little half measureful?” The implication here is that since the men claimed superior rights based on their superior intellect, then women with some intellect, even if just a “pint,” should have some rights. According to one observer, the audience responded with long and loud cheering (Stanton 1:116).

There are many accounts from contemporaries who witnessed the power Sojourner Truth wielded over hostile crowds. Her use of wit and her own life experiences were consistently effective. Speaking of Truth's address at the 1851 Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, [“Ain't I A Woman,”] Frances Gage made these observations:

The tumult subsided at once. … At first word there was a profound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached every ear in the house, and away through the throng at the doors and windows. … The speaker had taken us up in her strong arms and carried us safely over the slough of difficulty, turning the whole tide in our favor.

(Stanton 1:116-17)

In other words, with “the tender-skinned among us” quickly losing dignity in an atmosphere which “betoken[s] a storm,” Sojourner Truth had rescued the women too timid to speak and those whom the “boys in the galleries were getting the better of” (Stanton 1:115). In what had become an unruly situation, Sojourner Truth, with her quiet reserve and deep voice, had calmed the noisy crowd and rescued the women who were not accustomed to speaking publicly.

Frances Titus also relates the following story about Sojourner Truth. In a large reform meeting, Truth sat among many able public speakers. One man, a lawyer speaking against the rights of women, in defiance of propriety, was wasting time by “distasteful and indelicate declamation.” Some, thinking he would never end, left the meeting. Others, “distressed and mortified,” silently endured. Just at the point when he was finally forced to pause to draw new breath, Truth, “groaning in spirit, raised her tall figure before him, and, putting her eyes upon him said, ‘Child, if de people has no whar to put it, what is de use? Sit down, child, sit down!’ The man dropped as if he had been shot, and not another word was heard from him” (Narrative 149).

Titus tells another anecdote reported to her by a friend. In the period of the antislavery movement, Sojourner Truth was in the presence of a speaker whose address “appealed to the lowest sentiments of scurrilous and abusive” racial superlatives. “Alluding to the black race, he compared them to monkeys, baboons, and ourangoutangs [sic].” When he was about to close this inflammatory speech, Truth quietly drew near to the platform and whispered in the ear of the advocate of her people, “Don't dirty your hands wid dat critter; let me tend to him!” (149). The speaker knew it was safe to trust her. Straightening herself to full height, Truth said:

Children, I am one of dem monkey tribes. I was born a slave. I had de dirty work to do—de scullion work. Now I am going to reply to dis critter (pointing her long, bony finger with withering scorn at the petty lawyer). Now in de course of my time I has done a great deal of dirty scullion work, but of all de dirty work I ever done, dis is de scullionist and de dirtiest.

She had taken the crowd by storm. “The whole audience shouted applause, and the negro-haters as heartily as any” (Narrative 149).

Sojourner Truth's public work included speeches for abolitionism, women's rights, and economic assistance for freed slaves after the war. She employed moral arguments, legal arguments, and used herself as example when discussing the condition of slaves, women, and former slaves. By critically examining these strategies in what exists as a fragment of her most famous and oft-quoted speech, “Ain't I A Woman,” we can see how her rhetoric worked not as “seemingly random remarks,” but as a well-integrated whole.

IV

Sojourner Truth delivered her most famous speech at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851. As previously noted, few black women were welcomed at these meetings, and Truth's presence was exceptional. She approached the platform before a hostile crowd of white men and white women, and employed all the available means of persuasion within her power.

Sojourner Truth began her speech by setting the tone with humor and goodwill; she presented herself as a calming mother figure: “Wall, children, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out of kilter.” As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell observes (435, emphasis in original), at the outset of her speech Sojourner Truth “acknowledged the potent combination abolitionism and woman's rights represented for white males”: “I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of the Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon.” Says Campbell, “As a whole, that speech was refutative, a response to claims that: (1) Women suffer no ill effects under current laws; (2) Women are intellectually inferior to men, thus requiring fewer opportunities; and (3) Woman's limited sphere was ordained by God. Her responses illustrate the power of enactment,⁶ the force of metaphor, and the use of theology to respond to biblical justifications for woman's inferior position” (435).

