Harriet Tubman (born
Araminta
Ross;
c. 1822 – March 10, 1913) was
an
African-American abolitionist,
humanitarian, and
Union spy during the
American Civil War. After escaping from
slavery, into which she
was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves
using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as
the
Underground Railroad.
She later
helped John Brown recruit
men for his raid on Harpers
Ferry
, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.
As a child
in Dorchester
County
, Maryland
, Tubman was
beaten and whipped by her various masters to whom she had been
hired out. Early in her life, she suffered a traumatic
head wound when she was hit by a heavy
metal weight thrown by an irate overseer, intending to hit another
slave. The injury caused disabling
seizures,
headaches, powerful visionary and dream activity,
and spells of
hypersomnia which occurred
throughout her entire life. A devout
Christian, she ascribed her
visions and vivid dreams to
premonitions from
God.
In 1849,
Tubman escaped to Philadelphia
, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue
her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought
relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens
of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme
secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a
passenger," as she later put it at women's suffrage meetings. Large
reward were offered for the capture
and return of many of the people she helped escape, but no one ever
knew it was Harriet Tubman who was helping them.
When the far-reaching
United States Fugitive Slave Law
was passed in 1850, she helped guide fugitives farther north into
Canada
, and helped newly freed slaves find
work.
When the
American Civil War
began, Tubman worked for the
Union Army,
first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy.
The first
woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid
on the Combahee
River
, which liberated more than seven hundred
slaves. After the war, she retired to the family home
in Auburn, New
York
, where she cared for her aging parents. She
was active in the
women's suffrage
movement until illness overtook her and she had to be admitted to a
home for elderly African-Americans she had helped open years
earlier.
Family and birth
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to slave parents,
Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison
Brodess (and later her son Edward), while Ben was legally owned by
Mary's second husband, Anthony Thompson, who ran a large plantation
near
Blackwater River in
Madison, Maryland. As with many slaves in the United States,
neither the exact year nor place of her birth was recorded, and
historians differ as to the best estimate.
Kate Larson records the year 1822, based on a
midwife payment and several other historical documents while Jean
Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born
in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later."
Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman
herself reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death
certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820. In her Civil
War widow's pension record, Tubman claimed she was born in 1820,
1822, and 1825, an indication, perhaps, that she had only a general
idea of when she was born.

A map showing key locations in
Tubman's life
Modesty, Tubman's maternal grandmother, arrived in the US on a
slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other
ancestors.
As a child, Tubman was told that she was of
Ashanti lineage (from what is now Ghana
), though no
evidence exists to confirm or deny this assertion. Her
mother Rit (who may have been the child of a white man) was a cook
for the Brodess family. Her father Ben was a skilled woodsman who
managed the timber work on the plantation. They married around
1808, and according to court records, they had nine children
together: Linah, born in 1808, Mariah Ritty in 1811, Soph in 1813,
Robert in 1816, Minty (Harriet) in 1822, Ben in 1823, Rachel in
1825, Henry in 1830, and Moses in 1832.
Rit struggled to keep their family together as slavery tried to
tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah,
Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever.
When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's
youngest son Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other slaves
and free blacks in the community. At one point she even confronted
her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man"
came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told
them: "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my
house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and
abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that tales of this
event in the family's history influenced her belief in the
possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Because Tubman’s mother was assigned to "the big house" and had
scarce time for her own family, as a child Tubman took care of a
younger brother and a baby. At the age of five or six, she was
hired out to a woman named "Miss Susan" as a nursemaid. Tubman was
ordered to keep watch on the baby as it slept; when it woke and
cried, Tubman was whipped. She told of a particular day when she
was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried these scars for
the rest of her life. Threatened later for stealing a lump of
sugar, Tubman hid in a neighbor's pig
sty for
five days, where she fought with the animals for scraps of food.
Starving, she returned to Miss Susan's house and received a heavy
beating. Later, to protect herself from such abuse, she wrapped
herself in layers of clothing, but cried out as she might if less
protected. Another time, she bit a white man's knee while receiving
a punishment; afterwards, he kept his distance from her.
