The Life of Harriet Tubman

by Anne Schraff

  Harriet realized there was something wrong in enslaving people and whipping them just because they had darker skin. Very soon Harriet would do something dramatic to grasp freedom for herself. She would become a beacon of hope to other slaves, a “Moses” helping to set her people free.

  Chapter 3

  LIBERTY OR DEATH

  Image Credit: Enslow Publishers

  This map shows the route Harriet Tubman took to freedom, from Bucktown, Maryland, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (about 130 miles).

  While Harriet Tubman was still a child, some slaves managed to escape from plantations in the South and flee to free states in the North. Most made the journey on their own. Many were caught and sent back to their masters, but some were able to find freedom.

  In 1831, when Harriet was about eleven years old, people began using the term Underground Railroad to describe the pathways and way stations used by runaways in their flight to freedom. It was not a real railroad but a series of northward routes and houses or buildings along the way where the escaping slaves could take shelter. People who opposed slavery arranged for the secret places where the runaways could rest and get supplies.

  The phrase Underground Railroad was used in 1831 when a slave named Tice Davids escaped from his Kentucky master. Davids’s master pursued him to the edge of the Ohio River only to see him apparently vanish. The master cried out that Davids must have “gone off on an underground road.”1 And so a name was born to describe the many secret routes that led from southern plantations, across rivers and valleys, over mountains, all the way to the free North.

  By the time Harriet was in her early twenties, thoughts of freedom were stirring in her heart, but she had not yet made plans to flee slavery by the Underground Railroad or any other means. She continued to work on the Brodas plantation and was also hired out for various other jobs. What she was thinking about was marriage. Most slave girls were “married” early, often in unions set up by their masters. Slaves were not permitted to marry under the law, so their marriages were common-law, informal arrangements. At twenty-four, Harriet was still single though. Then she met John Tubman.

  A wealthy white man, Justice Richard Tubman, had come to Dorchester County in 1669 to claim one thousand acres he had received as a grant for fighting the Indians in many skirmishes. Richard Tubman owned many slaves, and they were all given his last name. The slaves worked in the family mansion and plantation on the western edge of Cambridge, Maryland, on the Choptank River. John Tubman’s parents had been freed by their white master, so John was a free man. Of the eight thousand blacks in the area at the time, about half were free. Some, like Tubman, had been freed after their owners grew to oppose slavery. Other slaves were freed as a reward for long service and loyalty, and some bought their freedom.

  John Tubman was literate and a free spirit. He seemed to have a measure of respect in the county. Harriet Ross and John Tubman began to court. They were married in 1844. Although Harriet was now the wife of a free man, she was not considered free. She was permitted to stay with her husband in his cabin at night, but her days and her labor still belonged to her white master. She was expected to report for work as usual at her master’s house. Any children born to Harriet would be considered slaves and the property of the Brodas plantation. During this time children inherited the status of the mother: slave or free.

  When Harriet Tubman was married, she looked into her own status. She had always heard rumors that her mother had been freed. If so, as a child of Harriet Greene Ross, she would be free, too. Using $5 of her precious savings, Harriet Tubman hired a lawyer to investigate her status. The lawyer went through sixty-five years of wills and other records. He discovered that Harriet Tubman’s parents had indeed been freed upon the death of their original master. This happened before Harriet and her brothers and sisters were born, so the children had actually been born free. But the lawyer told Harriet Tubman that since she had always lived as a slave, no judge in Maryland would consider her free. This had a profound effect on Tubman. From then on she believed that she and her entire family were wrongly enslaved.2

  Tubman continued to be a slave on the Brodas plantation and spent her nights with her husband. The selling of slaves increased on the plantation as the Brodas family finances declined further. The possibility of being sold to a cotton or rice plantation hung heavily over Harriet Tubman’s head. The fact of her marriage would have no influence on whether or not she would be sold away from her husband. Breaking up families did not trouble the white owners.

  Tubman prayed that her master would have a change of heart and would stop selling his slaves to southerners. “I was always praying,” she later recalled, “Oh dear Lord change that man’s heart.”3 When it became apparent to Tubman that her master would not change, she prayed that the Lord would take him out of the way so he could not do more mischief.4

  Tubman lived with her husband for five years while working as a slave for the Brodas plantation. When Edward Brodas died, his slaves’ fears about their futures grew. In March 1849, buyers came around with more frequency. Many were Georgia traders. Brodas’s widow, Eliza Ann, needed money and she discussed trading Harriet Tubman and three of her brothers, who still lived on the plantation.

  Harriet Tubman began having visions and hearing voices beckoning to her, “Arise, flee for your life!”5 She talked with her husband about the visions and her anxieties about being sold. She told John Tubman that she wanted to run away. He was unsympathetic and even threatened to tell his wife’s master that she was plotting to escape.6

  At this time, any slaves who escaped and were recaptured were subject to brutal punishments. They could be whipped, have their ears cropped (the tops of their ears clipped off), or be branded with a hot iron. Anyone helping a slave escape was subject to five years’ imprisonment. In 1849, the penalty was increased to fifteen years.

