The Life of Harriet Tubman

by Anne Schraff

  Harriet Tubman’s fame was spreading beyond the United States through antislavery activists visiting friends in Europe. A few donations even arrived from Europe earmarked for Tubman’s work. The funds were sent in care of Thomas Garrett.

  One day in 1857, Tubman was desperately in need of money to return to the eastern shore of Maryland to bring more fugitives out. She needed clothing and shoes for herself and her charges. Tubman visited Garrett and told him she had a dream that he had money for her. Only a day earlier, Garrett had indeed received a donation from an antislavery sympathizer in Scotland. In the letter were five English pounds. The money met all Tubman’s immediate needs, with nothing left over. She quickly left for Maryland, confident again that whatever she needed would be provided.

  The journey Tubman took when leading groups to Canada extended from Rochester, New York, to the town of Saint Catharines in Canada. On the south shore of Lake Ontario, with a population of six thousand, including about seven hundred blacks, Saint Catharines was a port city with a telegraph line and neat wooden houses for its residents. There were about thirty thousand black Americans living in the general area, many of them fugitive slaves. In 1833, slavery had been forbidden in all of the British Empire, including Canada.

  The former slaves who came to Canada had to contend with very harsh winters, bitterly cold and snowy. This was especially hard on slaves who had lived in the Deep South. Adjusting to the many differences between the South and the North was difficult for all the fugitives. Soon after arriving in Canada, some of the fugitives took jobs cutting wood in the forests. Others worked in hotels or homes.

  American slaveholder and politician Henry Clay said that blacks fleeing to Canada were worthless, and he advised, “the sooner they are gotten rid of, the better for Canada.”12 Canadians, however, did not share Clay’s negative view of their new residents. Blacks were treated cordially and without prejudice. They were allowed to buy tracts of land for the going rate of $2 an acre for fifty-acre tracts. The cost could be paid over ten years. Many former slaves became successful farmers in Canada. The Anti-Slavery Society of Canada reported in 1853 that all the former slaves required was “a fair chance, friendly advice, and a little encouragement, perhaps a little assistance at first.”13

  In 1857, Harriet Tubman began to worry very much about her parents. She had tried to get the elderly couple out of Maryland before, but they did not want to go. Many of their relatives and friends still lived nearby, and at this stage in their lives Tubman’s parents feared being uprooted from familiar surroundings. But Tubman had, by now, brought her brother, a sister, and the three brothers who lived in Maryland north to freedom. Tubman’s parents had lost track of other children who had long been sold away. Harriet Tubman feared that her parents would soon be left alone without children nearby. Tubman’s parents were frail and Tubman worried what would become of them when they could no longer care for themselves.

  It was the courage of Harriet Tubman’s father that brought matters to a head. Old Benjamin Ross had been helping other slaves escape, and now he was in trouble. He had been ordered to appear in court to face charges. That was all Tubman needed to hear to spring into action. She got some money from the Anti-Slavery Society and headed for Maryland to bring her parents to freedom.

  Chapter 7

  THE LAST DAYS OF THE RAILROAD

  Image Credit: Enslow Publishers

  The Underground Railroad extended all the way to Canada. There, slaves were at last free from the risk of being captured and returned to their masters. (Some slaves instead fled to Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean.)

  Benjamin Ross, about seventy years old, was facing legal action for helping to free a fellow slave. With his trial looming, Harriet Tubman headed south. She worried about the obstacles that lay ahead. The slaves she helped were generally young and strong. The three-hundred-mile journey from Maryland to Canada was challenging enough for the able-bodied young, but how could her old parents survive the arduous trip? They could scarcely walk many miles from their cabin. How could they be expected to walk the hundreds of miles through swamp and field? Clearly, a different approach would be necessary.

  Tubman had some money with her, borrowed from her friends at the Anti-Slavery Society, but she did not have much. When she arrived in Caroline County, where her parents lived, she bought an old horse and a pair of wheels on an axle. She laid a board across the axle for a seat and hung a second board from the axle for a footrest. Then she hitched the horse to this makeshift buggy with a rope and straw collar. Tubman told her parents they were going to freedom.

