Harriet Jacobs Walking Tour

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl carries a universal message about the power of determination and and courage. When Nithya Krishnamoorthy gave her mother Kamala a copy of Incidents in 2020, Kamala and two colleagues translated it into the South Indian language of Tamil.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of Jacobs’s life and era, they delved into the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, as well as works by and about many of her contemporaries. In 2022, they published the translation with the Tamil publishing house Kalachuvadu (which means “time’s footprints”).

This year, Nithya and Kamala put together a pilgrimage to visit significant places in Harriet Jacobs’s life, including Edenton, North Carolina, and New York. Their route brought them to Alexandria, about halfway in between. (Nithya has put together an account of the pilgrimage, please read it here.)

Nithya contacted the Alexandria Historical Society. As a board member, the email was forwarded to me. I’ve written about Jacobs’s work as a relief agent in Civil War Alexandria and am always happy to talk about it! When I offered to show them around, however, I had to figure out how to map out a two-hour walking tour. For logistics reasons, we skipped a few significant places and I added a few less significant stops that happened to be on our route from the Lyceum on South Washington Street down to the Potomac River and back up. Two other AHS board members joined and shared their Alexandria history stories, too.

Charles Magnus’s 1863 “Bird’s EYE View” oriented us.

Stop 1: Lyceum

The Lyceum, now a history museum and event space, was built before the Civil War as a place where (mostly white men) gathered for cultural edification. The Army turned it into a hospital during the war. We started here to talk about Alexandria’s involvement in the Civil War, including the city becoming a safe(ish) haven for African Americans escaping slavery.

Lyceum during the Civil war

In December 1862, Harriet Jacobs wrote her friend Amy Post:

I expect to go to Washington next month to remain through the winter. My health is better than it has been for years. The good God has spared me for this work, and the last six months has been the happiest of all my life. Sometimes my sky is darkened, but my faith in the omnipotent is strong.

Stop 2: Washington and Wolfe Street Building

Harriet Jacobs worked in Alexandria from 1863 to 1865 and spent a lot of time at a duplex near the corner of Washington and Wolfe Streets. She and fellow relief agent Julia Wilbur set up a clothing room. They lived upstairs at different times. The building at various times held a small hospital, classrooms, and living quarters for freedpeople and some of the Northerners who came to work with them. (Below, 1865, & now, as we peered into the south side of the building in what I believe was the clothing room.)

Journalist Ulysses S. Ward wrote about their work in the New York Post on April 29, 1863:

Many evidences were gathered from the testimony of Mrs. Jacobs, who was sent here by philanthropic friends in New York, and from Miss Wilbur, who represents a charitable association in Rochester. It will give great satisfaction to many persons who have interested themselves in the humane cause, to know that their gifts of clothing and utter and other articles have been as judiciously applied as they were imperatively needed. These two ladies have been energetically occupied in the self sacrificing work.

Stop 3: Alexandria Academy

We crossed Washington Street and headed down Wolfe. We stopped at the Alexandria Academy, which had been a school endowed by George Washington. It was used basically to warehouse the first freedpeople coming into Alexandria in 1861 and 1862. Jacobs visited Alexandria and Washington in the summer of 1862 and reported on the conditions in a long article for the abolitionist Liberator newsletter:

Another place, the old school house in Alexandria, is the Government headquarters for the women. This I thought the most wretched of all the places. Anyone who can find an apology for slavery should visit this place.

 Stop 4: Military Governor’s Office

On St. Asaph’s Street, we walked by the house where Marquis de Lafayette stayed when he returned to America in 1824 (i.e., one of the places not connected to HJ, but en route). A more relevant stop was the office used by Brig. Gen. John Potts Slough. As Military Governor, Slough was in charge of “occupied Alexandria.” He was known as hot-headed and domineering, but had a lot of power over everyday life so could not be ignored.

Pointing to Slough while standing on St. Asaph’s Street

Julia Wilbur wrote about the first time that she and Jacobs had to confront Slough (to appeal a decision to house healthy orphans at a smallpox hospital):

Mrs. Jacobs and I have been very much tried of late. Did I tell you in my last that Doctor Bigelow says he means to take all the orphans to the smallpox hospital? Of course Mrs. J feels as indignant as I do. I told her that I had concluded that it was not my duty to remain quiet and see this outrage go on. So last Saturday, for the first time, we called on General Slough. Mrs. J asked him if we might gather all the little orphans and put them in a room at the barracks, and we could employ a woman to take care of them. He said yes, it was a very laudable object….

My friend this was really a great undertaking for us. We are in such a state of nervous excitement that we were all of the trouble and we had such a headache too. Mrs. Jacobs spoke very handsomely to him and when pleading for these children said she “I have been a slave myself.” He is a very reserved and unapproachable man, but he listened to us quite as kindly as we expected and we obtained all we asked for….

