The Clotilda

Jacobs (1815-1897) escaped slavery, became an abolitionist, and wrote an autobiography that became one of the most significant American slave narratives - the first authored by a Black woman. Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides a rare female perspective on slavery and demonstrates how enslaved women faced unique forms of oppression. Although she was very close to her first mistress who taught her to read and write - advantages denied to most enslaved people - Jacobs's narrative exposes slavery's fundamental inescapable violence. Her account, corroborated by her brother John S. Jacobs and George W. Lowther (a civil rights activist and Massachusetts state representative who knew her from childhood), focuses on her personal story of enslavement and surviving physical violence and sexual harassment from one of her enslavers, Dr. Flint. While Jacobs does not dramatize slavery's brutality, the system's horrors emerge through brief, matter-of-fact mentions throughout her narrative: a mother driven to madness after all seven of her children were sold away; a man bound to a cotton gin and left to be eaten by vermin, and enslavers fathering and selling their many children from enslaved women. Her narrative also documents the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced her and other fugitives in the North to live in constant fear of capture and re-enslavement. These scattered references, delivered without embellishment, serve to underscore the everyday inhumanity of the "peculiar institution."

McCrear (c.1857-1940) was the last known survivor of the Clotilda and the last link to the transatlantic slave trade.