  Benjamin Ross agreed to go, but not without his broadax and other tools. Rit Ross insisted on bringing her feather bedtick. Harriet Tubman loaded all these possessions on the makeshift wagon and helped her parents aboard.1 Tubman drove the strange-looking vehicle as the journey began in the dead of night.2 They drove for many miles until they were far from home. Then Harriet Tubman gave her parents forged passes and put them on a train to Wilmington, Delaware. Tubman drove on alone to Wilmington and met her parents there at Thomas Garrett’s home.

  Before Tubman took her parents to Canada, they visited with William Still in Philadelphia and he had a long talk with the old couple. Benjamin Ross described his master, Dr. Anthony Thompson, as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” who allowed the Rosses little food and clothing, made them live in rough conditions, and had not even given them a dollar for the past twenty years. When Benjamin and Rit Ross remembered the “portion of their children” who had been sold away to slavery in Georgia, Still noted that they spoke with “much feeling.”3

  Harriet Tubman had her headquarters in Saint Catharines, where she lived while arranging for the arrival of fugitives. She boarded a railroad car with her parents and set off for Canada, arriving there in the middle of winter. Tubman settled her parents in a little house. That first winter in the north was very difficult for the old couple. The bone-chilling cold made them ill. Harriet Tubman had to work very hard doing chores for the local farmers to support her parents. While they were slaves, the Rosses had received meager provisions from their master, but now they had nothing at all but what their daughter provided. Tubman chopped wood in the snowy forest and sold the logs for firewood to the farmers, barely earning enough money to provide food for her parents.

  At about this time, one of Tubman’s friends, William Seward, then the governor of New York, came to the rescue. He knew of a parcel of land for sale in his hometown of Auburn, New York. He thought it might make a perfect home for Tubman and her parents. Auburn was a friendly place, a center of antislavery sentiment and support for woman suffrage—the right of women to vote. Seward asked Tubman how much money she could gather, and when the property was auctioned, he made sure that Tubman’s bid was accepted. Tubman was able to make the down payment and Seward arranged small monthly payments for the balance.

  Getting a house of her own was a godsend for Tubman, especially when her parents were suffering so much from the Canadian cold weather. Tubman brought her parents down to Auburn and settled them in the sturdy little house. They would spend the rest of their lives there. This was also to be Tubman’s home for the balance of her life, though she would often be away on her Underground Railroad duties and later as a participant in the Civil War. She was gone for long periods of time, but she could rely on friends in Auburn to look after her parents.

  During the late 1850s, in addition to her work rescuing slaves, Harriet Tubman began to speak at New England antislavery meetings and at other public forums. She was a much-sought-after speaker with her harrowing tales of narrow escapes. She was never paid for her appearances, as other famous African Americans—Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass—were, but she frequented conventions, lectures, picnics, and fairs, and she was never shy about talking about her experiences.

  On July 4, 1859, in Farmingham, Massachusetts, Tubman was introduced to the audience by Thomas Higginson, president of the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society. In August
1859, she spoke to the New England Colored Citizens Convention. She told her audience that she disliked the idea favored by some well-meaning people urging blacks to leave the United States and return to Africa.

  When she spoke, Tubman would mount the speaker’s platform, smiling though her upper front teeth were gone. She wore coarse but neat clothing and always carried a small net bag.4 A reporter in 1859 said she spoke in a style of “quaint simplicity.”5 Though uneducated, she had real eloquence, a well-stocked mind, and a remarkable memory. She had never read the Bible, but she had heard passages spoken and she could recite them from memory.6

  Tubman made friends with many famous people of her day who shared her sentiments about slavery. She knew Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist. Anthony helped Tubman clothe some fugitive slave women who arrived in the North in tatters.7 When Tubman was in Concord, Massachusetts, she lodged at the home of the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at the home of Mrs. Horace Mann, widow of the famous educator. Sometimes Tubman stayed with the Alcotts. (Louisa May Alcott is best remembered as the author of Little Women and Little Men.) Other famous people who maintained a warm friendship with Harriet Tubman were William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the antislavery newspaper The Liberator, Charles Sumner, the fiery Massachusetts senator who fought slavery, and Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. All these famous people admired the work Tubman was doing.8

  Once, Harriet Tubman had a vivid dream in which she imagined she was viewing a great wilderness. Suddenly a snake raised its head among the rocks. As Tubman stared at the snake, it changed into the head of an old white man with a long white beard and snow-white hair. Then two other heads appeared, both of them younger white men. They surrounded the old man, then rushed in and struck him. The old man stared at Tubman with a forlorn “wishful” look, Tubman said.9 Tubman did not understand the significance of the strange dream until the spring of 1858, when a fervent antislavery activist named John Brown visited her at Saint Catharines.

