ca. 1822–March 10, 1913
HIGHEST RANK:
Union Nurse, Spy, and Guerrilla
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Unknown
NICKNAMES:
Moses
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.”
Though known by name to virtually every American from grade school onward, Harriet Tubman has faded into the shadows of Civil War history and lore, obscured by the feats of generals, politicians, and writers. But she deserves a place of prominence in the American narrative as a woman of incredible courage and resourcefulness—and as a person whose triumphs and tragedies are emblematic of her tortured times.
Born to Ben Ross and Harriet “Rit” Green, two slaves living on Maryland’s eastern shore, Araminta, as Tubman was originally christened, grew up in a world in which illiteracy was fiercely enforced by white masters. She would never learn to read or write, though she ultimately dictated much of her life for posterity. From a very young age, she was hired out to other whites in the area for temporary periods—a way for Tubman’s master, Edward Brodess, to squeeze as much profit as possible out of his growing slave stock. The effect was terrifying, not only because the girl was separated from her parents and siblings for long stretches of time, but also because she had no idea how kind or sadistic each new master might be. On one notorious occasion, Tubman—repeatedly scourged by an impatient mistress until her neck and shoulders were permanently scarred—fled, hiding in a pigpen for days until fighting the sow for food scraps proved too exhausting. She then slunk back to receive her beating. With mistresses like these, Tubman learned to hate household duties; she requested work as a laborer. The outdoors suited her, and in time she developed physicality and stamina that would serve her well in freer times to come.
A childhood injury left Harriet Tubman prone to vivid dreams and hallucinations for the rest of her life. Among the most common was a recurring dream in which she flew above the countryside.
But she would have to seize that freedom herself. After marrying a free black man named John Tubman in 1844, Araminta managed to save enough money to hire a lawyer. Many slaves were manumitted, or freed, by contracts that were drawn up as rewards for years of loyal service, and Tubman was interested in discovering whether such an arrangement had been made at any time in her family’s past. The lawyer’s findings were somewhat shocking: Apparently, Edward Brodess had concealed the fact that Tubman’s mother was to be granted her freedom at age forty-five, which she had reached years prior. Moreover, all the children born to her after that date—i.e., the last of Araminta’s siblings—were to be considered free. Brodess was ignoring the contractual obligations that had been handed down to him from his mother’s side of the family.
This was awful news for a young slave woman whose legal options were essentially nil. But it was the death of Edward Brodess that inspired Tubman to act. Saddled with debt, the widow Brodess was forced to sell some of her slaves, a fate dreaded by people in bondage who relied on family ties to sustain them—and Tubman feared she might be included (a similar fate had already befallen her sisters). With nothing more to lose, an emboldened Tubman fled north to Philadelphia, leaving her captivity, family, and husband behind.
It was no easy task. Eastern Maryland was well known to those who operated the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that strove to get black fugitives to safety in the North and in Canada. Accordingly, it was also patrolled by those keen on shutting down the flow of runaway slaves up to Philadelphia and beyond. Finding her way through such dangerous country required remarkable stealth, determination, intelligence, and luck—she had made contact with the Railroad shortly after making her escape. But her most outstanding trait was an intrepid willingness to go back—again and again, on missions of liberation that were extremely perilous and that would make her a legend in her own time. Adopting her mother’s name after reaching freedom, she was now calling herself Harriet. But many others would soon be calling her “Moses,” for delivering them to the promised land.
The risks being what they were, Tubman had no desire to bolt recklessly into slave country, advertise for willing fugitives, and bolt back again. The fact is that these were missions of patience, intricacy, and subterfuge, employing Underground Railroad tactics that remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Local terrain needed to be scouted, word had to be spread (without alerting the wrong folks), and contacts had to be made—a tricky business indeed when virtually every message had to be carried by word of mouth through an illiterate community. Tubman acted as part of the Underground Railroad, whose leaders and “stationmasters” she grew to know well. It was a world of closely guarded codes and late-night rendezvous, of duplicity, daring, stamina, and tension. And Tubman was its greatest “conductor.” By 1860, she had made thirteen trips south and rescued perhaps as many as three hundred fugitives from slavery, including her parents and four brothers.
Secrecy was the key. Tubman carried a pistol, and not just for self-defense: Should one of her “passengers” get cold feet, killing them would prevent exposure of the network. Such confidentiality, combined with Tubman’s feverish spirituality and self-image as a humble instrument of God, contributed to her anonymity. Aside from the rumors of a “woman called Moses,” Harriet’s precise identity remained elusive, both to those who hoped for her succor and those who put a price on her head. (Bounties from various incensed parties amounted at one time to an estimated $40,000.)