Tubman also worked as a child at the home of a planter named James
Cook, where she was ordered into nearby marshes to check the
muskrat traps. Even after contracting the
measles, she was sent into waist-high cold
water. She became very ill and was sent back home. Her mother
nursed her back to health, whereupon she was immediately hired out
again to various farms.
Tubman spoke later of her acute childhood
homesickness, once comparing herself to
"the boy on the Swanee
River
", an allusion to Stephen
Foster's song "Old Folks at
Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned
to grueling field and forest work: driving oxen, plowing, and
hauling logs.
Head injury
One day, when she was an adolescent, Tubman was sent to a dry-goods
store for some supplies. There, she encountered a slave owned by a
different family, who had left the fields without permission. His
overseer, furious, demanded that Tubman help restrain the young
man. She refused, and as the slave ran away, the overseer threw a
two-pound weight from the store's counter. It missed and struck
Tubman instead, which she said "broke my skull". She later
explained her belief that her hair – which "had never been combed
and … stood out like a bushel basket" – might have saved
her life. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her
owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained
without medical care for two days. She was immediately sent back
into the fields, "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I
couldn't see." Her boss said she was "not worth a sixpence" and
returned her to Brodess, who tried unsuccessfully to sell her. She
began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious,
although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings even though
she appeared to be asleep. These episodes were alarming to her
family who were unable to wake her when she fell asleep suddenly
and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman for the
rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from
temporal lobe epilepsy as a
result of the injury.
This severe head wound occurred at a time in her life when Tubman
was becoming deeply religious. As an illiterate child, she had been
told
Bible stories by her mother. The
particular variety of her early
Christian
belief remains unclear, but Tubman acquired a passionate faith in
God. She rejected white interpretations of scripture urging slaves
to be obedient, finding guidance in the
Old Testament tales of deliverance. After her
brain trauma, Tubman began experiencing visions and potent dreams,
which she considered signs from the divine. This religious
perspective instructed her throughout her life.
Family and marriage
By 1840, Tubman's father Ben was
manumitted – released from slavery at the age of
forty-five, as stipulated in a former owner's
will, though his real age was closer to
fifty-five. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman
for the Thompson family, who had owned him as a slave. Several
years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five
dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer
discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit,
like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of forty-five. The
record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's
children, and that any children born after she reached forty-five
years of age were legally free. However, the Pattison and Brodess
families had ignored this stipulation when inheriting the slaves,
and seeing it enacted was an impossible task for Tubman.
In or around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman.
Although little is known about him or their time together, the
union was complicated due to her slave status. Since the mother's
status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and
John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages – free people
marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore
of Maryland, where half the black population was free. Most African
American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson
suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's
freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her
marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this
happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it
coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted
her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or
possibly to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, and her value as a slave was
diminished as a result. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could
not find a buyer. Angry at this effort (and the unjust hold he kept
on her relatives), Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God
to make him change his ways. "I prayed all night long for my
master," she said later, "till the first of March; and all the time
he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When
it appeared as though the sale was being finalized, she switched
tactics. "I changed my prayer," she said. "First of March I began
to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's
heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way." A week later,
Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier
sentiments. Ironically, Brodess's death increased the likelihood
that Tubman would be sold and the family would be broken apart. His
widow Eliza began working to sell the family's slaves. Tubman
refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite
her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two
things I had a right to," she explained later, "liberty or death;
if I could not have one, I would have the other."

Notice published in the Cambridge
Democrat, offering a three hundred dollar reward for
Araminta (Minty) and her brothers Harry and Ben
Tubman and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped from slavery on
September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Dr. Anthony
Thompson, who owned a very large plantation called Poplar Neck in
neighboring Caroline County, and it is likely her brothers labored
for Thompson there as well. Because the slaves were hired out to
another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their
absence as an escape attempt for some time.
Two weeks later,
however, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge
Democrat, offering a reward of up to one
hundred dollars for each slave returned. Once they had left,
however, Tubman's brothers succumbed to second thoughts. Ben had
just become a father, and the two men – fearful of the dangers
ahead – went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterwards, Tubman escaped again, this time without her
brothers. The night before she left, Tubman tried to send word to
her mother of her departure. She located Mary, a trusted fellow
slave, and sang a coded song of farewell: "I'll meet you in the
morning," she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land". While her
exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the extensive network
known as the
Underground
Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed
of free and enslaved blacks, white
abolitionists, and other activists. Most
prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of
the
Religious Society of
Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar
Neck in
Caroline County,
Maryland contained a significant Quaker community, and was
probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape, if not the
starting point.
