Harriet Tubman

American social reformer

• Born: c. 1820
• Birthplace: Bucktown, Dorchester County, Maryland
• Died: March 10, 1913
• Place of death: Auburn, New York

Tubman was one of the towering figures in the American abolitionist movement. A fugitive slave herself, she earned the nickname of “Moses of her people" for rescuing numerous enslaved people from bondage and leading them to freedom through the Underground Railroad that she helped to create.

Early Life

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on the eastern shore of Maryland. She was the daughter of two enslaved people, Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green, one of ten or eleven of the couple’s children. Her ancestors had been brought to the United States from Africa sometime during the early eighteenth century. Her enslaver, Edward Brodas, named her Araminta, but she quickly took on her mother’s name and came to be known as Harriet.

Tubman’s status as an enslaved person quickly became obvious to her. As a young child, she saw two of her sisters carried away in chains. She received no schooling, and by the age of five she was already at work as a babysitter and maid. Her mistress worked her as a maid during the day and then demanded that she remain alert to the baby’s cries at night. Once when Tubman dozed off and the baby’s crying awakened the mistress, the woman pummeled the young slave about her face and neck.

At the age of six, Tubman was hired out to a new enslaver who taught her how to trap muskrats and how to weave. Once, he caught her taking a sugar cube from his table, and she had to run away to avoid punishment. When she returned, tired and hungry, after several days’ absence, she was whipped. The remainder of her childhood was spent in various other occupations. She worked again as a nursemaid and later split and hauled wood, part of the time working with her father. She was also a field hand. None of her various enslavers seemed happy with her work, and she was frequently in trouble.

When Tubman was twelve or thirteen, she suffered an accident that was to affect her for the rest of her life. An overseer became angry at another enslaved person for leaving his work and demanded that Tubman help in his whipping. She refused and instead tried to help the man escape. In his anger, the overseer picked up a two-pound weight and threw it at the fleeing girl. His aim proved faulty, however, and he struck Tubman on the head, knocking her unconscious. For the rest of her life, she suffered a form of sleeping sickness brought on by the blow, often falling asleep involuntarily. These spells only increased her reputation as a poor worker.

In 1844, Tubman's mother forced her to marry a free Black man named John Tubman. She lived with him for five years but had no children. While discussing her husband’s free status, Harriet became curious about her own background. In 1845, her inquiries turned up the fact that her mother had actually been emancipated some years previously, but a former enslaver had hidden this fact from her. This revelation caused Tubman to look at her enslavement in an even more critical light.

The year 1849 proved to be the turning point in Tubman's life. Her enslaver at this time was a young, sickly White man who was under the care of an adult guardian. When the young man died in 1849, the rumor spread that the guardian planned to sell all of his enslaved people. Tubman decided to run away. Her husband refused to join her, but two of her brothers went along. They quickly lost their nerve, however, and Tubman was forced to travel the one hundred miles or so out of Maryland, through Delaware, to Philadelphia on her own. Along the way, she found aid from sympathetic people, both Black and White. When she reached free soil, she had mixed feelings. She was excited about reaching freedom but was sad that her family members were still chattel. She determined somehow to free them. Her life of slavery was over; a new career was soon to begin.

Life’s Work

When Tubman reached Philadelphia, she met William Still, a Black man reputed to be the chief “conductor” on what was referred to as the Underground Railroad. This collection of abolitionists, Quakers, and other sympathetic Black and White people had established a series of houses, barns, caves, passageways, and the like for fugitive slaves to use as they made their way north to freedom. This so-called Underground Railroad was not nearly as well organized as myth would have it, but there is no denying that numerous individuals helped the fugitives escape. Tubman had already experienced some of this help during her own escape, and now she learned more about the system from Still and another close ally, the Quaker Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware.

Tubman first had to find work in a hotel to earn a livelihood, and thus she began the pattern she was to follow from then on. She was never a paid agent, so she had to do manual labor of various sorts to pay her own way and help finance her activities. (Sometimes, abolitionists did give her some financial support for particular excursions.) In December 1850, she made the first of some twenty trips back into slavery. She went to Baltimore and brought out her sister and two children. In 1851, she rescued a brother and his family. When she returned for her husband in the fall of that year, she found him remarried and uninterested in joining her.

Through the rest of the 1850s Tubman engaged in her activities on the Underground Railroad, rescuing somewhere between sixty and three hundred people. Her work was complicated by the recently enacted Fugitive Slave Law of the Compromise of 1850, which made it no longer safe for runaways to remain in the North. She began to take her fugitives into Canada, from 1851 to 1857 considering St. Catharines, Ontario, her home. From there, she made eleven trips into slave territory. Her most spectacular rescue, and the most personally satisfying one, was her success in bringing out her parents in 1857 in a specially contrived wagon. Her raids were so successful, in fact, that frightened Maryland slaveholders held a meeting in 1858 and put a price of forty thousand dollars on her head.

