Between 1838 and 1842, three events occurred that convinced Jacobs to escape. Sawyer took Louisa Matilda to Washington, D.C., to live with him and his new wife, Lavinia Peyton, and then sends her to his cousins in Brooklyn, New York. Jacobs' brother John ran away from Sawyer, his master. Aunt Betty (Aunt Nancy) died, plunging her grandmother into near-inconsolable grief at the loss of her daughter. Following her escape, Jacobs spent several years as a fugitive slave, alternately living in Boston and New York and supporting her children by working as a seamstress.
In 1849, Jacobs moved to Rochester, New York, where she helped her brother run an antislavery reading room, office, and bookstore in the same building that also housed the offices of Frederick Douglass' newspaper, The North Star. In Yellin's "Introduction" to her 1987 edition of Incidents, she notes that "the breadth of the references to literature and current events in Incidents suggests that during her eighteen months in Rochester [Jacobs] read her way through the abolitionists' library of books and papers" which included "the latest and best works on slavery and other moral questions." During this time, Jacobs also began working with a group of antislavery feminists, which led to her meeting with the abolitionist Amy Post. Post became one of her closest friends and encouraged her to publish her story, despite her understandable reluctance to reveal her painful private life to the public.