In abolitionist circles, by contrast, she was a celebrity. When John Brown arrived at her home in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1858, it was like paying homage to a heroine. “General Tubman,” as he insisted on calling her, agreed to drum up money for Brown’s planned invasion of the South. The two made quite an impression on each other: Tubman believed in the fiery partisan wholeheartedly and was deeply crushed by his abject failure and execution the following year. Her next extraordinary effort on behalf of freedom, however, was both more successful and more direct—in fact, it would mark the first time that Tubman intervened openly on behalf of a fugitive without concern for her identity.
Since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, slaves caught on the lam in free states were no longer safe. Indeed, authorities in the North were required by law to hold them until the “owning” parties—or agents working on their behalf—arrived to reclaim the absconded property. This resulted in open clashes throughout the North between police bound to take runaways into custody and abolitionists willing to go to extraordinary lengths to thwart the effort. One clash happened in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860—the day Harriet happened to be passing through on a visit to her cousin John Hooper.
Charles Nalle, a former slave who had been on the run for a year and a half, was arrested that day by a hireling sent from Virginia. A crowd, mostly black, gathered outside the United States commissioner’s office in Troy, where Nalle was being held. After disguising herself to look, as one local paper reported, like a “somewhat antiquated colored woman” (she was around thirty-eight at the time), Tubman surreptitiously gained access to the building. The authorities soon decided to move the prisoner across town to the judge’s office, producing an opportunity that Tubman wasn’t going to pass up. As Nalle and his escorts descended the stairs to the street, a certain “antiquated colored woman” sprang into action and attacked the sheriff and his deputies in an attempt to free their charge. Her attacks were savage—punching, choking—and the officers gave as good as they got, producing a frenzied melee that eventually spilled into the street, where it evolved into a general engagement. Spurred and inspired by this wiry powerhouse of a woman (who must be, it quickly began to circulate, Harriet Tubman), the crowd got seriously physical with the officers. A running gun-and-knife fight ensued, rolling like a storm toward the Hudson River and beyond to West Troy, where rescuers hoped Nalle would be safe.
He wasn’t—not yet. Seized by authorities there, he was spirited to the chambers of Judge Stewart, then released when the enraged mob of abolitionists essentially bashed their way into the room through a fierce hackfest at close quarters. Tubman, her clothes in scarlet tatters, allegedly carried Nalle—himself a bloody mess—over her shoulder “like a bag o’ meal” amidst the snap of angry bullets. He was whisked into the countryside, where he lived like a fugitive until local antislavery elements bought his freedom.
Violent and sensational, the Charles Nalle incident marked Tubman’s transformation, in the wake of the John Brown fiasco, to a more candid relationship with the struggle against slavery. The outbreak of civil war would change it further. She didn’t approve of Lincoln, whose tepid stance on slavery infuriated her. But by 1862, she had joined the Federal forces as a nurse and cook, finding herself in the wealthy, rebellious lowlands of the South Carolina coast. Her skills as a scout and spy, however, were not lost on her superiors—particularly Colonel James Montgomery, a fellow ardent abolitionist who had been with John Brown in Kansas during the bad old days. In time she was infiltrating the area, acquiring intelligence on terrain, troops, slave populations, and more. This led directly to the Combahee River raid of June 1863, Harriet’s greatest wartime achievement—and one of the very first examples in American history of a woman leading a military operation. Like a scalpel cutting into the heart of Carolina plantation country, Tubman’s band of freed black soldiers made their way up the Combahee River, avoiding the “torpedoes” (floating mines) that Moses herself had assiduously reconnoitered prior to the mission. They landed with impunity wherever they wished, burning property, causing mayhem, and gathering eager slaves. Brushing aside desultory Confederate resistance, the mission played on the deepest of Deep South fears as surely as a maestro plays his violin: black soldiers led by a black woman burning white property in the heart of secession. It was an extraordinary triumph.
At war’s end she was tending to wounded soldiers in Virginia. In New Jersey, on her way home to Auburn, New York, she was rewarded for her wartime services by being forced to give up her seat on the train by a bigoted conductor who couldn’t imagine a black woman with a soldier’s pass. True to form, she did her best to kick his ignorant ass before he and a few other half-wits overpowered her. She was compelled to spend the rest of her “homecoming” journey in the baggage car.