From there, she probably took a common route
for fleeing slaves: northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware
and then north into Pennsylvania
. A journey of nearly ninety miles (145
kilometers), traveling by foot would take between five days and
three weeks.
Her dangerous journey required Tubman to travel by night (guided by
the
North Star), avoiding the careful eyes
of "slavecatchers", eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves.
The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used a variety of
deceptions to hide and protect her. At one of the earliest stops,
the lady of the house ordered Tubman to sweep the yard to make it
appear as though she worked for the family. When night fell, the
family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house.
Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, it
is likely that Tubman hid in these locales during the day. Because
the routes she followed were used by other fugitive slaves, Tubman
did not speak about them until later in her life.
Particulars of her first journey remain shrouded in secrecy. She
crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and
recalled the experience years later: "When I found I had crossed
that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.
There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold
through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in
Heaven."
"Moses"
Immediately after reaching the city of
Philadelphia
, Tubman began thinking of her family. "I was
a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my
mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland].
But I was free, and
they should be free." She began to
work odd jobs and save money. At the same time, the
U.S. Congress passed the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which
forced law enforcement officials (even in states which had outlawed
slavery) to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, and imposed
heavy punishments on those who abetted escape.
The law increased
risks for escaped slaves, many of whom headed north to Canada
.
Meanwhile, racial tension was increasing in Philadelphia itself, as
the city expanded.
In
December 1850, Tubman received a warning that her niece Kessiah was
going to be sold (along with her two children, six-year-old James
Alfred, and baby Araminta) in Cambridge, Maryland
. Horrified at the prospect of having her
family broken further apart, Tubman did something very few slaves
ever did: she voluntarily returned to the land of her enslavement.
She went
to Baltimore
, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until
the time of the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free black man
named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while
he pretended to make arrangements to pay, Kessiah and her children
absconded to a nearby
safe house. When
night fell, Bowley ferried the family on a
log
canoe sixty miles (one hundred kilometers) to Baltimore. They
met up with Tubman, who brought the family safely to
Philadelphia.
The following spring, she headed back into Maryland to help guide
away other family members. On this, her second trip, she brought
back her brother Moses, and two other unidentified men.
It is
likely that Tubman was by this time working with abolitionist
Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in
Wilmington,
Delaware
. Word of her exploits had encouraged her
family, and biographers agree that she became more confident with
each trip to Maryland. As she led more and more individuals out of
slavery, she became popularly known as "Moses" – an allusion to the
prophet in the
Book
of Exodus who led the
Hebrews to
freedom.
During an interview with author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman
revealed some of the names of helpers and places she used along the
Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black
minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her
parents' home at Poplar Neck in Caroline County, MD. From there,
she would travel northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware,
and onto the Camden area where free black agents William and Nat
Brinkley, and Abraham Gibbs guided her north past Dover, Smyrna,
and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In
Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to
William Still's office or the homes of
other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia
area. Still, a famous black agent, is credited with aiding hundreds
of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New
York, New England, and Canada.
In the
fall of 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester
County
for the first time since her escape, this time to
find her husband John. She once again saved money from
various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south.
John, meanwhile, had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman
sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was
happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house
and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble.
Suppressing her anger, she found some slaves who wanted to escape
and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family
together, until he was killed sixteen years later in a roadside
argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States
more dangerous for escaped slaves, many began migrating further
north to Canada. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified
group of eleven fugitives – possibly including the Bowleys and
several others she had helped rescue earlier – northward. There is
evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home
of abolitionist and former slave
Frederick Douglass. In his
third autobiography,
Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same
time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me
until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It
was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some
difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter…." The number
of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was
Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman showed a great admiration for one another as
they struggled together against slavery. When an early biography of
Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor
her. It read in part:
Journeys and methods
For eleven years Tubman returned again and again to the
Eastern Shore of Maryland,
rescuing some seventy slaves in thirteen expeditions, including her
three other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some
of their children. She also provided specific instructions for
about fifty to sixty other fugitives who escaped to the north. Her
dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked
during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group
would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the
winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have
homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping
slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would
not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys back into the land of slavery put her at tremendous
risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection.
