On the first day of October 1865 Sojourner Truth dictated a letter from Washington,

D.C. to her friend Amy Post in Rochester, New York:

I have heard nothing from my children for a long time, neither from my grandchildren since they left me. I take this occasion to inquire after their whereabouts and health, as well as your own prosperity, and to inform you of my own. I spent over six months at Arlington Heigths [sic], called the Freedmen's village, and served there as counciller for my people, acceptably to the good but not at all times to those who...

When Sojourner Truth spoke of her ancestors, she spoke in a general way as many African Americans might speak: We came from Africa. What she allowed her audience, for example in the remarks Harriet Beecher Stowe attributed to her in their 1853 meeting, was the general truth of African American historical experience.

You see we was all brought over from Africa, father an’ mother and I, an’ a lot more of us; an’ we was sold up an’ down, an’ hither an’ yon.²

Truth wrote to James Redpath of the BostonCommonwealthshortly after the publication of Stowe’s essay to correct...

It was in the social and religious turmoil and political ferment of New York City in the 1830s that Sojourner Truth matured the responses that made her a powerful antislavery speaker, a radical critic of racial prejudice, including racism in the woman’s rights movement, and, in her seventies, a crusader for the resettlement of freedpeople on government land, not in Liberia, but in the United States that they had helped to build.

Truth’s entry into the free black community in New York City in 1829 and her departure in 1843 coincided with two turning points in its history, which were...

The woman who boarded the Fulton Street ferry early in the morning on the first day of June 1843 had chosen for herself a name that resonated with the pain of an oppressed people dwelling for many generations in a strange land. Within the Old Testament context the sojourner was the non-Hebrew stranger who lived among the Hebrews. During part of their own history, the Hebrews had lived as sojourners among the Egyptians, with some rights and duties; afterward they had been enslaved: “My people went down afore time into Egypt to sojourn there; and the Assyrians oppressed them without...

Toward the end of her last year at Oberlin, Frederick Douglass invited Sallie Holley to write for theNorth Star,which he had launched in 1847 against the bitter opposition of the Garrisonians. In mid-1851 the title of his new venture,Frederick Douglass’ Paper, would leave no doubt as to who controlled its editorial viewpoint. Holley refused; by the end of the summer of 1851 Abby Kelley Foster had already recruited her for the Garrisonian Ohio campaign to preach disunionism and nonresistance across the state, filtered through a growing Garrisonian-sanctioned feminist awareness. Sallie Holley made joking reference to having found...

When Truth gathered the children around her in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s parlor in mid-May 1867 to hear the newspaper reports of her speeches at the Equal Rights Convention, the woman’s rights movement led by white feminists was in painful transition. No woman's rights meetings had been held during the Civil War, while women, as Stanton later wrote, “held their own claims in abeyance to those of the slaves in the South.”² At the end of the Civil War, white feminist reformers who had worked for the end of slavery viewed themselves as a full-fledged part of Reconstruction. Just as they...