Nevertheless, the final half-century of Tubman’s life seemed more like an attempt to make peace. John Tubman, her first husband who wished to remain behind when she fled slavery in Maryland, had long since moved on. In 1869, Harriet took a new husband, Nelson Davis. For more than ten years she had been living in Auburn on land purchased from William Seward, a good friend and secretary of state during the Lincoln administration. In addition to becoming a famous suffragist, she purchased a large piece of land next to her own in 1896 for the construction of a hospital for aged and indigent African Americans—a proud achievement whose operation eventually passed to a local church. By the time of her death in 1913, she had become a rare bird indeed: an African American who had won her own freedom, secured the adoration of abolitionists, become indispensable to the military, and helped pave the way for women in a new century. How many people could say that?
Araminta was twelve or thirteen when she was thumped with the defining tragedy of her life. While attempting to help a fellow slave escape, she was struck in the head by an errant metal weight that had been hurled by an irate overseer with a wild arm. The result was disastrous. She nearly died and was hampered with noticeable cognitive issues for the rest of her life. In the years to come, many who knew her reported witnessing Tubman’s habit of nodding off to sleep in the middle of an exchange, only to wake minutes later and resume the thread of conversation as if nothing had happened. She also experienced vivid fantasies, even while awake, that evoked images of religious renewal and liberation. Her dreams of flight above the countryside were graphic and indelible; she even felt warned of her association with John Brown through a dream involving a snake that turned into a man with an especially long beard. Much has since been diagnosed to offer a scientific explanation of her behavior, from narcolepsy and cataplexy to hypnagogic hallucinations and even temporal lobe epilepsy. But whatever its source or nature, it was real to Harriet.
Hard-Bitten
Harriet Tubman was one remarkably tough person. Any doubts about that will be dispelled by the story in which she found herself escorting a party of fugitives through the Maryland wilderness while experiencing an awful pain in her mouth, indicating tooth decay that had gone too far. Unwilling to keep going with so much agony, Harriet wandered off and knocked the rotting teeth out of her mouth with the butt of her pistol. The mission carried on as if nothing had happened.
The Combahee River raid in 1863 was one of the most famous events in Harriet Tubman’s long, extraordinary life—a military success that secured the liberation of more than seven hundred slaves. Moreover, Tubman stumbled—literally—across a bit of warfare fashion wisdom that had escaped her until then. In the course of rescuing a slave mother with her children, Tubman’s skirts got trampled and nearly tripped her up. The experience was unnerving enough for Harriet to write abolitionist friends in Boston, requesting (only half in jest) that they send her a pair of bloomers for the work that had yet to be done in South Carolina.
As far as we know, Harriet Tubman never bore any children of her own. She did, however, “adopt” a fellow Marylander named Margaret, a light-skinned girl of African descent. But Margaret was not a slave who’d been rescued. It seems likely (though a great deal of mystery surrounds the incident) that she was a free black girl living in relatively decent circumstances, and Tubman essentially kidnapped her during one of her trips south as if the little eight-year-old were unclaimed goods. As author Catherine Clinton recounts in Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Margaret is often referred to in reminiscences by friends and family as a niece of Tubman’s, but this seems unlikely. Clinton even explores the remote possibility that Margaret was Tubman’s biological child, a tantalizing notion that will probably never be proven one way or another.
Saddled with financial difficulties in the years after the war, Tubman was eager to entertain any possibility of acquiring a windfall to help her juggle her own debts with the burden of all the charity cases she had taken on. Unfortunately, in 1873, her vulnerability played right into the hands of a couple of con men. Their claim was straightforward: For $2,000 in paper money, they would hand over $2,000 in gold coin, a Confederate stash supposedly dug up in the chaotic final days of the war. The coins, they were quick to point out, belonged to the government, and so they were eager to unload such a burdensome treasure that could get them in hot water. It sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime. Unfortunately, when Tubman showed up with the money (loaned by a friend) on the night the exchange was to take place, the men showed up with chloroform—with which they proceeded to render her unconscious before stealing her cash and leaving her, bound and gagged, to be discovered by friends like a rabbit trussed for the pot. The incident, which sold a lot of papers, was a cruel reminder not only of Tubman’s awkward situation, but also of her apparent financial naïveté—a bizarre exception to her otherwise canny survival instincts.