Tubman once disguised herself with a
bonnet and carried two live
chickens to give the appearance of running errands.
Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in
Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs,
and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she
recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she
snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Since Tubman was
known to be illiterate, the man ignored her.
Her religious faith was another important resource as she ventured
again and again into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head
injury continued, and she saw them as divine
premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with
God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once
said of her: "I never met with any person of any color who had more
confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her
faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used
spirituals as coded messages,
warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path.
She also carried a
revolver, and was not
afraid to use it. Once a slave agreed to join her expedition, there
was no turning back – and she threatened to shoot anyone who tried
to return. Tubman told the tale of one voyage with a group of
fugitive slaves, when morale sank and one man insisted he was going
to go back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and
said: "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group
as they entered Canada. It is more than likely that Tubman carried
the handgun as protection from ever-present slave catchers and
their vicious dogs.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the
petite, five-foot-tall, disabled slave who had run away years
before and never come back, was behind so many slave escapes in
their community. In fact, by the late 1850s they began to suspect a
northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves
away. They even entertained the possibility that John Brown himself
had come to the Eastern Shore to lure slaves away before his
ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry in October 1859. While a popular
legend persists about a reward of US$40,000 for Tubman's capture,
this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to drum up
support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a
former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming
US$40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to
offer for her." Such a high reward would have garnered national
attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be
purchased for a mere US$400. No such reward has been found in
period newspapers. (The federal government offered $25,000 for the
capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in Lincoln's
assassination.) A reward offering of US$12,000 has also been
claimed, though no documentation exists for that figure either.
Catherine Clinton suggests that the US$40,000 figure may have been
a combined total of the various
bounties offered around the region. Despite
the best efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman was never captured –
and neither were the fugitives she guided. Years later, she told an
audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight
years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran
my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging
parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855
from Eliza Brodess for twenty dollars. But even when they were both
free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later,
Tubman received word that her father had harbored a group of eight
escaped slaves, and was at risk of arrest.
She traveled to the
Eastern Shore and led them north into the Canadian city of St.
Catharines, Ontario
, where a community of former slaves (including
Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had
gathered.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist
John Brown, an
insurgent who advocated the use of violence to
destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated
violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct
action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being
called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath
of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic
vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on
slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called
her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border
states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to
Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Frederick
Douglass and
William Lloyd
Garrison did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting
to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for
military action. After he began the first battle, he believed,
slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the south. He
asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in Canada who
might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8,
1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham-Kent, Ontario
, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers
Ferry, Virginia
. When word of the plan was leaked to the
government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds
for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort, and
with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist
audiences and tending to her relatives. In the autumn of 1859, as
Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not
be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October
16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New
York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head
injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped
slaves in Canada, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have
been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to
rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have
begun sharing Frederick Douglass' doubts about the viability of the
plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of
treason and hanged in December. His actions were
seen by abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out
by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She
later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would
in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist US Senator
William H. Seward
sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New
York
for US$1,200. The city was a hotbed of
antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver
her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the US
meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the
south under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed
reservations.
Catherine Clinton
suggests that anger over the 1857
Dred Scott decision may have prompted
Tubman to return to the US. Her land in Auburn became a haven for
Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and
boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a
better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to
Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old
light-skinned black girl named Margaret. The circumstances of this
expedition remain clouded in mystery. There is great confusion
about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated
they were free blacks. The girl had left behind a twin brother and
a loving home in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice
called Tubman's actions selfish, saying: "she had taken the child
from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to
care for her." Indeed, Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that
Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the
two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman –
knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never
have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton
presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice
herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete
evidence exists for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's
relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission.
Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape
of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children (Ben and Angerine).
Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel
had died, and the children could only be rescued if she could pay a
US$30 bribe. She had no money, so the children remained enslaved
(and their fates remain unknown). Never one to waste a trip, Tubman
gathered another group, including the Ennals family, ready and
willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks
to safely get away because of slave catchers, forcing them to
hide-out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold
and they had little food. The children were drugged with
paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols
rode by. They safely reached the home of David and
Martha Wright in Auburn, New York on
December 28, 1860.
