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by Rick Bromer
Harriet Tubman was a slave who ran away from her master's plantation in
Maryland in 1849. She was a plain, illiterate, black-skinned woman, about
thirty years old, with no children. Her husband, a free Negro, did not accompany
Harriet Tubman when she ran away.
She fled northward with the help of the Underground Railroad, a clandestine
society of people who opposed slavery. During her journey to freedom, Harriet
Tubman studied the methods of the Underground Railroad agents who helped
her. These agents were committing federal crimes by aiding fugitive slaves,
so they were secretive. To recognize each other, they used special signs
and signals. They used railroad terms to conceal the real nature of their
operation: fugitive slaves were called "freight"; escape routes
were called "lines"; stopping places were called "stations;"
and the people who guided the fugitives along their path were "conductors."
With the help of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman crossed the Mason-Dixon
Line, the boundary between the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania,
where slavery was illegal, she found work as a maid in the city of Philadelphia.
Later she moved to Cape May, New Jersey.
In 1850 Congress passed a new law designed to stop fugitive slaves from
finding freedom in the northern United States. The Fugitive Slave Act empowered
bounty-hunters to arrest runaway slaves in any state of the Union, and return
them to their masters in the South.
If Harriet Tubman wanted to be safe from arrest, she knew that she should
now move further north, to Canada. Instead, she decided return to the South
as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. She had eleven brothers
and sisters, all of whom she wanted to liberate from slavery, along with
their families. She also wanted to free her parents, her friends, and any
other slaves who wanted to go north.
In December of 1850 Harriet Tubman made a journey to her old home in Maryland,
and returned to the North with several of her sisters and their families.
She then went back to Maryland again and again, picking up other slaves.
She managed to carry off both her parents, although they were too old to
walk far and had to be transported in a wagon, which made that journey particularly
dangerous.
In 1851 Harriet appeared at her husband's house, to invite him to come north
with her. She found that he had acquired a new wife, and he preferred to
stay in Maryland.
During the decade of the 1850s, Harriet Tubman made a total of nineteen
trips south of the Mason-Dixon line. She liberated over three hundred people
from slavery, and won a legendary reputation among black Americans, who
called her "Moses."
After President Lincoln freed the slaves, Harriet Tubman granted an interview
to an Abolitionist newspaper, in which she revealed some of the methods
she had used in her work with the Underground Railroad. The Freeman's Record
of March, 1865, reported:
She would never allow more to join her than she could properly care for,
though she often gave others directions by which they succeeded in escaping.
She always came in the winter when the nights are long and dark, and people
who have homes stay in them. She was never seen on the plantation herself,
but appointed a rendezvous for her company eight or ten miles distant, so
that if they were discovered at the first start she was not compromised.
She started on Saturday night; the slaves at that time being allowed to
go away from home to visit their friends--so that they would not be missed
till Monday morning. Even then they were supposed to have loitered on the
way, and it would often be late on Monday afternoon before the flight would
be certainly known.
If by any further delay the advertisement [offering a reward for the runaway
slaves] was not sent out before Tuesday morning, she felt secure of keeping
ahead of it; but if it were [sent out early], it required all her ingenuity
to escape.
She resorted to various devices. She had confidential friends all along
the road. She would hire a man to follow the one who put up the notices,
and take them down as soon as his back was turned. She crossed creeks on
railroad bridges by night. She hid her company in the woods, while she herself,
not being advertised, went into the towns in search of information. If met
on the road, her face was always to the south, and she was always a very
respectable-looking Negro, not at all a poor fugitive.
None of the fugitives was allowed to change his mind and return to slavery.
If a fugitive said that he was too tired to flee any further, Harriet would
shoot him, she told the reporter for the Abolitionist newspaper. "Would
you really do that?" he asked her.
"Yes," she replied. "If he was weak enough to give out, he'd
be weak enough to betray us all, and all who had helped us; and do you think
I'd let so many die for just one coward man?"
"Did you ever have to shoot anyone?" she was asked.
"One time," she said, "a man gave out the second night; his
feet were sore and swollen; he couldn't go any farther; he'd rather go back
and die, if he must." They tried all arguments in vain, bathed his
feet, tried to strengthen him, but it was no use; he wanted to go back.
Then she said, "I told the boys to get their guns ready, and shoot
him. They'd have done it in a minute; but when he heard that, he jumped
right up and went along as well as anybody."
The reporter described Harriet Tubman as follows:
She can tell time by the stars, and find her way by natural signs as well
as any hunter; and yet she scarcely knows of the existence of England or
any foreign country...
She has a very affectionate nature, and forms the strongest personal attachments.
She has great simplicity of character; she states her wants very freely,
and believes you are ready to help her; but if you have nothing to give,
or have given to another, she is content...Her personal appearance is very
peculiar. She is thoroughly Negro, and very plain. She has needed disguise
so often, that she seems to have command over her face, and can banish all
expression from her features, and look so stupid that nobody would suspect
her of knowing enough to be dangerous; but her eye flashes with intelligence
and power when she is roused.