Tubman’s success was the result of intelligence, planning, determination, a mystical faith in God, and courage. She carried drugs to anesthetize babies. She used a pistol to embolden fugitives on the verge of losing their nerve, giving them the choice of continuing or dying on the spot. She used cryptic messages to announce her arrival and sang songs with hidden messages to implement her plans. On one occasion, she and her fugitives boarded a southbound train on the supposition that no slave hunter would suspect a Black person traveling in that direction. Another time, she saw a former enslaver approaching her and loosed some chickens as a diversionary tactic to get by him unnoticed. She sometimes physically carried fugitives; she encouraged; she prayed; she bullied. As she later explained: “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” She was convinced that God had chosen her for her work and protected her in its execution.

During the 1850s, Tubman’s fame spread among the abolitionists. She traveled to New England, where she came to know Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and Thomas W. Higginson. William Henry Seward, though hardly an abolitionist, befriended her also and in 1857 sold her a house in his hometown, Auburn, New York, where she took up residence with her aged parents.

In 1859, when Tubman spoke to the Fourth of July meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, she so mesmerized its secretary that he forgot to take notes and had to apologize to the membership for the lapse. However, others whom Tubman met during these years left descriptions of her. She was short, of dark color, medium build, with missing upper front teeth. She dressed simply, reminding one observer of her enslaved past and another of her Quaker acquaintances. By most standards, she was not an attractive woman, and the fact that she often fell asleep as soon as she sat down gave the impression of fragility rather than the strength that she actually possessed.

During the late 1850s, Tubman met John Brown when he was touring Black communities in Canada looking for recruits to join in his attempt to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and begin a massive uprising of enslaved people. Tubman approved of his slave-insurrection plan, and only an unknown illness at a crucial time prevented her from completing her recruiting mission. She considered him the personification of Jesus Christ because of his willingness to die for Black people in slavery. Brown was similarly impressed with her, introducing her to Wendell Phillips as “General” Tubman. At another time, he offered the quintessential nineteenth century sexist praise, referring to her repeatedly as a man.

In the spring of 1860, while Tubman was on her way to an anti-slavery meeting in Boston, she passed through Troy, New York. She found to her dismay that federal marshals had discovered a fugitive and were preparing to take him back to slavery. Tubman helped lead the city’s opposition. She grabbed hold of the fugitive and, though her clothes were nearly ripped from her, she held on. After further struggle and several near misses, she successfully gained for the fugitive his freedom. Later that year she made her last trip into Maryland, but by that time the nation was on the verge of war and her abolitionist friends were concerned for her safety. They now escorted her into Canada, where she had led so many fugitives previously. Her days of rescuing enslaved individuals were over.

Tubman remained in St. Catharines only briefly. In the spring of 1861, she returned to the United States and apparently followed General Benjamin Butler’s Massachusetts troops as they marched southward to defend Washington. In May 1862, armed with a letter from the governor of Massachusetts, she went to General David Hunter’s command in South Carolina to help in the war effort. At first she served as a nurse, gaining renown for her ability to cure disease among those under her care. Later she became a spy, given authority to organize and command a Black scout and spy unit. She participated in several raids during the Civil War, leading the successful July 1863 Combahee River expedition. Later she watched Black troops attack Fort Wagner near Charleston. In 1864, she became concerned over the health of her parents and traveled to Auburn, returning to Virginia near the end of the war to work briefly at a hospital in Fortress Monroe.

On her way home from Virginia, Tubman learned that slavery’s end had not created a promised land for the newly freed people. The conductor on the railroad refused to honor her nurse’s pass and called her a racist name. Despite her strenuous protests, he and three other men threw her body into the baggage car.

Tubman returned to Auburn, where she spent the rest of her life. She began a home for aged African Americans in her own house, married Civil War veteran Nelson Davis in 1869 (John Tubman having died several years previously), and helped Sarah Bradford write an autobiographical book entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869). The publication of this book allowed her to complete the purchase of her house, but she remained in difficult financial straits all of her life. Beginning during the late 1860s, with Seward’s support, she requested federal payment for her Civil War service. Nothing happened until 1897, when she received a pension of twenty dollars a month.

During these post-Civil War years, Tubman was also active in the temperance and the women’s rights movements, working with Susan B. Anthony and other feminists. Her fame had early spread overseas, and upon the publication of her autobiography, Queen Victoria sent her a gift and invited her to visit England.

