ABOLITIONIST UNITED STATESThere was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted.
—HARRIET TUBMAN
Harriet stood in the hot sun, shucking corn with the rest of the slaves. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a tall black man slip into the woods. Her heart raced! Was he running away? Harriet had always dreamed of running away. Worry gnawed at her heart—would he make it? Kicking up a cloud of dust, the overseer galloped past, pulling out his snakeskin whip as he neared the woods. He was after the slave! She had to do something, but what? What could a fifteen-year-old black girl do to stop a white man?
Without thinking, Harriet took off after them. She caught up at the plantation store, where the overseer had ahold of the slave. Harriet recognized the terror in his eyes. When the overseer spotted her, he yelled, “You. Hold this man while I tie him for his lashing.” In a quiet, angry voice, Harriet replied, “No, I won’t.” He was so stunned by her words that he lost his grip on the slave, who bolted from the store. Before you could blink, Harriet moved so she stood in the door, blocking the white man from chasing the slave. In his rage, the overseer grabbed a lead weight and hurled it toward the escaping slave, but he missed. The weight hit young Harriet right between the eyes. Blood gushed from the wound, and the world went dark.
Harriet’s bravery should come as no surprise—her parents were of the Ashanti people. These fierce warriors lived in West Africa, where they successfully fought off British invasions during the 1800s.
It was the first time this fifteen-year-old girl helped one of her people run toward freedom and took the beating for it, but it certainly was not her last. In just a few years, Harriet would have a new name; one that would be praised by blacks and feared by white slave owners—Moses, after the Jewish hero who led his people out of slavery in Egypt. Harriet “Moses” Tubman would lead more blacks out of slavery than any other person—male or female, black or white—in American history.
Oh go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go.
—A SONG HARRIET SANG AS SHE LED SLAVES TO FREEDOM
Harriet was born into slavery sometime in 1820 (no one bothered to keep track of slaves’ birthdays), on a plantation in Maryland, one of eleven children of Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross. Her parents, who couldn’t marry because it was illegal for slaves then, were brought to the plantation from Africa in chains. Her mother worked in what they called the big house, and her father cut wood for their white master, Mr. Brodas.
Brodas made much of his fortune from renting out his slaves and also from breeding and selling them, like animals. As a young girl, Harriet saw many of her siblings and friends “sold down the river,” never to be seen again. It was her worst nightmare: to be sold to another plantation farther south, far from her parents and friends. Harriet always dreamed of running away to the North, where she would be free.
Slaves didn’t get to be kids for long. When Harriet was just five, her master rented her out to work for a local family. She slept on the kitchen floor and shared scraps with the dog for meals! Harriet hated working inside, near her white captors, so she convinced her master that she worked better outdoors. When he witnessed her unusual strength, Brodas quickly put her to work with the men, plowing, chopping wood, and driving oxen. Harriet considered the hard labor an improvement, but she never lost sight of her dreams of freedom.
But getting to freedom was no easy thing. When a master reported a runaway slave, groups of white trackers searched the surrounding countryside with dogs. If caught, a runaway would be whipped, branded with the letter R (like cattle!) for “runaway,” and sent to the dreaded Deep South, where treatment of slaves was even more horrific. But Harriet’s back was already crisscrossed with scars from her many whippings. She wasn’t afraid.
Harriet’s first escape attempt occurred when she was seven. She got caught sneaking a sugar cube from her master’s house, but before they could whip her, she ran to the pigpen and hid inside for five days. Starving, she fought piglets for scraps from the trough.
Harriet first helped a runaway slave when she was just fifteen, and the blow she took from the overseer almost killed her. She was in a coma for weeks, and it would be over six months before she could walk again. For the rest of her life, she was scarred by an ugly dent in her forehead and suffered what were called sleeping fits. Several times a day, no matter where she was or what she was doing, Harriet would suddenly drop into a deep sleep from which no one could wake her until she regained consciousness on her own. In spite of her wounds, Harriet never regretted her act of rebellion.
Her master, however, was not pleased, and decided it was time to sell his troublesome slave. Even while Harriet was lying in a coma, he brought prospective buyers in to look at her. As she recovered, Harriet prayed, “Oh dear Lord, change that man’s heart . . . ” When that appeal didn’t work, she switched tactics, “Lord, if you’re never going to change that man’s heart, kill him . . . ” Soon after she made her pleas, Mr. Brodas fell ill and died.
But his successor still planned to sell Harriet, so she got ready to escape even though by then she was married and her husband strongly discouraged her. She’d heard tales of the Underground Railroad—a network of people willing to hide runaway slaves in their homes and help them as they journeyed north to freedom. By night, slaves walked and hid in wagons, boats, and trains. By day, they slept in safe stations—houses, churches, and barns whose owners supported freedom for blacks. Harriet could read a compass and planned to use the Railroad to make it to the Free States.
