Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (review)

330CIVIL WAR HISTORY Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. By Carleton Mabee, with Susan Mabee Newhouse. (New York: New York University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 320. $35.00.) Born into slavery in New York, SojournerTruth freed herself from bondage and pursued a public career as an abolitionist, women's rights activist, temperance advocate, and evangelist until her death in 1 883. Due to a range of factors, including her own life-long illiteracy and white needs to romanticize her race, Sojourner Truth became the subject of legend during her lifetime. This process has continued, Mabee and Newhouse maintain, in this century. To counter these myths, the authors of this new biography of Sojourner Truth have sought "to discover the best available sources about her, to stay close to those sources, and to state what they are" (x). While at times this approach makes the book read like a dialogue with sources and historians instead of with the life of Sojourner Truth, the effort is clearly needed and yields important results. The authors present a portrait ofTruth that challenges many previously held assumptions about her life. From her years as a slave, when Truth was labeled by other slaves as a "white folks' nigger," through her later career, Truth associated largely with whites. While Truth maintained strong ties with other black leaders, the authors emphasize that she lived in predominantly white neighborhoods , adeptly used the white legal system to her advantage, fought for desegregated public transportation, did notjoin black churches, and did not endorse black separatism. Truth also emerges here as strongly individualistic. She was comfortable within a loose network of radical abolitionists like Amy Post, Francis Titus, and William Lloyd Garrison but neverjoined, created, or led organized reform societies, a limitation that occasionally impeded her effectiveness . More specifically, the authors fully and convincingly question the authenticity of Frances Gage's report of Truth's alleged use of the phrase "Ar'n't I a Woman?" in her 1851 speech in Akron. They also effectively contextualize Truth's rebuttal ("Is God gone?") to Frederick Douglass within the moral suasionist reasoning of nonviolent Garrisonians. Through the authors' careful examination of her contemporary correspondence, they also reject claims that Lincoln directed Truth's work with freedmen in wartime Washington. Mabee and Newhouse clarify our understanding of who Truth was (and was not), uncover new evidence, and add valuable interpretations. Given their extensive work with primary sources concerning Truth, future biographies, including works in progress by Margaret Washington and Nell Irvin Painter, may choose to investigate the broader contexts that helped shape Truth's life. They may ask what role Truth's contact with New York City antiprostitution groups had on creating the type of nineteenth-century feminist who could bare her chest to an audience that doubted her sex. Did the importance ofAfrican traditions of oral communication play a part in her continued illiteracy? How did her immersion in communitarianism, slavery, and working-class poverty influence her position on government aid for freemen and evolving definitions of freedom? Given Mabee and Newhouse's emphasis on establishing a realistic BOOK REVIEWS33I and firmly documented biography ofTruth, such questions are perhaps beyond the scope oftheir book. Indeed, it is possible to raise them only because oftheir fine and exhaustive work uncovering the realities of Sojourner Truth's life. Michael D. Pierson Illinois State University A Confederate Nurse: The Diary ofAda W Bacot, 1860-1863. Edited by Jean V. Berlin. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 199. $29.95.) The crucial contributions of women, North and South, to the Civil War are chronicled and analyzed in a sizable and growing literature. A noteworthy addition is A Confederate Nurse: The Diary ofAda W. Bacot, 1860-1863, edited by Jean V. Berlin. Ada Bacot was a young and childless widow from a wealthy upcountry South Carolina family when the hostilities began. Motivated by a passionate patriotism for her state, the desire to aid the Confederate cause, and a growing discontent with the Southern patriarchy, she responded to a call for volunteer nurses, and from December 1 86 1 until late 1 863 served in a Charlottesville , Virginia, hospital—one of a number established on the Virginia...