Harriet Tubman possessed a few unusual skills that aided her in her work
of liberating slaves. As a teenager, she had been set to work harvesting
lumber with her father. This heavy, dangerous work had made her as strong
as some men, and she had learned how to find her way through the woods.
Another special skill was Harriet Tubman's ability to stay alert while sleeping,
and to wake up instantly upon hearing a suspicious sound. She had acquired
this ability as a young slave girl, when she had been required by her white
mistress to sit up all night, rocking the cradle of the mistress's baby.
If the baby cried, Harriet got a whipping. In a biography of Harriet Tubman,
her friend Sarah H. Bradford wrote that Harriet "was thus prepared
by the long habit of enforced wakefulness, for the night watches in the
woods, and the dens and caves of the earth, when the pursuers were on her
track, and the terrified ones were trembling in her shadow."
On her journeys to the South, Tubman always wore plain, respectable clothing
that made her look inconspicuous. She carried a loaded pistol, a vial of
opium to quiet cranky babies, and as much cash as possible. But despite
all her precautions, she often found herself in tight spots where she had
to rely on prayer to avoid capture.
Sarah H. Bradford recorded the following story from Harriet Tubman:
On one of her journeys to the North, as she was piloting a company of refugees,
Harriet came, just as morning broke, to a town, where a colored man had
lived whose house had been one of her stations of the underground, or unseen,
railroad. They reached the house, and leaving her party huddled together
in the middle of the street, in a pouring rain, Harriet went to the door,
and gave the peculiar rap which was her customary signal to her friends.
There was not the usual ready response, and she was obliged to repeat the
signal several times. At length a window was raised, and the head of a white
man appeared, with the gruff question, "Who are you?" and "What
do you want?" Harriet asked after her friend, and was told that he
had been obliged to leave for "harboring niggers."
Here was an unforeseen trouble; day was breaking, and daylight was the enemy
of the hunted and flying fugitives. Their faithful leader stood for one
moment in the street, and in that moment she had flashed a message quicker
than that of the telegraph to her unseen Protector, and the answer came
as quickly; in a suggestion to her of an almost forgotten place of refuge.
Outside of the town there was a little island in a swamp, where the grass
grew tall and rank, and where no human being could be suspected of seeking
a hiding place. To this spot she conducted her party. She waded the swamp,
carrying in a basket two well-drugged babies (these were a pair of twins,
whom I have since seen well grown young women), and the rest of the party
following. She ordered them to lie down in the tall, wet grass, and here
she prayed again, waiting for deliverance. The poor creatures were all cold,
and wet, and hungry, and Harriet did not dare leave them to get supplies;
for no doubt the man at whose house she had knocked had given the alarm
in town; and officers might be on the watch for them. They were truly in
a wretched condition, but Harriet's faith never wavered, her silent prayer
still ascended, and she confidently expected help from some quarter or another.
It was after dusk when a man came slowly walking along the solid pathway
at the edge of the swamp. He was clad in the garb of a Quaker, and proved
to be a friend in need and in deed; he seemed to be talking to himself,
but ears quickened by sharp practice caught the words he was saying:
"My wagon stands in the barnyard of the next farm across the way. The
horse is in the stable; the harness hangs on a nail." And the man was
gone. Night fell, and Harriet stole forth to the place designated. Not only
a wagon, but a wagon well provisioned stood in the yard; and before many
minutes the party was rescued from their wretched position, and were on
their way rejoicing, to the next town. Here dwelt a Quaker whom Harriet
knew, and he readily took charge of the horse and wagon, and no doubt returned
them to their owner. How the good man who thus came to their rescue received
any intimation of their being in the swamp Harriet never knew, but these
sudden deliverances never seemed to strike her as at all strange or mysterious;
her prayer was the prayer of faith, and she expected an answer.
Slave owners were constantly on the lookout for Tubman and offered large
rewards for her arrest, but they never caught her. As an old lady, looking
back on her accomplishments, she was able to boast, "I never ran my
train off the track, and I never lost a passenger."
During the Civil War Harriet Tubman served heroically with the Union Army
as a scout and spy. She also served more prosaically as a cook and nurse.
Later she lived in poverty for many years in Auburn, New York, where she
struggled to support her parents.
In 1869 Sarah Hopkins Bradford wrote a biography which described Harriet
Tubman's exploits with the Underground Railroad. The profits from the book
went to Harriet Tubman, who used the money to open a shelter for needy black
people.
The book made Harriet Tubman famous. When she died in Auburn on March 10,
1913, she was buried with military honors. A year later the city unveiled
a tablet in her memory.
SOURCES:
The Underground Railroad. by Charles L. Blockson. Prentice Hall Press. New
York. 1987.
Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her People. by Sarah H. Bradford. 1886. Reprinted
by Applewood Books, 18 North Road, Bedford, MA 01730.
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