Campbell continues the discussion by emphasizing what Sojourner Truth's biographers have already illustrated: she was herself an immediate and dramatic proof of the ills resulting from woman's position. Like other poor women, particularly poor slave women, Sojourner Truth's life had never been consonant with traditional nineteenth-century concepts of “womanliness” or “femininity.” “Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to hab de best places everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages! And A'n't I a woman?” She drew attention to herself: “Look at me!” she exclaimed. “Look at my arm!” “Moreover,” says Campbell, “her life demonstrated women's physical prowess—she had done the most backbreaking farmwork so well that no man could do it better.” “I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me.” For emphasis and dramatic effect, she repeated her refrain, “And a'n't I a woman? And a'n't I a woman?” “She called attention to the contradiction at the heart of slavery—the treatment of slave women, which wholly ignored their status as women and treated them as chattel, as breeding stock” (Campbell 435). “I have borne thirteen children, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'n't I a woman.” By describing her experience as not just that of a slave, but also of a slave woman and slave mother, Sojourner Truth aroused the passion of her listeners. She appealed to the audience members—to their emotions—not as persons who held the reins of social power and justice, but as parents who would feel the same grief were their own children taken away. By including the reference to Jesus, she further established her Christian ethos. And according to Campbell, “Her response to claims of woman's intellectual inferiority evaded argument about women's mental capacity to affirm the right to equality of opportunity” (435). “If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?” “Her response to theological justifications for ‘woman's place’ was equally apt,” says Campbell, “a dramatic version of the theological notion that Mary wiped out Eve's curse”: “Then that little man in black there he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? … From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do wid Him.”

Truth ends the speech with what she considers a logical explanation of women's entitlement to rights. “If de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn de world upside down all alone, dese women togedder ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!” This is an abbreviated syllogism, which demonstrates Truth's wit as she poked fun at the obvious weakness of man in the very “beginning.” If Adam let Eve “turn de world upside down all alone,” then perhaps man has never been as strong as he thinks he is, and women can't possibly be as weak as men think they are. After all, Sojourner Truth boasted, she was equal in strength and intellect to any man.

Sojourner Truth became extremely skillful in using ethos, logos, and pathos along with her wit and straightforward manner to engage and soften hostile crowds. Although she did not read or write, we know from the fragments of her extant speeches and from the various documented accounts of audience responses that Truth's practical public discourse was effective, that her rhetoric did work as a unified whole.

On May 9, 1867, Sojourner Truth gave the third of her extant speeches. It was a major address to the American Equal Rights Association in New York City. This was the post-Civil War period, a time of division and regrouping in the women's movement. With the outbreak of hostilities between North and South, northern prosuffrage women had suspended activities on their own behalf to devote full energy to the Union cause. In addition, the National Woman's Loyal League was formed under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, in effect functioning as an arm of the Republican Party's radical wing. In this capacity, the Woman's Loyal League collected hundreds of thousands of petition signatures calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.

However, when enfranchisement of black men only became the policy of the very faction of the Republican Party that the League had worked to strengthen, the women's movement became bitterly divided.⁷ The proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—adopted in 1866—gave Negroes the vote but omitted any reference to women, and in its second section, actually introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. Stanton and Anthony felt betrayed, but their former abolitionist allies for the most part seemed resigned. It was widely held at the time that this was “the Negro's hour,” and that women had no decent course available but to stand aside and wait their turn (Schneir 128).

Stanton and Anthony would not accept this premise and openly opposed the constitutional amendments that guaranteed suffrage to black men but not to women. Observes Miriam Schneir, “Both believed that this position was the only consistent one with their feminist principles” (129). Stanton, who had never before argued for women's rights on a racially imperialistic platform, expressed outrage that “inferior niggers” should be granted the vote while “superior” white women remained disenfranchised. So strong was her rage that she argued:

If Saxon men have legislated thus for their own mothers, wives and daughters, what can we hope for at the hands of Chinese, Indians, and Africans? … I protest against the enfranchisement of another man of any race or clime until the daughters of Jefferson, Hancock, and Adams are crowned with their rights.