Stop 5: Athenaeum/Commissary

What is now the center for the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association was a bank before the Civil War and the Commissary during it. We had been hearing bagpipes as we approached it, and it turned out that a funeral was beginning in its main salon. So we did not stop but instead walked down Prince Street to the Potomac River. The lower part of Prince Street remains cobble-stoned. Ignoring the cars, you get a sense of the scene at the time.

Stop 6: Potomac River

The river served as our walking tour halfway point. It is the raison d’etre for the city—from shipping out tobacco to trafficking in enslaved people to serving as a logistics center during the Civil War. Jacobs would have been down here often. Several neighborhoods of freedpeople grew up nearby. She took the ferry across to Washington. It would not have had the pleasant walkways, etc., of today, but our little group (our visitors, me, and two other board members of the Alexandria Historical Society) stopped for a group portrait.

L to R: Brenda, Kamala, Me, Nithya, Linda on the banks of the Potomac

I also shared an excerpt from George Alfred Townsend, a New York Herald journalist:

Alexandria is filled with ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess…[Alexandria] has become essentially a military city. Its streets, its docks, its warehouses, its dwellings, and its suburbs have been absorbed to the thousand uses of war.

Stop 7: Market Square/Marshall House

Heading up King Street, I pointed out the Marshall House, where Elmer Ellsworth and James Jackson were sequentially killed as the first martyrs of the Civil War. Market Square was quiet on a Monday mid-morning but we tried to conjure up the space as a bustling place of trade and social networking.

Stop 8: Provost Marshall and Look Toward School

Harriet Jacobs had frequent dealings with the Provost Marshal, the office under General Slough with the most direct dealings with freed people. When I see the photo below, I think of her and Julia Wilbur, two civilian women, having to cross this gauntlet of hangers-on at the entrance!

The site of Harriet Jacobs’s school is about four blocks to the north of King Street, corner of Pitt and Oronoco Streets. With no indication, not even a marker, we forewent the trek, as we were running out of time and it was getting hot. But here is a wonderful photo of the school. An “x” was placed under Jacobs image; the photo was used for fundraising.

Photo from Langmuir Collection, Emory University. Used with Permission.

Virtual Stop 9: Slave Pen/Freedmen’s Barracks/L’Ouverture Hospital

There was time only to share photos and a few stories about the Slave Pen (the former Franklin & Armfield slave-trading business, now Freedom House Museum), as well as the site of barracks built for freedpeople (built in 1863, torn down in 1865) and a hospital built for U.S. Colored Troops patients (built in 1864, torn down in 1866). They will have to return for a visit. The area is about half-mile west of the Lyceum.

I shared an excerpt from an article in the Anglo-African that described Jacobs’s leadership and speech at L’Ouverture Hospital on August 1, 1864. She organized a ceremony to honor emancipation in the British West Indies in 1834. Before there was emancipation in the United States to celebrate, Black communities in the North marked the day.

The presentation by Mrs. Jacobs was admirably done, calm and unassuming (the peculiar characteristic of this estimable lady), she came forward and presented to Doctor Barker a fine flag, accompanied by these remarks….

Physician, soldiers and friends, for the first time in Alexandria we have met to celebrate a day made historical to our race, the day of British West Indies, India emancipation. Three years ago, this flag had no significance for you and we could not cherish it as our emblem of freedom. You then had no part in the bloody struggle for your country. Your patriotism was spurned but today you were in arms for the freedom of your race and defence of your country. Today this flag is significant to you soldiers who have made it the symbol of freedom for the slave. Unfurl it, stand by it, and fight for it, until the breeze upon which it float shall be so pure that a slave cannot breathe its air.

Virtual Stop 10: Contraband and Freedman Cemetery Memorial

Likewise, since it is about a mile south, I only pointed in the direction of the former “contraband’s cemetery,” which was rediscovered in the 1990s and rededicated in 2014. A passage by Harriet Jacobs about a funeral she attended are etched on one of the beautiful bronzes at the memorial:

I have just witnessed a novel and solemn scene, a funeral in the open air. The deceased Peter Washington was an old man and a slave until the breaking out of the war. He had lived in the house with us and was a missionary among the freedmen and was ordered to do the work to which he considered God had especially appointed him to, his zeal was unwearied. At all times, in sunshine and storm, he might have been wending his way to some home where affliction had fallen, or to the House of worship, where the people listened with rapt attention to his quaint, earnest utterances.

We returned to the Lyceum in time for Nithya and Kamala to head into Washington to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Kamala showed me her translated version of Incidents.

A great end to a wonderful morning.