aguerreotype of Louise Jacobs. From the Fanny Fern and Ethel Parton Papers, 1805-1982, courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/support4.html 1864 letters from freedmen
From 1862 to 1866 Jacobs devoted herself to relief efforts in and around Washington, D.C., among former slaves who had become refugees of the war. With her daughter Jacobs founded a school in Alexandria, Virginia, which lasted from 1863 to 1865, when both mother and daughter returned south to Savannah, Georgia, to engage in further relief work among the freedmen and freedwomen. The spring of 1867 found Jacobs back in Edenton, actively promoting the welfare of the ex-slaves and reflecting in her correspondence on "those I loved" and "their unfaltering love and devotion toward myself and [my] children." This sense of dedication and solidarity with those who had been enslaved kept Jacobs at work in the South until racist violence ultimately drove her and Louisa back to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1870 she opened a boarding house. By the mid-1880s Jacobs had settled with Louisa in Washington, D.C. Little is known about the last decade of her life. Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D.C. on March 7, 1897.
Suggested further reading: William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story (1986); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987); Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989); Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White (1992); Carla L. Peterson, "Doers of the Word" African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (1995); Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays (1996); and Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004).
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2014/12/threads-of-memory-12-rochester-star-for.html
Louisa “Lulu” Matilda Jacobs, teacher, equal rights activist, and entrepreneur, was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, on October 19, 1833. She was the daughter of congressman and newspaper editor Samuel Tredwell Sawyer and his mixed-race enslaved mistress Harriet Jacobs.
Louisa Jacobs was educated in private schools in New York City, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, and trained as a teacher. From 1852 to 1854, she alternated living with the white abolitionist Zenas Brockett family, who operated an Underground Railroad station in Manheim, western New York State, and assisting her mother at the Hudson River home of Home Journal editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. From 1856 to 1858, Jacobs lived with the family of Willis’s sister, author and journalist Fanny Fern and her husband, biographer James Parton. Fanny Fern’s abusive rages and unfounded accusations of impropriety with Parton culminated in her attempt to physically attack Jacobs in the spring of 1858. Jacobs left the Parton’s New York household abruptly and moved back to Boston where she remained through the early 1860s.
After founding a Freedman’s school in Alexandria, Virginia, during the Civil War, Jacobs joined Charles Lenox Remond and Susan B. Anthony in early 1867 on an Equal Rights Association lecture tour in western New York State. In 1868 Jacobs and her mother sailed to England to raise funds for a home for women and children in Savannah, Georgia, and on their return to the United States, Jacobs taught at the Stevens School in Washington, D.C. During the early 1870s, Jacobs and her mother ran a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which catered to Harvard faculty and students.
In late 1879, Jacobs and her mother moved to Washington, D.C., and operated another boarding house patronized by Governor William Claflin and Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. For at least two summers (1882 and 1883), she supervised the thriving canning and bakery business of the E.T. Throop Martin family at their family estate, “Willowbrook,” in upstate New York. Louisa started her own jam and preserves business in Washington in 1883 while simultaneously teaching sewing and cooking in the Girls Industrial School at Howard University. In late 1884, with her mother ill but insistent that they be hospitable to their second family, Louisa reluctantly accepted geologist Bailey Willis and his wife as boarders. In the spring of 1887, Louisa and her mother boarded James Monroe Trotter, the District of Columbia recorder of deeds.
From 1891 to 1893, Louisa Jacobs worked in the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1896 she participated in the gathering of the Colored Women’s League at the home of Frederick Douglass. After her mother’s death in 1897, she became assistant matron, then matron, at the National Home for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, D.C. From 1903 to 1908, she worked as preceptress at Miner Hall, Howard University. Never married, Jacobs retired at the age of seventy-five.
Louisa Matilda Jacobs died on April 5, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, at the home of longtime family friend Edith Willis (Grinnell), one of the white children her mother had helped to raise.
Nathaniel Parker Willis (January 20, 1806 – January 20, 1867), also known as N. P. Willis,was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former slave and future writer Harriet Jacobs. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fer
cornelia willis sister in law of fanny
As a steadfast caretaker, women’s rights advocate, founding member of the “first woman’s club” in the United States, and abolitionist, Cornelia Grinnell (1825-1904) was a force to be reckoned with and had a decidedly positive effect on the lives of many individuals and families throughout her adult life.
Following the death of her parents, Elizabeth Tallman Russell and Cornelius Grinnell, Jr., Cornelia became the ward and only child of her father’s brother, Joseph Grinnell, and his wife, Sarah Russell Grinnell. In 1836, Joseph Grinnell, having achieved fame as an abolitionist and success in his many business ventures in New York and Massachusetts, built his mansion on County Street in New Bedford. It has been recorded that on December 25, 1844, Cornelia hosted a party at the mansion, complete with gifts for the guests and a Christmas tree lit by candles, perhaps the earliest such celebration in New Bedford.
Cornelia was schooled in New Bedford and travelled to Europe, where her adoptive father commissioned a likeness of her by the preeminent American sculptor Horatio Greenough, a Boston native who resided in Florence, Italy. In 1843, the Grinnell family moved to Washington D.C., where Joseph Grinnell served as a member of the House of Representatives. During that time, Cornelia met her future husband, Nathaniel Parker Willis, a celebrated poet, journalist and social commentator who was a widower with a young daughter, Imogene Willis. Prior to his first wife’s death, Mr. Willis hired Harriet Jacobs to be Imogene’s nursemaid, unaware that Harriet had escaped enslavement in North Carolina. Cornelia and Nathaniel were married in 1846, giving Imogene Willis a new stepmother and Harriet Jacobs further employment. Cornelia gave birth to five children, losing the youngest, a daughter, at birth.
While living in the Willis home, Harriet Jacobs secretly wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the few surviving slave narratives written by a woman. It was through this autobiography that she managed to share the story of unwanted advances from her slave owner, hiding in her grandmother’s attic crawl-space for seven years and her eventual escape. It was through the Underground Railroad, a network of marine transport, homes, and conductors, that Harriet had made her way to New York and freedom.
In 1852, her “owner’s” arrival was published in the newspaper. Cornelia assured Harriet’s safety by hiding her first in the home of a friend in New York and then sending her to New Bedford to be sheltered in the Grinnell Mansion. Later, Cornelia managed to “purchase” Harriet’s freedom, thereby ending the author’s fear of recapture. Cornelia and Harriet often resided in the same household in New York, New Bedford (while summering with the Grinnell family), Cambridge (MA), and Washington, D.C. Cornelia started a school in 1863 for young women at her New York home, the Willis estate of Idlewild. She was forced, however, to give it up in 1866, when her husband became too ill to continue living in New York.
Cornelia wrote a column in the New York Ledger about the role of women as advocates and hostesses. She modeled her philosophy by becoming one of the original founders of the first women’s clubs in the United States, New England Women’s Club, in Boston in 1868.
After Nathaniel Willis’s death, Cornelia traveled with her children throughout Europe and saw them through their education. The youngest child, Bailey Willis, graduated from Harvard College in 1870. During this time, Cornelia lived in Harriet Jacobs’ popular boarding house in Cambridge. Cornelia later lived in Washington, D.C., where she and two of her daughters nursed and advocated for Harriet Jacobs until her death in 1897. Cornelia died in 1904 in Washington, D.C. She is buried in New Bedford’s Oak Grove Cemetery
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