  Harriet Tubman decided she must escape no matter what the dangers or the consequences. She knew very little about the North except that it was colder. She had vague notions of geography but no concept of maps at all. Tubman did know that the distance from Dorchester County to freedom in Pennsylvania was about one hundred miles. Going on foot, around hills, through swamps, skirting well-traveled roads and towns, it would be much farther.

  The Choptank River, the largest river on the eastern shore of Maryland, ran northeast. Following the river would provide a reliable route. Tubman could rely on the North Star to guide her. She also knew how to read the clues of nature, such as the fact that moss grows thicker on the north side of trees.

  Harriet spoke with her three brothers who still lived on the Brodas plantation. She told them of her plans to escape and hoped they might all leave together. Tubman longed to tell other friends and relatives, but she dared not for fear someone might accidentally betray her.7

  One dark night, Tubman and her brothers walked away from the plantation. They walked eastward, following the Greenbriar Swamp, along the edge of the Brodas land to the hamlet of Bucktown. Tubman walked the familiar road singing softly, “Goodbye, I’m going to leave you. Goodbye, I’ll meet you in the kingdom.”8 Nobody was alarmed because she often walked down that road singing. Even when she met Dr. Anthony Thompson, the clergyman who was managing the plantation for Mrs. Brodas, Tubman bowed toward him and sang all the louder.9 Dr. Thompson later recalled how calm she had seemed, and how she appeared to be merely out for an evening stroll. “A wave of trouble never rolled across her peaceful breast,” he marveled.10

  Early into the journey, Harriet Tubman’s brothers became frightened and turned back. She continued on alone. She was about twenty-nine years old, almost penniless, with nothing to rely on but her own courage and her dream of freedom.

  Tubman hid by day and traveled by night. Her first stop was at the house of a white woman who had befriended her in the past while she worked at cutting and hauling wood. The woman quickly took Tubman into her cabin and gave her a meal. Then she gave Tubman two strips of paper, each containin
g the location of a safe house ahead and directions to reach it. In gratitude, Tubman gave the woman a patchwork quilt that was her only possession of any value. She had stitched the quilt after her marriage to John.

  The next stop Tubman made was another cabin owned by some white people. She was promptly given a broom and told to start sweeping the front porch so she would look like an ordinary slave. Tubman did as she was told. If curious neighbors looked over, they would think the white family had a new servant. When night fell, a wagon pulled up to the cabin. It was half filled with vegetables. Tubman was told to climb in, cover herself with a cloth, and hide among the vegetables as the wagon rattled north.

  Tubman made the greater part of her journey north alone and on foot. There were times when sympathetic white people helped her along the way. Usually, though, she trudged through swamps and woodland with no shelter at night but woodland or potato holes, the board-lined pits where farmers kept their winter vegetables.

  Tubman later recalled her feelings during the desperate flight. She reasoned that she would have either “liberty or death.” She had made up her mind that if she did not gain her liberty she was willing to face death because “no man would take me slave.”11

  Harriet Tubman remained close to the Choptank River for about sixty-seven miles, keeping the North Star in front of her and to her left. She tried to stay off roads of any kind for fear of detection. The roads in Maryland were crowded with slave catchers who were eager to collect the cash rewards being offered for runaways. Tubman favored traveling through cemeteries, often spending nights there. She had no fear. She was comfortable with her belief in spirits and the supernatural.

  Exhausted and footsore, Harriet Tubman finally reached Pennsylvania and crossed into freedom. She recalled the moment this way: “I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free.”12 Tubman could scarcely believe that now, for the first time in her life, at almost thirty years old, she was a free woman. “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person,” she said. “There was such glory over everything. The sun came like gold through the trees.” She said she felt as if she were “in heaven.”13

  Chapter 4

  THE CONDUCTOR

  Harriet Tubman decided to go to Philadelphia to find work to support herself. She had saved some money from being hired out while she was enslaved, but it would not be enough to sustain her for long. She had been working since she was six years old and she knew how to do many jobs. Tubman had been a housekeeper, a nanny, a cook, and a skilled outdoor laborer. She did not think she would have much trouble getting employment, and she was right. She quickly got a job as a cook in a hotel, earning $1 a day.

  Tubman rented a small room near her job. As she earned money, she furnished her quarters. She did not spend much money, even on necessities, because she wanted to save as much as possible.

  Although Tubman was now free, she was very lonely and she longed for the faces of family and friends back home. When she came to Philadelphia, she knew no one to welcome her there. “I was a stranger in a strange land,” she later said of her arrival.1 The friends she made in Philadelphia were kind, but she had left so many loved ones behind, still in slavery.

  In 1850, Tubman visited the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee offices. This was the main eastern station for the Underground Railroad. William Still, a black man, was in charge of the organization. It offered assistance, day or night, to fugitive slaves. Here Tubman learned all about the Railroad and how widespread it was. Runaways received food and clothing, help in getting jobs, loans of money, and information about families back home.