Harriet Tubman died in Auburn on March 10, 1913. She received a full military funeral conducted by the Grand Army of the Republic. The following year, the city of Auburn dedicated a memorial to her on the county courthouse lawn. Booker T. Washington was the main speaker for the event. In 1978, when the United States Postal Service inaugurated its “Black Heritage U.S.A.” stamp series, Tubman was the first person honored.

Significance

In a world that saw the enslaver as dominant and the enslaved person as powerless, in a society that believed in White superiority and Black inferiority, in a time when men were movers and women’s place was in the home, Tubman was a contradiction. She showed enslavers that they were not all-powerful; she likewise showed enslaved people that enslavement might not have to be permanent. She demonstrated to a racist and sexist age the truth of Black and female capability. She was a “Moses” leading people from slavery into freedom.

Though Tubman’s symbolic effect was significant, her actual success was limited. She affected enslaved people only in a border area, and no more than sixty to three hundred of them. She did not rescue any enslaved people in the Deep South, their chances of running away made impossible by the simple fact of distance. However, even there she had an effect. If slavery was insecure anywhere, it was threatened everywhere. Runaways in Maryland were perceived to be a threat to Mississippi slaveholders as they were to those in Maryland. The bounty for her capture demonstrated better than any words just how upsetting her activities were.

Tubman represented the ideals of freedom and the willingness to endanger one’s life for others. This small woman, who never learned to read and write and thus never read the Declaration of Independence, nevertheless exemplified this document in a most profound way.

In Popular Culture

Tubman's life has been chronicled in a number of biographies, including Milton C. Sernett's Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (2007), as well as in numerous operas, plays, paintings, and novels. In 1978, Tubman's life was dramatized in the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, and the opera Harriet, the Woman Called Moses premiered in 1985. She has also been depicted on stamps and specialty coins. Statues of Tubman have been erected across the country; the first statue of Tubman in the region she was born was unveiled in Salisbury, Maryland, in 2009.

In early 2015, the Women On 20s campaign began advocating for the National Treasury to replace the controversial president Andrew Jackson's portrait on the twenty-dollar bill with that of a female historical figure. The campaign invited the public to vote on a slate of prominent American women, including Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Susan B. Anthony, and on May 10 of that year, Tubman was declared the winner. Two days later, the group presented their petition to President Barack Obama and the Treasury Department. Negotiations were lengthy, in part because the ten-dollar bill was the next scheduled for redesigning, but many advocates specifically wished to replace Jackson, a slaveholder known for his forcible relocation of Native Americans during his presidency.

In April 2016, treasury secretary Jacob Lew announced that Tubman would indeed appear on a redesigned twenty-dollar bill. The bill was originally scheduled to go into circulation in 2020, the centennial of women's suffrage in the United States. However, in 2019, Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary under President Donald Trump, announced that the release of a new twenty-dollar bill was delayed by six years due to technical reasons. At the start of the Joe Biden administration in 2021, the new Treasury Department announced it would look into ways of speeding up the process of creating the Tubman twenty-dollar bill. However, experts noted it was unlikely the change would be made before 2030 due to a deadline previously set by an anti-counterfeiting committee.

In 2018, the section of Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland, that previously held the statues of two Confederate generals—controversially removed in August 2017—was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove. The following year, Tubman was the subject of the biopic Harriet (2019). Starring British actor Cynthia Erivo as Tubman, the film performed well in the box office, however, it caused controversy among some of its viewers for having a British actor rather than an African American actor play the historical figure. A statue of Tubman was erected at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in 2022, in honor of her work freeing enslaved people and her Civil War service.

Bibliography

Bradford, Sarah E. H. Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. Introduction by Butler A. Jones. New York: Lockwood, 1886. Reprint. New York: Corinth, 1961. Print.

Calmes, Jackie. "Harriet Tubman Ousts Andrew Jackson in Change for a $20." New York Times. New York Times, 20 Apr. 2016. Web. 4 May 2016.

Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, 2004. Print.

Clinton, Catherine. "You Have No Idea How Hardcore Harriet Tubman Really Was." Interview by Ana Swanson. Washingon Post. Washington Post, 21 Apr. 2016. Web. 4 May 2016.

Conrad, Earl. Harriet Tubman. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1943. Print.

Heidish, Marcy. A Woman Called Moses. Boston: Houghton, 1976. Print.

Humez, Jean M. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Print.

LaFrance, Adrienne, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, Shauna Miller, and Gillian B. White. "What Does It Mean for America to Put Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill?" Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 20 Apr. 2016. Web. 4 May 2016.

Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballantine, 2004. Print.

Livni, Ephrat. "Putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill May Take Years. Here's Why." The New York Times, 30 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/business/harriet-tubman-20-dollar-bill.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2022.