Civil War
When the
American Civil War broke
out in 1861, Tubman saw a
Union victory as a key step
toward the abolition of slavery.
General Benjamin Butler, for
instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe
. Butler had declared these fugitives to be
"
contraband" –
property seized by northern forces – and put them to work without
pay in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills
to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and
Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head District in
South Carolina.
She became a fixture in the camps,
particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina
, assisting fugitives.
Tubman soon met with General
David
Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the
"contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering
former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. US President
Abraham Lincoln, however, was not
prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and
reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's
response (and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery
in the US), for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let
master Lincoln beat the South till he does
the right
thing," she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from
local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from
dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with
smallpox; that she did not contract the
disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At
first, she received government rations for her work, but newly
freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the
tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money
selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln finally put the
Emancipation Proclamation into
effect in January 1863, Tubman considered it an important step
toward the goal of liberating all black men, women, and children
from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the
Confederacy, and before long
she was leading a band of scouts through the land around Port
Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to
those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus her knowledge of
covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies were put to
good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War
Edwin M. Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and
reconnoitered its inhabitants.
She later
worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided
him with key intelligence which aided the capture of Jacksonville, Florida
.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed
assault during the Civil War.
When Montgomery and his troops conducted an
assault on a collection of
plantations along the Combahee River
, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the
raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three
steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the
shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations,
destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of
food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles,
slaves throughout the area understood that it was being liberated.
Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw
such a sight," she said later, describing a scene of chaos with
women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags
slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents'
necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried
to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the
tumult.
As Confederate troops raced to the scene,
steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort
.
More than seven hundred slaves were rescued in the Combahee River
Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy,
[and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts:
most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army.
Tubman
later worked with Colonel Robert Gould
Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner
, reportedly serving him his last meal. She
described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and
that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the
big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the
drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was
dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to
newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and
eventually nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made
periodic visits back to Auburn, to visit her family and care for
her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after
donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home.
Despite her years of service, she had never received a regular
salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status
and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great
difficulty in documenting her service, and the US government was
slow in recognizing its debt to her. Tubman did not receive a
pension for her service in the Civil War until 1899. Her constant
humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept
her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in
obtaining a government pension were especially taxing for
her.
Tubman returned to Auburn at the end of the war. During a train
ride to New York, the conductor told her to move into the smoking
car. She refused, explaining her government service. He cursed at
her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other
passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they
muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her
into the smoking car, causing more injuries. As these events
transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for
the conductor to kick her off the train.
Later life
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family
and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her
elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of
the people Tubman took in was a Civil War veteran named Nelson
Davis. He began working in Auburn as a
bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he
was twenty-two years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869, they
were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They spent the
next twenty years together, and in 1874 they adopted a baby girl
named Gertie.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition,
meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah H.
Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled
Scenes in the
Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in
1869, and brought Tubman some US$1,200 in revenue. Criticized by
modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective
point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of
information and perspective on Tubman's life. Bradford released
another volume in 1886 called
Harriet, the Moses of her
People, which presented a less caustic view of slavery and the
South. It too was published as a way to help alleviate Tubman's
poverty.
Because of the debt she had accumulated (including delayed payment
for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle
involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other
John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold
smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth
about US$5,000, they claimed – for US$2,000 in cash. They insisted
that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her
home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white
people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces
threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently
assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible,
and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her
to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy
friend named Anthony Shimer, and arranged to receive the gold late
one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they
attacked her and knocked her out with
chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and
gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and
injured, and the money was gone. New York responded with outrage to
the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté,
most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con
men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service
and her economic woes.
Wisconsin
Representative Gerry W. Hazelton introduced a bill (H.R. 3786)
providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services
rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy…." It
was defeated.
Suffragist activism
Tubman worked in her later years to promote the cause of
women's suffrage. A white woman once asked
Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and
received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began
attending meetings of
suffragist
organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as
Susan B. Anthony and
Emily
Howland.
