By David J. Kent
Washington, D.C.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Sojourner Truth spoke in support of Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 reelection campaign during several stops made in George B. McClellan’s home state of New Jersey on her way to Washington, DC.
Truth, formerly known as Isabella Baumfree, or Belle, when she was enslaved, had become free a year before New York State completed its long-awaited gradual emancipation program. She was traveling from Michigan to the nation’s capital to work for the new Freedmen’s Relief Association. Truth was sixty-seven years old at the time and had long been a leading activist for abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. While in Washington, she decided to pay a visit to Lincoln but found that she was unable to secure an appointment on her own and thus called on Lucy N. Coleman, a white abolitionist working for the National Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children. Coleman reached out to Mary Lincoln’s confidante, Elizabeth Keckley, and a visit was arranged for October 29, 1864, a week or so before Lincoln’s pivotal reelection.
Like other abolitionists, Truth saw the Emancipation Proclamation as both a turning point and a steppingstone toward full Black freedom. She greeted Lincoln by praising him as “the best President,” and calling him God’s “instrument.” A few weeks later, Truth reported, “I was never treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than was shown to me by that great and good man.” Her escort at that meeting, Lucy Coleman, initially praised Lincoln’s treatment of Truth, but in an 1891 memoir, Coleman was more caustic, accusing him of condescendingly calling her “aunty, as he would his washerwoman.” But Truth seems not to have been offended at all, adding in her own letter with pride that Lincoln had signed his name in her autograph book and called her “Aunty.”
Truth, who had been encouraged by abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to give speeches about the evils of slavery, spoke Dutch fluently (she was originally born to enslaved parents held in Dutch-speaking upstate New York) and thereafter spoke English with a Dutch accent. But she never learned to read or write, so in 1950 she dictated what would become her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, to Olive Gilbert, who assisted in its publication. The later letter in which she recounts her meeting with Lincoln (or perhaps several meetings she suggests) was also dictated.
It was in 1851 that she gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio. At nearly six feet tall and in her mid-50s, Truth challenged prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority and inequality.
This 1864 meeting is the only one that we can definitively say happened, although an article written in 1940 suggested that Lincoln “always welcomed” Truth at the White House. That claim is debatable, as both Coleman and British journalist Fred Tomkins claimed that Sojourner Truth had been barred from attending a White House reception on February 25, 1865. Tomkins claimed to mention this to Lincoln, who “expressed his sorrow, and said that he had often seen her, and that it should not occur again.”
In any case, the two met at least that one time, and Truth continued to recruit Black troops for the Union war effort. Apparently, Lincoln did sign her autograph book, which was enough for a print depicting the meeting to become popular with the public.
[Photo of Lincoln and Sojourner Truth courtesy of Library of Congress, Reference No. LC-US2-16225]
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