Harriet Tubman

by Rosemary Sadlier

  Harriet’s last known trip on the Underground Railroad may have been the one she made in December 1860 when she tried to find her sister in Maryland. She discovered that her sister had died, so Harriet took seven others with her instead.

  9

  The Civil War

  Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet …

  What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?…

  England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not to make war on cotton.

  No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.

  — U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond, owner of Redcliffe Plantation, in a speech before the United States Senate, March 4, 1858.

  The Civil War in the United States is often seen as being about states’ rights, and those rights, particularly for southern planters, clearly rested on the continuation of the enslavement of Africans. Religion played a major role in raising awareness about issues of equality and fair treatment, which challenged slavery, so it was other forms of knowledge, other ideas that people just accepted, that helped to support the continuing interest in enslavement, without guilt and aside from the reality that huge profits could be made by those who operated large plantations.

  At this time, the United States’ southern cotton plantations produced 80 percent of the cotton used worldwide. What ideas, what concepts could be shared with people, those who had power, those who could vote, those who could ensure that there were not too many changes, to ensure that the “institution” of slavery remained intact? Who could voice those ideas in a broad public sphere? John Henry Hammond is an example of a powerful pro-slavery individual. Hammond was an educated teacher and lawyer, but substantially improved his holdings and his stature upon his marriage to an affluent southern belle. His wife, Catherine, had inherited much property — 7,500 acres of land and 147 enslaved Africans — which then came under his control. The land initially produced $600 in wealth, but increased to $21,000 with his highly controlling measures. He wrote down how enslaved children were to be fed and how they were to be named, what enslaved people were assigned to do, as well as the punishments to be administered to those who opted to flee from his plantations scattered along the Savannah River in South Carolina, including Redcliffe, which today is preserved as a historic site. He was a wealthy and influential South Carolina planter and politician who advocated for maintaining slavery through what he referred to as the Mudsill Theory.

  In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal. The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?

  “The ‘Mudsill’ Theory,” by James Henry Hammond. Speech to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858.

  While this “theory” is attributable to Hammond, it may well have informed and been informed by the Southern gentry, the eventual Confederate South, about what was important, about how to be religiously observant and a slave owner at the same time, and about how important and necessary their efforts were in moving American civilization forward. It was about the need for land, labour, and products, that is, for power to remain in the hands of those who were already powerful — that meant wealthy, white Southern men. With this type of entrenched view, how else but through war could there be a change in the United States at that time?

  John Brown visited St. Catharines with J.W. Longuen in April 1858. John Brown arrived in Chatham on April 29, 1858, to recruit men to end slavery and overthrow the American government. As a white abolitionist, he envisioned surprise attacks being made against plantations from bases in the Appalachians. He felt that slaves freed in this manner would join his trained group, continue attacking plantations, and freeing other slaves until finally setting up a new provisional government. Brown recruited in Chatham, Buxton, Ingersoll, Hamilton, and Toronto and was feeling confident of his support when he met Harriet in St. Catharines. Brown found a black printer in St. Catharines and gave him the provisional constitution to reproduce. Brown asked Harriet to bring as many fugitives to join the pending battle as she could and to be the chief guide to Canada for the many who would want to settle there after the war was waged and won. Brown said that Harriet Tubman was “the most of a man naturally; that [he] ever met with.” Brown was greatly impressed with Tubman and referred to her in the male gender as a sign of his admiration for her proven military skill. He advised his son by letter that “General Tubman” had hooked her “whole team” to his cause — Harriett assured Brown of her support. However, when the time came to help, Harriet was unable to come to Brown’s assistance due to her illness. Harriet later realized that a recurring dream of hers seemed to mean that Brown and his sons would die in this conflict. Harriet later is known to have said that Brown died because he was too impatient.

  With the failure
at Harpers Ferry came the death of John Brown, and the heightening of the tensions between slave owners and abolitionists. From A Voice From Harper’s Ferry written by Osborne Anderson (and edited by Mary Ann Shadd), the only black from Canada to join John Brown on the raid and the only one to survive, we know that John Brown’s raid did not go according to plan. A white recruit from Chatham defected and told of the plans, which caused a delay in the raid. Communication problems prevented the maximum number of attackers from getting to the area in time (only twenty were in the raid), whites were being released rather than imprisoned or killed, and they warned others so that by the time John Brown and his party reached their target they were ambushed and hung after a court trial. Their bodies were then fed to pigs instead of being buried.

  While there had been at least 250 slave revolts in the United States by the time of Brown’s raid, his was one of the first that had white leadership and international support. He raised white fears, forced people to take a stand on slavery, and widened the gap between northern, anti-slavery industrial views and southern, pro-slavery agricultural views. It marked a significant turning point in relations between the Union and the Confederacy which culminated in the American Civil War.

  George Stearns - Frank Sanborn

  Theodore Parker - Gerrit Smith

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Samuel Gridley Howe

  These men were known as the “Secret Six.”

  Harriet was too ill to come to John Brown’s aid because she had spent the spring of 1859 recruiting throughout New England until the point of exhaustion, one of the only black women to do so. She was recuperating in New Bedford when the raid on Harpers Ferry occurred. As soon as she was able, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and three members of the “Secret Six” — the white, northern abolitionists who helped to finance Brown’s work — Franklin B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns, and Samuel Grindley Howe, left for Canada after the raid because angry sentiments were so high. Harriet and the others were publicly identified as having a connection to John Brown. Despite her absence from the raid itself, Harriet was identified as a co-conspirator through the media and congressional investigation. Many of the few records of the Underground Railroad were destroyed at this time because Underground Railroad workers feared the negative repercussions of the community. But with great foresight, William Still hid his records in a graveyard to preserve them.