(quoted in hooks 127)

Into this strife-torn atmosphere came Sojourner Truth to stand alone for the all but forgotten black woman. Her dedication to feminism and her political acumen were demonstrated in the speech she delivered in 1867 before the Equal Rights Association.

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, and not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not the colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get going again.

(Quoted in Stanton 2:193)

Truth was intelligent enough to understand that in a society built on both racial and sexual hierarchy, the only way black males would ever feel they had any real power would be to exercise control over black women. Furthermore, history proved Sojourner Truth correct in her second assertion, “If we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get going again.” It was not until 1920 that women were finally granted the right to vote in this country.

Other topics dominated Sojourner Truth's later career. She was very much concerned with the fate of freed Negroes after the Civil War—where would they live and how could they become self-sufficient? During the Civil War she witnessed the “affliction of her people” in Washington, D.C., and “desiring to mitigate their sufferings,” she found homes and employment for many in Northern states” (Narrative 191). However, while working for the Freedman's Bureau (1864-1866) in Arlington, Virginia, she decided that the federal government should play a more significant role in reconstruction than it was doing. As Olive Gilbert paraphrased Sojourner Truth's views in the Narrative, “Justice demanded that government take efficient legislative action in the interest of these people. Nations anxiously watching the scales in which this government and its dependent millions must be weighed, waited to render their verdict” (193).

As she looked upon the imposing public edifices that graced the District of Columbia, all built at the nation's expense, Sojourner Truth noted that blacks had helped to pay the cost. The slaves had been a source of wealth to the republic.

Our labor supplied the country with cotton, until villages and cities dotted the enterprising North for its manufacture, and furnished employment and support for a multitude, thereby becoming a revenue to the government. Beneath a burning southern sun have we toiled, in the canebrake and the rice swamp, urged on by the merciless driver's lash, earning millions of money; and so highly were we valued there, that should one poor wretch venture to escape from this hell of slavery, no exertion of man or trained blood-hound was spared to seize and return him to his field of unrequited labor.

(Narrative 197)

According to Truth, one solution to Washington's problems of high unemployment, a growing welfare system, crime, and poverty—exacerbated by the influx of freed slaves from neighboring Virginia and Maryland—was to designate lands “out west” for the Negro. She knew that the United States owned countless acres of unoccupied land, which by cultivation would become a source of wealth to the nation. She was also aware that some of the land was being used to build railroads, and that large reservations had been apportioned to the Indians. “Why not give a tract of land to those colored people who would rather become independent through their own exertions than longer clog the wheels of government?” (197). Sojourner Truth felt that if the freed slaves could be educated and trained to support themselves, there eventually would be no need for large welfare payments. The government could put “welfare” money to other, more productive, use in rebuilding the country after the Civil War.

In her last years of traveling and lecturing, Truth canvassed the nation, gathering signatures for a petition (which she would later submit to Congress) in support of legislation that would give the freed slaves land out west. It was this concern that she brought before the public on January 1, 1871, at the Commemoration of the Eighth Anniversary of Negro Freedom in the United States. This speech, given at Tremont Temple in Boston, is recognized as her last extant address. Sojourner Truth was now more than eighty years old, and while Janey Montgomery claims that Truth never used pathos as a means of persuasion, we see in this speech her use of pathos at its best.

I was born a slave in the State of New York, Ulster County, 'mong de low Dutch. W'en I was ten years old, I couldn't speak a word of Inglish, an' hab no education at all. When my master died we was goin' to hab an auction. We was all brought up to be sole. My mother an' my fader was very ole, my brudder younger 'em myself, an' my mother took my hand. Dey opened a canopy up even, and my mother sat down and I and my brudder sat next to her. We were they only two children left, for dere was a great number ob us, an' was all sole away befor'. … I know what it is to be taken into the barn an' tied up an' de blood drawed out ob yere bare back. … Now this is de question dat I am here tonight to say. Colud people been degraded enough. Dat de colud pepul dat is in Washi'ton libin on de government dat de United States ort to giv' 'em land and move 'em on it and it would be a benefit for you all.