Tubman
traveled to New York, Boston
, and
Washington
DC
to speak out in favor of women's voting
rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil
War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern
history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National
Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was
the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman
among the press in the United States. A publication called
The
Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women"
with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a
series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of
service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others
had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train
ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the century, Tubman became heavily involved with the
African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated
a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the
instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent
colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and
Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a
one-hundred-dollar entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that
nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I
wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't
have no money at all."
She was frustrated by the new rule, but was
the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet
Tubman Home for the Aged
celebrated its opening on June 23,
1908.
As Tubman aged, the sleeping spells and suffering from her
childhood head trauma continued to plague her.
At some point in the
late 1890s, she underwent brain
surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General
Hospital
. Unable to sleep because of pains and
"buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He
agreed, and in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up,
and now it feels more comfortable." She had received no
anesthesia for the procedure, and reportedly
chose instead to
bite down on a
bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs
were
amputated.
By 1911, her body was so frail that she had to be admitted into the
rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as
"ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of
donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, Harriet Tubman
died of
pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just
before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a
place for you."
Legacy
Harriet Tubman, widely known and well-respected while she was
alive, became an American icon in the years after she died. A
survey at the end of the twentieth century named her as one of the
most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War,
third only to
Betsy Ross and
Paul Revere. She inspired generations of
African Americans struggling for
equality and
civil rights; she
was praised by leaders across the political spectrum.
When she
died, Tubman was buried with military honors at Fort Hill
Cemetery
in Auburn. The city commemorated her life
with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her
many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off
de track") – apparently chosen for its authenticity – has been
criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and
dedicated humanitarian. Still, the dedication ceremony was a
powerful tribute to her memory, and
Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote
address. The Harriet Tubman home was abandoned after 1920, but was
later renovated by the AME Zion Church. Today, it welcomes visitors
as a museum and education center.
Bradford's biographies were followed by
Earl
Conrad's Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and
Abolitionist. Conrad had experienced a great difficulty in
finding a publisher – the search took four years – and endured
disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective,
detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly
dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children
– and many more came later – but Conrad wrote in an academic style
to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and
the nation's memory. The book was finally published by
Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1942.
Despite her popularity and significance, another Tubman biography
for adults did not appear for sixty years, until Jean Humez
published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003, and
Larson and
Clinton both published their biographies
in 2004.
Tubman was celebrated in many other ways throughout the nation in
the twentieth century. Dozens of schools were named in her honor,
and both the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn and the Harriet Tubman
Museum in Cambridge serve as monuments to her life.
In 1937 the gravestone
for Harriet Tubman Davis
was erected by the Empire State Federation of
Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of
Historic Places in 1999. In 1944, the
United States Maritime
Commission launched the
SS
Harriet Tubman, its first
Liberty
ship ever named for a black woman. In 1978, the
United States Postal Service
issued a stamp in honor of Tubman as the first in a series honoring
African Americans. She is commemorated together with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Amelia Bloomer, and
Sojourner Truth in the
calendar of saints of the
Episcopal
Church on July 20.
In 2002, scholar
Molefi Kete
Asante included Harriet Tubman on his list of the
100 Greatest African
Americans.
In 2008, Towson University
named Tubman House, a new residence hall in the
campus' West Village development, after Tubman.
References
Bibliography
- Anderson, E. M. (2005). Home, Miss Moses: A novel in the
time of Harriet Tubman. Higganum, CT: Higganum Hill Books.
ISBN 0-9776556-0-1.
- Bradford, Sarah (1961). Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her
People. New York: Corinth Books. .
- Bradford, Sarah (1971). Scenes in the Life of Harriet
Tubman. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press. ISBN
0-836-98782-9.
- Clinton, Catherine (2004).
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little,
Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-14492-4.
- Conrad, Earl (1942). Harriet
Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist. New York:
International Publishers. .
- Douglass, Frederick (1969).
Life and times of Frederick Douglass: his early life as a
slave, his escape from bondage, and his complete history, written
by himself. London: Collier-Macmillan. .
- Humez, Jean (2003). Harriet Tubman: The Life and Life
Stories. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN
0-299-19120-6.
- Larson, Kate Clifford (2004).
Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an
American Hero. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN
0-345-45627-0.
- Sterling, Dorothy (1970). Freedom Train: The Story of
Harriet Tubman. New York: Scholastic, Inc
. ISBN 0-5904362-8-7.
External links
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