Great women and men have much to teach us, however, so it is worth using our imaginations and the tools of history to see events through their eyes, as imperfectly as we shall. Fiction lights the dark corners of evidence. In the case of Harriet Tubman, I hope my portrayal will inspire others.
The epigrams that start each chapter of this book are drawn from original documents. I have relied upon extensive historical sources on the Civil War, American slavery, and Harriet Tubman. These include over two thousand oral history interviews conducted by the Federal Works Progress Administration in the 1930s that tell the story in enslaved peoples’ own words and give insight into period language of the lower and upper South. The dialect used in this novel is based on these records and others, and on statements by Tubman that sympathetic friends, mostly Northerners, wrote down. To make the text less jarring to modern readers, I have streamlined the dialect and imposed consistent spellings.
As to the events themselves, I have followed the record as closely as possible while fleshing out bare facts with plausible fictions—from Webster’s thievery, for example, to Pipkin’s shooting of a nameless girl who bolted vainly for the ship. (Private Webster was found guilty in a court-martial at which Tubman and Plowden testified, and I created the story of Kizzy around the girl.) The danger posed by Confederate torpedoes was real. In an 1864 mission up the St. Johns River in Florida, the Harriet Weed sank in under a minute when it hit two underwater mines. As the New York Times reported, “She was literally blown to atoms.”
We know from Harriet Tubman’s candid testimony that her husband opposed her flight to freedom in 1849 around age twenty-seven. A year later, John married a free woman with whom he had free children. Tubman devoted herself after this painful event to bringing her own family and others to safety. Smuggling fugitives was highly illegal, so most people did not keep records, but we know from the secret logs of William Still of Philadelphia and Thomas Garrett of Delaware that Tubman guided close to one hundred people and possibly many more to freedom. In yearly raids, typically conducted during fall when nights grew long, she brought her enslaved brothers Robert, Ben, Henry, and Moses, her manumitted parents Benjamin and Harriet Ross, and various other family members to Canada along with countless strangers. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she again courted danger to serve on the occupied Sea Islands.
Samuel Heyward and Walter Plowden belonged to a small group of scouts under Tubman’s command. To make a living during the war, she sold pies, gingerbread, and root beer with the help of an assistant and set up a laundry in Beaufort to teach freedwomen how to support themselves. After the war, she married Nelson Davis, a veteran of the US Colored Troops who fought at the Battle of Olustee and was twenty years her junior. Harriet Tubman must have been magnetic. Both of her husbands would otherwise have chosen a peer as a mate. Someone younger. Someone free.
Nelson Davis and Harriet Tubman Davis lived in Auburn, New York, until Nelson passed away in 1888 in the house she had purchased from William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s political rival and secretary of state. She bought an adjacent parcel in 1896, where she built a shelter for homeless colored people, and where she lived until her own death in 1913, around age ninety-one. Harriet Tubman never knew her precise age since her birth was unrecorded, like so much else. William Seward wrote of her, “a nobler, higher spirit, or a truer, seldom dwells in human form.” Colonel James Montgomery described her as “a most remarkable woman, and invaluable as a scout.” General Rufus Saxton, supervisor of the contraband on Port Royal, recommended Tubman for a military pension as a “spy” who made “many a raid inside the enemy’s lines, displaying remarkable courage, zeal, and fidelity.” Despite disinterested testimonials on Tubman’s behalf, and her own petition as “commander of several men,” Congress nonetheless resisted granting a woman a scout’s pay. Three decades later, the federal government retroactively awarded Tubman the lesser pension of a nurse. Congress granted Walter Plowden the pay of a scout.
Seven months after the Combahee raid, Rebel pickets had captured Plowden during a solo mission. He languished fifteen months as a prisoner of war in Charleston, until the 21st Infantry of the US Colored Troops entered the city. As indicated by Samuel Heyward’s last name, he had likely escaped from the Heyward Plantation, since it was common for freedmen to be identified by the surnames of former owners. We know little else about the scout.
Nothing in the historical record describes his and Harriet’s personal relationship. Tubman was a single woman as well as a canny military strategist. I don’t accept the prejudice that a woman must be sexless to be virtuous, so I penned a love affair to reveal the individual behind the icon. War intensifies a yearning for sheltering arms, and it would be natural if Tubman sought them. Family reunification might well have precipitated a crisis. As historian Tera Hunter observes, one of the most challenging legal problems freed Americans faced was how to confirm or end relationships begun under slavery. Marriage and divorce were often the first civil rights they exercised. Readers who wish to understand the doubly difficult plight of enslaved women more generally—including its emotional costs—may wish to consult Deborah Gray White’s seminal Ar’n’t I A Woman?
On the subject of Harriet Tubman’s family, historians speculate that a child she mysteriously took from a “brother” in Baltimore around 1858 was not her so-called niece but actually her daughter. Margaret Stewart physically resembled Tubman, and they were close until the older woman’s death. In this novel, I have chosen to accept the best guess of biographers such as Catherine Clinton and Kate Larson. Since family lore holds that Margaret came from a “brother” in Maryland (though all of Tubman’s brothers escaped to the North), I’ve depicted her as the ward of Harriet Tubman’s brother-in-law.