(Narrative 213-15)

After stirring the emotions of the crowd, playing on its sympathy in an effort to get signatures, Sojourner Truth concluded her speech by announcing that she had spoken these words because she wanted everyone to know exactly why they should sign the petition when it came around. Olive Gilbert explains, “Being convinced of the feasibility and justice of this plan, she hastened to present her petition to the public, and solicit signatures” (Narrative 198).⁸

VI

Sojourner Truth's public speaking career was extensive: it took her from New York as far west as Kansas and from Maine as far south as Virginia. Her efforts to free southern slaves, procure rights for women, and improve the lot of freed slaves spanned some forty years. She met many people and touched many lives in her unique way. Since she never learned to read or write, we are grateful for the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which is the only known collective personal account of her life's work. With its publications in 1850, 1853, 1875, 1887, 1881, and 1884, it has been instrumental in assuring her immortality.

Sojourner Truth's life was founded on her own concepts of moral character and Christianity as she interpreted the Scriptures. As a skilled practitioner in the art of public speaking, she did not develop a formal theory of language; she did, however, call for a spirit that was uniquely woman's. When retelling the following story about Mary near Jesus' tomb, she related the message to all women.

And when the men went to look for Jesus at the sepulchre they didn't stop long enough to find out whether he was there or not; but Mary stood there and waited and said to Him, thinking it was the gardener, “Tell me where they have laid him and I will carry him away.” See what a spirit there is. Just so let women be true to this spirit and the truth will reign triumphant.

(Stanton 2:222)

Truth deeply believed that women had by nature a kind and patient spirit. Women were not greedy, but wanted only what was due them. “We are trying for liberty that required no bloodshed—that women have their rights—not rights from you” (Stanton 2:225).

Sojourner Truth was not simply a ceremonial speaker—a preacher, an evangelist—as some have described her. She was, instead, speaking to bring about social and political change for slaves, women, and former slaves through legislation. Her practical public discourse, her lifelong commitment to communication on public problems, has justly earned Sojourner Truth a place in the history of deliberative rhetoric.

Notes

1. In a 1968 dissertation, Janey Weinhold Montgomery does attempt a rhetorical analysis of parts of Sojourner Truth's speeches. Montgomery does not, however, forthrightly conclude that Sojourner Truth was a rhetorician, one skilled in the art of persuasion.

2. Although Sojourner Truth lectured over a forty-year period, no complete texts exist. Only four fragmentary texts of her speeches are extant. Her early speeches against slavery were not recorded, and the speeches that are extant primarily represent Sojourner Truth's views on women's rights. They are: (1) 1851, Address to the Women's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio; (2) 1853, Address to the Mob Convention, New York City; (3) 1867, Address to the American Equal Rights Association Convention, New York City; and (4) 1871, delivered in Boston, an Address of Commemoration on the Eighth Anniversary of Negro Freedom in the United States.

3. While bell hooks makes this strong claim, the attitude was not held by all white women of the period; women such as Lydia Marie Child and others had a different view on this issue.

4. S. Michael Halloran, “Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum,” 257. Other examples of histories that assume a “break” or “decline” of the classical rhetorical tradition in the nineteenth century include Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford 1-15. But see also Nan Johnson for a different view.

5. Increasingly, rhetorical theorists and historians have begun to acknowledge the importance of understanding implicit theories residing in the communication practices of nonacademicians (for a thorough listing, see Oravec 396-97).

6. Enactment is a reflexive rhetorical form in which the speaker incarnates the argument, is the proof of what is said. For a more detailed discussion, see Campbell and Jamieson 9-11.

7. Giddings notes that the feminist and abolitionist camps were not neatly divided. Leading white feminists such as Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe did not believe that the world would come to an end if black men—whose leadership was sympathetic to woman suffrage and promised to work toward that end—were enfranchised first.

8. A highlight of Sojourner Truth's career was her interview with Abraham Lincoln. Although she allegedly addressed the Senate at this time, no speech was recorded in The Congressional Globe. There is no evidence that Congress ever acted on her petition to move freed slaves to lands out west.

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