Domesticating Racial Capitalism: Freedwomen in U.S. Industrial Sewing Schools, 1862–1872—An Opening Foray

By early 1863, Harriet Jacobs had long mastered reading people. Even before she could extend a hand to the stone-faced Julia Wilbur, she caught a flash of resentment in Wilbur's eyes. Jacobs decided against a handshake. “Miss Wilbur, I am Harriet Jacobs. Do you remember me?” she asked. Wilbur did remember Jacobs. In fact, Wilbur had not taken her eyes off of the immaculately but modestly dressed African American woman from the moment Jacobs stepped into the converted barracks that now served as a school for freedwomen and girls. Wilbur first met Jacobs in 1849 in Rochester, New York, when Wilbur was a teacher and the secretary of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Then, Jacobs was a self-emancipated, former slave operating an antislavery reading room in the city. Yet, on this unseasonably warm evening of January 14, 1863, in a converted barracks in the District of Columbia, the wheels of fortune had indeed turned. Wilbur made no effort to hide her anger as Jacobs explained that the New York Friends had decided to make Jacobs head matron of the freedwomen's school—the school Wilbur had opened and run almost single-handedly for three months.