One dark night in 1849, Harriet finally set out alone. At the first station she was given slips of paper, called tickets, with names of friendly families up the road. At these houses, Harriet presented her tickets and was allowed in. At one house they gave her a broom and told her to sweep the porch. She was upset until she realized that this was their way of hiding her—no one would question a black woman sweeping. Traveling by night, Harriet trudged through ninety miles of swamp and woods until she finally crossed into free Pennsylvania. Of her first taste of liberty, she said, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. 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.”8
But Harriet wasn’t satisfied with her own freedom for long. She worried about her family, friends, and others still living in bondage. She immediately began planning her first rescue mission. From 1850 to 1860, she made nineteen risky trips back into the South, conducting three hundred runaway slaves north to freedom.
Harriet always gave herself a head start on the whites. She arrived at plantations late Saturday night, disguised as an old woman, and then led groups out on Sunday, knowing owners wouldn’t chase them that day. She was also remarkably cool-headed on those long, treacherous journeys north and discouraged fear in her passengers. If any runaways got scared and wanted to turn back (which would endanger the entire Underground Railroad), Harriet put her pistol to their head and said, “Move or die.” It worked. In ten years, Harriet never lost a single passenger.
Harriet even snuck back to the Brodas plantation, where her chances of being recognized and caught were terribly high. By 1857 she had rescued her entire family, including her elderly parents. By then Harriet’s husband was remarried, so she left him behind for good.
At first Harriet led her escaped slaves to the northern states of America, but this became too dangerous when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, demanding the return of escaped slaves and punishing those who helped them. Harriet refused to give up and instead led her people all the way to Canada. It turned a ninety-mile escape route into a five-hundred-mile one, but at least the ex-slaves knew they would be truly free.
The mysterious thief angered and scared white plantation owners, who just assumed that Moses was a man. How could a woman—a black woman, at that—be so cunning and bold as to steal slaves right from under their noses? The usual reward for catching a slave ranged from a hundred to a thousand dollars, but slave owners put an amazing reward on Moses’s head: forty thousand dollars! Though the South swarmed with bounty hunters, they never caught Harriet as she freed slave after slave.
The queen of England was so impressed with Harriet that she sent her a medal and invited her to come to England. Harriet didn’t go, but she reread the queen’s letter so often it “was worn to a shadow.”
When the Civil War broke out in 1860, many southern slaves fled their masters and ran to the Union troops, who unfortunately weren’t prepared to deal with them. Harriet heard what was happening and traveled from her home in Canada to South Carolina, where she worked as a nurse on the front lines, caring for both black freedmen and white soldiers.
Harriet was soon recruited as a spy because of her extensive knowledge of the southern states and her legendary courage. She led groups of black soldiers into enemy territory while informing Union officers about the actions of Confederate troops and the locations of ammunition depots and slaves waiting to be freed. Union General Rufus Saxton praised her: “She made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines, displaying remarkable courage, zeal, and fidelity.” In one legendary raid, Harriet and 150 black soldiers attacked a Confederate outpost in South Carolina and freed 750 slaves! What sweet revenge for Harriet and her men.
After the war, Harriet settled in Auburn, New York, a former station on the Underground Railroad, to care for her elderly parents. Never one to miss out on any excitement, in 1870 fifty-year-old Harriet fell in love again—this time to a man in his twenties! She married Nelson Davis, a Civil War veteran, and became a popular and moving speaker on the rights of blacks and women.
Despite her fame and all she’d accomplished, Harriet was practically penniless after the war. She and friends wrote letters asking the US Government to pay her a pension, just like it paid to male soldiers who had served in the Civil War. No luck. When her husband died at forty-four (yes, Harriet outlived her young husband!), the government paid her an eight-dollar monthly pension as his widow, but it still didn’t recognize her for her own service!
Harriet’s dream in her old age was to build a home for sick and elderly ex-slaves, a place where they would be safe and taken care of after all their struggles. She earned money by selling copies of her biography and was finally able to build her retirement home in 1908. At age eighty-eight, she was one of the first to move in. Five years later, surrounded by her friends and family, and in the home she’d built, Harriet finally quit the struggle and died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-three.
In Cambridge, Maryland, not far from where Harriet lived in slavery, Tubman Street reminds us of the girl who refused to accept her lot in life. When up against the foreboding wall of slavery, the woman they called Moses persevered, risking her life again and again to help others and to lead her people to freedom.
AGE 12