  As the busiest and the most successful of the conductors on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman managed to bring over 300 people into Canada. Because exact records could not be kept, it is likely that Harriet brought even more captured Africans to safety under the “lion’s paw,” or British rule. Harriet indicated later in life that she made more than nineteen rescue trips, though some historians doubt this number. However, while the actual number of rescue trips may not be known and is subject to debate, that Harriet Tubman managed even one was sufficient. This was a significant accomplishment given the severe penalties for even reading about abolition in the States, never mind actually motivating and leading people out of bondage. Every time Harriet helped an enslaved person become a free person she was committing a crime, she was causing plantation owners to lose the labour of their slaves, she was disrupting the system, and she was using Canada as a retreat. Every rescue was an anti-slavery statement. And as if Harriet’s own personally escorted rescue missions were not successful enough, her reputation inspired others to take the risk of freeing themselves or of going back to their former plantations to lead their families to freedom.

  Without the success of the Underground Railroad, there might not have been a Civil War. It heightened the debate between slave-holding interests and those who promoted abolition. Had Canada not been willing to grant the same rights and privileges to blacks as members of other groups, as well as being in such close proximity to the Americans, there would have been no Underground Railroad. In the pioneer society of English-speaking southern Ontario, conditions supported the entry and security of freedom seekers. The climate, economy, and language were similar to that of the northern United States without the constant threat of being recaptured. Mary Ann Shadd, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringgold Ward, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and other black intellectuals of the era made a concerted effort to express the positive life experiences of blacks who had made themselves free in Canada. They were concerned about highlighting their successes because pro-slavery interests promoted the notion that people of African descent could not take care of themselves, would be unable to lead wholesome lives, were incapable of learning, and actually needed slavery to protect them from themselves since they were inferior creatures. The black abolitionists made it their business to portray the free black community in a positive way since the idea that blacks were not only competent and capable but interested in taking care of themselves was critical to foiling this perception. They travelled throughout the north and the south, speaking wherever they could find an audience, sharing information about how well the blacks in Canada were managing, and how they too could join or support other blacks in getting to Canada.

  The free black population of Ontario in particular was raised like a beacon of hope, a successful test case of the potential for free blacks to thrive and contribute. If it could work here, it could work there. It could work anywhere. The successful presence of black peoples in Canada, the holding of the North American Free Men’s Convention in Toronto, and Harriet Tubman’s work and residence in Canada, combined with the protection of the rights of blacks under the law, was an affront to slave interests and countered their views.

  While John Brown’s plan for freeing the slaves was unsuccessful, it was an international response to an American situation, since he had recruited in Canada with Harriet Tubman’s, and others’, support. Harriet was to have rounded up black recruits and motivated them in battle. She was to have played a key role in guiding the African Americans who would be freed by John Brown’s raids to Canada. Most of the people who were identified with John Brown were taking refuge in Ontario. Both Harriet and the abolitionists/activists were despised since they were viewed as the main targets who were trying to “subvert” the American way of life. Among the abolitionists and well-placed persons that Tubman knew, was supported by, and worked with were William H. Seward, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Susan B Anthony. There were also William Still, and Thomas Garrett, as well as Frederick Douglass. Often Tubman was invited to rest in one of their homes or to bring others to be fuelled for their onward journeys while conducting a group towards Canada.

  By April 1861, Harriet was again moved to do what she could to help her people. Through an interview with John Andrews, governor of Massachusetts, and a John Brown supporter, Harriet joined the Union Forces at Hilton Head, then later Beaufort, South Carolina. She acted as a nurse and became acting head of the hospital. She established a washhouse with the only money she was given during the war: $200. She declined the rations she was entitled to, in deference to her less fortunate neighbours, and spent her evenings making gingerbread, pies, and root beer, which she paid someone to sell for her while she worked during the day.

  The lowlands, the Sea Islands near Hilton Head, South Carolina, are remarkably like the terrain of West Africa, where many of the ancestors of the enslaved peoples came from. Here the rice cultivation skills that they arrived with were put to good use. The area was known as the lowlands since they were at sea level. With a tempered climate, and much swamp land, the lowlands were also rather prone to mosquitoes and the related disease of malaria. Since the Africans already had some immunity from their continental upbringing, and since whites had none, plantation owners regularly made arrangements not to be there too often. Slave owners often had more than one plantation or residence, so the enslaved peoples on the Sea Islands were left alone under the direction of their African overseer for weeks, if not months, at a time. This facilitated the retention of African traditions and beliefs and was further fuelled and reinforced by new arrivals, newly
enslaved people who had authentic African-isms to share with others.

  The people became known as the Gullah People, and had developed their own language — a mix of West African languages, English, and other Creole expressions, as well as their own unique culture and ways of knowing.

  By the time the Union Army arrived, they found the Gullah ready to join the fight for their freedom. The southern plantation owners had headed inland indefinitely since they anticipated a naval attack on their coastal properties. The throngs of willing and unsupervised enslaved Africans were included in the Union forces. Harriet may have convinced them to leave their owners to invest their energies with the Union forces. It was Harriet Tubman who challenged herself to work with the Gullah despite what she recognized as a bit of a culture barrier — they spoke differently and had different ways to the people she had grown up with and whom she had come to know — but she found a way to inspire them, to calm them, and to free them.

  She worked with Quakers to engage the Gullah in schooling to better prepare them for freedom. By 1862 she was in Beaufort, South Carolina, at the request of Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, and she again acted as a nurse and teacher. In the process, Harriet gained the confidence and trust of the Gullah.