23
Harriet Tubman
“I Was Free; They Should Be Free”
They walked for six hours in darkness, stumbling over roots and stones, branches lashing their faces, their bare feet torn and bleeding from prickly sweet-gum burrs. When the first faint streaks of dawn lit the horizon, the group of twenty-five fugitives hunkered down in a remote swamp to wait out the day until they could travel again under cover of darkness. Morale was low. Deprived of food, wet, uncomfortable, and exhausted, the group prepared to leave the swamp as dusk fell.
Suddenly one man stood up and declared it was too much: he had decided to take his chances and return to the plantation. A stout woman turned to face him, insisting that his return would compromise the entire party. When he refused to continue with the group, she stepped close to him, pulled a revolver from the folds of her dress, and aimed it at his head, hissing, “Move or die!” The man complied, and less than a week later she led him across the border into Canada, a free man.
It was almost unheard of for a former slave to return to the South once he or she had escaped into freedom. But Harriet Tubman was the exception. After she fled from Maryland to Philadelphia in the fall of 1849, she returned to her home state approximately thirteen times on exceedingly dangerous secret missions to liberate family and friends. As an Underground Railroad conductor, Tubman led seventy slaves to freedom and gave instructions to fifty more who traveled to freedom on their own. Her extraordinary courage and determination earned her the name Moses, after the biblical leader who led the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt to freedom.
Escape and Rebirth
Like most slaves, Harriet Tubman—who was born Araminta “Minty” Ross—never knew her birth date. As the abolitionist and runaway slave Frederick Douglass noted, slaves knew as much about their age “as horses know of theirs,” and the closest they estimated an actual birthday was whether it was near “planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time or fall-time.”1 We do know that Harriet was the fifth of nine children and was born in either late February or early March 1822, on the plantation of Anthony Thompson in Dorchester County, Maryland.
When she was six or seven years old, Araminta was hired out, first at a nearby farm as a housekeeper and then at another farm as a nanny to a sickly infant. Her mistress kept a whip beneath her pillow, and if Araminta stopped rocking the baby’s cradle during the night, or if her mistress was awakened by the infant’s cries, the young nanny was beaten across the chest, neck, and shoulders, often numerous times in a single night.
As a young teenager, Araminta was hired out as a field hand on a neighboring plantation, and it was around this time that she received a near-fatal blow, intended for another slave, to her head, which resulted in frequent seizures and periods of narcolepsy for the rest of her life.
Araminta’s severe head injury coincided with a period of increased religious fervor. She was known to burst into raucous and excited hymn singing and praise, and she often spoke about hearing the voice of God and experiencing vivid dreams and visions that foretold the future.
While slaves were not permitted to attend religious services led by African American preachers, they were often encouraged or forced to attend the white congregations with their master’s family. Araminta and her family attended Methodist services (their master’s son was an ordained Methodist minister), but her family was also likely influenced by Episcopal, Baptist, and Catholic teachings and probably attended camp meetings held by itinerant white ministers as well. While contemporary scholars aren’t sure how and where Araminta came to memorize Scripture, we do know through her own words that faith was a very personal experience for her.
“When invited to join in prayers with a white master’s family, ‘she preferred to stay on the landing, and pray for herself.’ Praying for strength to make her ‘able to fight,’ Tubman’s pleadings became her own private rebellion,” writes biographer Clifford Kate Larson. “Later Tubman would come to believe that her repeated attempts to retrieve enslaved blacks from the South were a holy crusade.”2
In 1849, now married to John Tubman, a free black man, Araminta launched a prayer vigil for the soul of her new master, Edward Brodess, begging God for his conversion to Christianity so he would come to see the cruelty of slavery and repent. Soon, though, she heard a rumor that Brodess planned to sell her and her brothers, so she switched strategies and began to pray for her master’s death: “I changed my prayer, and I said, ‘Lord, if you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way, where he won’t do no more mischief.’”3
When Brodess suddenly died not long after, Araminta felt terribly guilty about her prayers, but she also realized that rather than assuage her worries, her master’s death only exacerbated her suffering. Fearing she would be sold by Brodess’s widow to pay off debt, and despite her husband’s pleas for her to stay, Araminta fled the planation with her two brothers in September 1849. When her brothers got cold feet and returned to the plantation, Araminta forged ahead alone, through Maryland, along the treacherous byways of Delaware, and into the free state of Pennsylvania. “When I found I had crossed that line,” Tubman later recalled, “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.”4
Araminta Tubman was indeed a new person, at least in name. As was common for fugitive slaves, she changed her name once she crossed into freedom. She was reborn as Harriet Tubman, a name that would be carried through American history.
