page_title: Harriet Jacobs
section_title: The Jacobs School
hierarchical_section_title: Harriet Jacobs / Biography / Civil War and Reconstruction / The Jacobs School
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of the Jacobs Free School, which offered tuition-free schooling to African-American children. Founded by Harriet Jacobs, the school was unique in being both free to use, and run by African-Americans (the head of the school was Harriet's daughter, en:Louisa Matilda Jacobs, assisted by another young African-American woman) instead of being led by white abolitionists. Harriet Jacobs is indicated with a small X beneath her. This photograph was distributed to Northern abolitionists who had helped fund the school.
context_page_description: Harriet Jacobs was an African-American writer. Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her master. When he threatened to sell her children, she hid in a tiny crawlspace under the roof of her grandmother's house, where she wasn't even able to stand. After staying there for seven years, she finally managed to escape to New York, where she was reunited with her children Joseph and Louisa Matilda and her brother John S. Jacobs. She found work as a nanny for the children of Nathaniel Parker Willis and got into contact with abolitionist and feminist reformers. Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, is now considered an "American classic".
  During and immediately after the Civil War, she went to the Union-occupied parts of the South together with her daughter, organizing help and founding two schools for fugitive and freed slaves.
context_section_description: In most slave states, teaching slaves to read and write had been forbidden. Virginia had even prohibited teaching these skills to free blacks. After Union troops occupied Alexandria in 1861, some schools for blacks emerged, but there was not a single free school under African American control. Jacobs supported a project conceived by the black community in 1863 to found a new school. In the fall of 1863 her daughter Louisa Matilda who had been trained as a teacher, came to Alexandria in the company of Virginia Lawton, a black friend of the Jacobs family. After some struggle with white missionaries from the North who wanted to take control of the school, the Jacobs School opened in January 1864 under Louisa Matilda's leadership. In the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Harriet Jacobs explained that it was not disapproval of white teachers that made her fight for the school being controlled by the black community. But she wanted to help the former slaves, who had been raised "to look upon the white race as their natural superiors and masters", to develop "respect for their race".
  Jacobs's work in Alexandria was recognized on the local as well as on the national level, especially in abolitionist circles. In the spring of 1864 she was elected to the executive committee of the Women's Loyal National League, a women's organization founded in 1863 in response to an appeal by Susan B. Anthony which aimed at collecting signatures for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. On August 1, 1864 she delivered the speech on occasion of the celebration of the British West Indian Emancipation in front of the African American soldiers of a military hospital in Alexandria. Many abolitionists, among them Frederick Douglass, stopped over in Alexandria while touring the South in order to see Jacobs and her work. On a personal level, she found her labors highly rewarding. Already in December 1862 she had written to Amy Post that the preceding six months had been the happiest in her whole life.
caption: Harriet and Louisa Matilda Jacobs and their students in front of the Jacobs School, Alexandria, Virginia, 1864
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