  There are no written records of most of the activities of runaway slaves. The majority of the slaves were illiterate and those who helped them were too busy to keep records. Also, runaway slaves and their sympathizers feared that leaving records would increase the chances of being caught and returned to slavery. But William Still did keep extensive records of the fugitives who passed through his station. He believed these were necessary to reunite families and let loved ones know what happened to their kinfolk who seemed one night to drop off the earth without a trace.

  Still kept careful records of runaways’ names, how many were in each party, physical descriptions, names of masters they had run from, the county where they had lived, and the date of their arrival in Philadelphia. Because the discovery of these records would have been a disaster, he kept them hidden in a graveyard, and none were ever found by slave catchers. Eventually, after slavery was abolished, Still gathered all these records, notes, and letters into a book titled Underground Railroad. The eight-hundred-page book narrates the hardships, narrow escapes, and amazing courage of many runaways and the people who helped them.

  Almost every night, after a day of cooking and cleaning in the hotel, Tubman climbed the steep wooden steps to the loft to meet with Still and others. Tubman was eager to play a role in helping more slaves escape. She believed that the whole system of slavery was evil and had to be stopped. Not only was it miserable for the slaves, she thought, it was even bad for their masters.2 Tubman once called slavery “the next thing to hell.”3

  Tubman wanted to bring her own family to freedom. “I was free and they should be free also,” she later said.4 She dreamed of bringing them all to Philadelphia, but she did not know how to go about it. Still, from that time forward, she dedicated her life to the cause of freeing the slaves.

  On a visit to the Vigilance Committee, Tubman learned of a black woman about to be sold away from her family in Maryland. She was shocked to discover that it was her own sister, Mary. Tubman struggled to keep track of all her siblings, but once they were sold away or married, she had no way to communicate with them.

  Tubman’s sister was Mary Bowley, the wife of a free black man, John Bowley. They had two children who were going to be sold along with their mother. Tubman’s rescue of the Bowley family would be her first experience as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

  Mary Bowley and her children had already been taken from the plantation. They awaited buyers in the slave pen in Cambridge, Maryland, where an auction of a large number of slaves was to be held. Buyers from all over the South would be bidding for the slaves.

  Tubman’s plan was for John Bowley to pose as an agent for the auctioneer. He was to go to the slave pen and request custody of Mary Bowley and the children on the pretense that a buyer was waiting in the hotel to inspect them more closely.

  Mary and the children were turned over to John Bowley, and the little family marched down the street toward the hotel. It looked as if a slave was bringing new slaves to his master for evaluation—but it was really the escape of a family.

  John Bowley hustled his wife and children into a house owned by a Quaker (a member of the religious group the Society of Friends) who was sympathetic to fugitive slaves. They remained there until nightfall, when, under cover of darkness, a wagon rolled up to the house. The Bowley family piled in and was covered with blankets. Then the wagon rattled off toward the river. At the river, the four climbed into a boat Tubman had hired, and they headed for Baltimore. They were told to keep watch for two lights on the opposite shore, one yellow, one blue. The lights would be hung from barns, and when the Bowleys saw them they would know the coast was clear. Finally they saw the lights and hurried toward a wagon parked along the road.

  A white woman sat bent over on the wagon seat. The wagon was loaded with potatoes and onions, and the Bowleys crawled among the vegetables on the bouncy ride to a house in Baltimore. They remained hiding there for a week until Harriet Tubman arrived to take them to Philadelphia. She had planned every detail of the escape, hiring the wagons and arranging for the safe houses. Now, with the help of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, Tubman found the Bowleys housing and jobs. Tubman’s first experience as a conductor was successful because of careful planning, but her future rescues would be much more hazardous.

  In 1851, Tubman returned to Maryland to help one of her brothers, John Ros
s, escape. He was working in Talbot County, just north of Dorchester County. After Tubman arranged her brother’s escape, her thoughts turned to her husband. She had not seen him in two years. Tubman hoped she might persuade John to join her in Philadelphia, where they could resume their married life. John Tubman did not appear to love Harriet as much as she loved him.5 He was a free man, and it would have been easy for him to move north and join his wife if he wanted to.

  Harriet Tubman saved her wages for a long time until she finally had enough to make the trip back to Dorchester County, Maryland, to visit her husband. She brought him a brand-new suit from a men’s store in Philadelphia as a gift.

  She was still considered a fugitive slave, so Harriet Tubman could not travel openly. She set out in disguise, again traveling by night and using safe houses to rest in. When she arrived near her husband’s cabin, friends approached her with surprising news. They said John Tubman had taken a new wife, a woman named Caroline. Harriet did not go directly to the cabin to confront her husband or the woman who had taken her place. Instead she sent a friend with a message that she was now living in Philadelphia and wanted her husband to join her there.

  John Tubman sent back his answer at once. He was very happy with his new wife and had no desire to live with Harriet again. She was awash in grief and anger.6 She considered going to her husband’s cabin despite the danger that she might be captured. She told her friends that she wanted to “see [her] old man once more.”7 Common sense prevailed, and Harriet decided that if John could do without her, then she could do without him, too.8 Later she said that at that moment, John Tubman “dropped out of” her heart.9