Harriet Tubman suffered throughout her life from the brain trauma inflicted by an overseer. Her disability was documented by acquaintances who observed that she frequently lost consciousness when sitting quietly, only to wake after three or four minutes without losing the thread of a conversation. Tubman reported to her chosen biographer that strange dreams, sounds, and visions sometimes accompanied these episodes. Historians speculate that Tubman’s original injury may have produced temporal lobe epilepsy, a seizure disorder that triggers loss of consciousness though not convulsions. The disability gave her increasingly painful headaches as she aged. In the 1890s, she sought brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she underwent a procedure—without anesthesia—that moderated the condition.
Military accounts of the Combahee Raid are skimpy, as is common in war. The contribution of scouts was not documented and Tubman’s name appears nowhere in the official record. For this reason, some historians question her leadership. Yet advance intelligence must have played a role. Plantation owner Joshua Nichols intuited that slaves had been forewarned as they did not evince the “slightest” surprise at the dawn raid, and he thought he spotted “women” (perhaps a lone woman) on the upper deck of the attacking gunship. Plantation owner William Heyward watched Union boats sail “safely” around torpedoes, as if their location was known. Harriet Tubman later recalled urging General Hunter to appoint Colonel Montgomery, and an eyewitness journalist wrote immediately after the raid that a woman named Moses “led” the expedition under the command of Montgomery, who himself called Tubman “invaluable.” Although evidence doesn’t paint a complete picture, in my opinion there is enough to substantiate the testimony of Tubman and the Wisconsin journalist, who had no reason to fabricate events and whose public reports no one contradicted at the time.
One of the last things about which we cannot be certain is how Harriet Tubman might feel about a white person writing this book. We do know she commissioned Sarah Bradford to pen her biography in 1869 and not Frederick Douglass, though he contributed a testimonial letter to the volume. Harriet Tubman advocated strenuously for women’s rights, including the right to vote, and may have wished to give a female writer the opportunity. Today, she would undoubtedly be proud t
o have black authors tell her tale. Her long collaboration with white abolitionists suggests she would also encourage writers who share John Brown’s skin color. I hope readers will be as openhearted, though some may not. The lifework of a historian is to reveal the experience of people from the past. For myself, I don’t believe that gender, race, region, or time period make us unintelligible to one another. Harriet Tubman was a singular individual within her generation—or any generation—and wanted her story told widely. No one owns her. She risked everything to establish that fact.
Many people helped with this project. In Beaufort, Stephen Wise, Larry Rowland, Carolyn Lauvray, Reverend Kenneth Hodges, John Wharley, Grace Morris Cordial, and Larry Kooklin gave invaluable advice. I am indebted to Susan Meredith and her family for preserving the Maryland store where Harriet Tubman received the blow to her head and for finding the priceless runaway notice widow Eliza Brodess published when Tubman fled in 1849. Ashley Trujillo of the Museum of Miami helped locate relevant archives on the 2nd South Carolina. Jack and Bradley MacLean, avid fishermen of the Combahee, shared lore on tides, currents, and alligators. Historian Catherine Clinton provided guidance. Macke Raymond made hand pies. Lilly Golden of Arcade gave me courage, opportunity, and excellent editorial advice. Alexandra Shelley helped with writing craft while publicist Gretchen Crary supported the book with feats of legerdemain. Judy Beletti, Shelbee Cobbs, Sandra Dijkstra, Claudia Friddell, Michelle Gable, Maria Gomes, Khoi Le, Tina Lee, Christina Luhn, Michele Mattingly, Victoria Shelby, Stephanie Shelley, Susan St. Louis, Janice Steinberg, Victoria Wayne, and Iris Wyatt allowed me to see the prose through the eyes of discerning readers. Gregory Shelby and James Shelley allowed me to see it through the eyes of filmmakers. My first graduate advisor, Carl Degler of Stanford University, inspired my interest in slavery and the Civil War. Stanford’s Hoover Institution, San Diego State University, and Texas A&M University provided research support, and I am particularly grateful for the generosity of Melbern and Susanne Glasscock.
Lastly, I wish to thank the first person who encouraged me to see the world through the eyes of a famous figure. “For Halloween, you should be Joan of Arc,” my Aunt Diane told me when I was eight. “She was burned at the stake!” My aunt then made me a costume from cardboard, which, I note in retrospect, is a combustible material. Equipped with a wooden sword and dreams of heroism, I set out to collect my candy and save France. Yet even at that age, I sensed when historical details were wrong. My shiny suit of armor bore an embarrassing resemblance to a Tide box covered in tinfoil. So I removed the square breastplate and continued on the mission in leotard and tights, disappointed at my own cowardice. On the way home, I donned the armor once more, and my aunt was never the wiser. (Now she is.)
This book is dedicated to my friend and fellow historian Myra Burton, who kindly read multiple drafts, offered salient perspectives as a person from what she calls “The Community,” and cried with me at the end. With better attention to period costuming, it humbly honors an American leader who, like Joan of Arc, fought for her country and belongs to the ages.
Readers who wish to delve into the background of this novel may wish to consult the following original sources:
Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869) and Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886) by Sarah Hopkins Bradford
Army Life in a Black Regiment (1900) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers (1902) by Susie King Taylor
The Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884, ed. Rupert Holland (1912)
The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (1988)
A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary, ed. Gerald Schwartz (1989)
Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) by Frederick Douglass
Bullwhip Days, The Slaves Remember: An Oral History, ed. James Mellon (2014)
Slave Songs of the United States, ed. William Allen, Charles Ware, and Lucy Garrison (1857)
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, United States War Department (1880-1901)
The Tubman Command Page 31