Spoken Direct to Her Soul
It didn’t take Harriet long to realize that freedom didn’t necessarily guarantee happiness. She missed her family and worried about them constantly. She wasn’t content knowing her loved ones were still enslaved, so she immediately began to strategize how to rescue them. “I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free.”5 She found work as a maid and cook in various hotels and for families in Philadelphia, where she had settled, and hoarded her earnings, communicating with family members via an extensive network of fugitives, free blacks, and abolitionists all along the eastern seaboard.
Receiving word that her niece Kessiah and Kessiah’s two children were going to be auctioned off in Baltimore, Harriet masterminded their escape with the help of Kessiah’s free husband. Following the success of that rescue, she returned to Baltimore just two months later to lead her brother Moses and two other men to freedom. Harriet continued rescue operations from her base in Philadelphia even after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. Southern slaveholders were now pursuing their runaway slaves more aggressively, making Philadelphia and every northern American city unsafe for fugitives. Most of Harriet’s family moved to Canada in the fall and winter of 1851, but Harriet stayed put, unable to rest until she’d rescued all of her enslaved family members.
Harriet was extraordinarily clever with her rescue strategies. Knowing newspapers were not printed on Sundays, she carefully planned departures for Saturday evenings, thus runaway slave advertisements would not be published until Monday, giving her a head start on slave owners and officials. She traveled at night, as was common, but she preferred planning her escapes for the winter months, when the nights were long and people were less likely to be outdoors. She often disguised herself as an elderly woman or a man and frequently sang spirituals encoded with secret messages. If danger was imminent, Harriet would sing a particular spiritual to warn the party, and when the danger cleared, she changed the words or the tempo of the song to alert them that it was safe to move on.
Her fearlessness was legendary, but according to Harriet, it was her faith that fueled her and provided protective intuition. “When danger is near, it appears like my heart goes flutter, flutter,” she said.6 Others testified to the presence of the divine at work. “Harriet seems to have a special angel to guard her on her journey of mercy . . . and confidence [that] God will preserve her from harm in all her perilous journeys,” said Underground Railroad comrade Thomas Garrett. “I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul,” he added.7
Nurse, Scout, and Spy
By 1860 Harriet had led dozens of slaves to freedom, including her elderly parents, whom she guided on a dangerous mission to Canada. But her work was not done. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she realized a new role awaited her: first as a nurse serving the Union Army and later as a scout and spy, utilizing her knowledge of covert travel and her survival skills. Her reconnaissance helped Colonel James Montgomery capture Jacksonville, Florida, in 1863, and later that year, Harriet also played an integral role in the famed Combahee River Raid. On June 2, 1863, she guided three steamboats past Confederate torpedo mines to designated spots on the South Carolina shore, where hundreds of slaves waited under cover. As the steamboats sounded their whistles, more than seven hundred slaves scrambled aboard to freedom.
This raid made Harriet the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. And while several white women famously served during and after the war as spies or smugglers, fewer than a handful of black women can be credibly called Civil War spies. “Tubman’s gift was, again and again, to make her appearance when the enemy least suspected, working behind the scenes,” writes biographer Catherine Clinton. “Federal commanders came to depend on her, but kept her name out of official military documents. Her missions were clandestine operations, and as a black and a woman she became doubly invisible.”8
Preparing a Place
Despite her years of military service, Harriet never received regular compensation and for decades was denied a government pension. As a result, she constantly struggled with debt, even in her later years after she had remarried. Finally, after much discussion and disagreement, Congress awarded her a pension of twenty dollars per month in 1899—more than thirty years after the conclusion of the Civil War, as Harriet herself was approaching age eighty.
In the last years of her life, Harriet was active in the women’s suffrage movement, working alongside leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. She also opened up her home in Auburn, New York, to the poor and needy, particularly African American elderly and disabled people who were not eligible for social services assistance, which was still largely available only to whites at the time. Because so few homes for the aged admitted black residents, Harriet decided to fund one herself, and in 1903 she donated a parcel of land she owned to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn, with the stipulation that it should be used for a home for “aged and indigent colored people.”9 Although nearly penniless when she originally won the bid for the land at a public auction, Harriet wasn’t concerned about her lack of funds. When asked how she was going to pay for the land, she responded, “I’m going home to tell the Lord Jesus all about it.”10
On March 10, 1913, Harriet died in a room in the Harriet Tubman Home, the residence for the elderly she had founded years prior. Shortly before she took her last breaths, she quoted verses from John 14 to those gathered at her bedside: “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am you also may be”11—fitting final words for a woman who had prepared a place of freedom, comfort, and security for so many in her lifetime.12