Overview
Born as Isabella Baumfree, born into slavery, in Swartekill, New York, sometime in the year of 1797. Her father was a slave and so would she be a slave. At age nine, she was sold and sold among animals to a new slave owner. She suffered many mental, physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her new slave owners hands. She learned English here, previously Dutch being the only language she had known. During her teenage years she experienced more suffering and pain, fallen in love with a fellow slave from the local area. His name was Robert. Robert’s slave master aware that if Isabella and Robert had engaged in a relationship, that any children produced would not actually be their slaves forbade such interaction between the two. Even as so far as to beat Robert. One such beating being fatal, and so Isabella had known love and lost it.
The slow process of the abolition of slavery in New York, began in 1799, however it was not until July 4, 1827 that it was completed, much of Sojourner’s early life during that time. Promise by her slave master that if she worked hard and was loyal, he would allow and grant her freedom earlier than such things were to become official, Isabella, worked as dutifully as ever, and when promises were broken, Isabella worked anyway out of a sense of obligation.
One year short of New York’s Abolition of Slavery legislation coming to pass, Isabella’s frustration with her situation led her to escape to freedom with her infant daughter, Sophia. Yet painfully her other children she was not about to liberate as of yet. Truth had come to met a couple, Isaac and Maria Van Wagener, who positively impacted on her life. With their aid, she was able to go to court, and fight for the right have back her son Peter, still kept and abused as a slave. They won there case and mother and son were reunited.
In 1843, Elizabeth Baumfree, changed her name to Sojourner Truth.