Isabella
She was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, in a Dutch-speaking household where slavery was legal and ordinary. English came later and never lost its Dutch inflection. At about nine she was sold away from her parents at auction, together with a flock of sheep, for roughly one hundred dollars, and passed through several owners before reaching John Dumont, who held her for some sixteen years. She was forced into a union with an older enslaved man and bore five children.
Dumont promised her freedom a year before New York's emancipation statute took effect, then refused to honour it. Late in 1826 she walked away at dawn with her infant daughter Sophia, leaving the older children behind because they remained legally bound. A nearby family, the Van Wagenens, paid Dumont for the remainder of her service and refused to be called her masters. She then discovered that her five-year-old son Peter had been sold illegally out of state to a planter in Alabama.
The Court at Kingston
New York law forbade the sale of an enslaved person across state lines, and Isabella, who could neither read nor write, went to the county courthouse and pressed the case with the help of local Quakers. She raised the money, swore the complaint and refused every suggestion that she wait. The court ordered Peter returned, and in 1828 the boy came back to her, bearing scars he attributed to his new owner. It was among the earliest instances of a Black woman successfully suing a white man in an American court.
In 1843, after years in New York City and a disastrous involvement with a fraudulent religious commune, she told friends she had been called to travel and testify, and renamed herself Sojourner Truth. She joined an abolitionist community in Northampton, Massachusetts, and in 1850 dictated her life story to Olive Gilbert. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was printed at her own expense and sold at meetings, and the income from it supported her for the rest of her life. She could not read a word of the book that carried her name.
The Speech She Probably Did Not Give
At a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 she spoke on the platform. The version everyone knows, with its repeated question about whether she was a woman and its heavy southern dialect, was published twelve years later by the presiding officer Frances Dana Gage, who reconstructed it from memory and supplied speech patterns a Dutch-speaking New Yorker would not have used. A report printed within weeks by Marius Robinson records a plainer, more theological argument. Both are Truth in some measure; only one is contemporary.
During the Civil War she gathered supplies for Black regiments, met Lincoln at the White House in 1864, and worked with the Freedmen's Bureau resettling refugees. She rode Washington's segregated streetcars deliberately and had a conductor prosecuted after he injured her shoulder. Her last campaign, a petition asking Congress to grant western land to freed people, failed. She sold photographs of herself to fund the travel, and died at Battle Creek, Michigan, in November 1883. Thousands attended the funeral of a woman once sold with a flock of sheep.