  John Brown had heard of Tubman’s bravery in the Underground Railroad and her soldier-like qualities. Brown wanted to get a prominent black person on board for his planned slave uprising. When Tubman met him, she recognized his face from the vivid dreams. He was the old man transformed from the snake’s head.

  John Brown was impressed with Harriet, and he began calling her General Tubman.10 He shared with her his plans to invade Virginia. He wanted her to recruit slaves for a general uprising after he captured the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

  John Brown had a violent past. He was involved in the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, but then he joined up with antislavery forces in Kansas. When pro-slavery activists burned the town of Lawrence, Kansas, Brown and his sons struck back by killing slavery supporters at Pottawatamie Creek in 1856. From then on, his name was associated with violent resistance to slavery.

  Tubman was in agreement with Brown’s plan to raid Harpers Ferry in Virginia and cause a general slave uprising there. Tubman was so impressed with Brown that later she rated him as a greater man than President Abraham Lincoln.11 Tubman waited for Brown’s instructions, but she did not stand idle. In the spring of 1859 she was involved in a wild incident to save an escaped slave who was about to be returned to his master.

  Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave, was handcuffed and led from the United States Marshal’s office in Troy, New York. An unusual twist in the story is that Nalle was half white and looked like a white man. Still, he was a slave because he had a slave parent.

  In the crowd of onlookers that day was Harriet Tubman. When Nalle appeared, Tubman shouted to her friends, “Here he comes—take him!”12 Tubman seized one officer who was holding Nalle, and she pulled him down. Then she pulled the other officer away, and she wrapped her arms around Nalle and cried, “Don’t let them have him!”13

  In the melee that followed, Tubman removed her sunbonnet and tied it on Nalle’s head to confuse the lawmen. She hoped they could not pick Nalle out among the sea of people.

  As Tubman and her friends pulled Nalle along, they were frequently knocked down. Nalle himself, still handcuffed, was bleeding from the violent jostling. Tubman’s outer clothing was torn from her body, and her shoes were ripped from her feet, but she continued, barefoot, refusing to release her hold on Nalle.

  The mob reached the river and Nalle was shoved into a boat. Tubman jumped into another boat to follow him. But the lawmen used the telegraph to notify officials on the other shore, and the moment Nalle landed, a swarm of lawmen seized him. Nalle was taken to a house to be held until his master could come for him.

  But Tubman did not give up her struggle. She and her friends raced up the stairs of the house, burst into the room where Nalle was being held, and dragged him out, carrying him down the stairs.

  When Tubman and her allies reached the street, a sympathetic wagon driver took pity on them. He offered his wagon, pulled by a swift horse, for the escape. Tubman and the others carried Nalle off to safety in Schenectady, New York. During her valiant struggle for one man’s freedom, Tubman was repeatedly beaten over the head. She never doubted whether the struggle was worth the cost, however, for another fugitive slave was free. Later, Nalle settled in Washington, D.C., and raised a brood of red-headed children.

  In the fall of 1859, the call finally came from John Brown. He was ready to implement his plan to attack Harpers Ferry, and he tried to reach Harriet Tubman at her home in Canada, asking her to join him. Brown then learned that Tubman had moved to Auburn, New York, and he contacted her there. But Tubman had been traveling and was ill from exhaustion. She was lying very sick at a friend’s house in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Only her illness kept her from going to Virginia to be at John Brown’s side.14

  John Brown went ahead with his plans without Tubman. On October 16, 1859, he and twenty-one men attacked the Harpers Ferry arsenal. A company of United States marines and soldiers led by Colonel Robert E. Lee was sent to put down the attack and capture John Brown and his men. After a fierce battle, two of Brown’s sons were killed, along with eight other men. Brown himself was captured. He was put on trial for murder and treason and hanged on December 2, 1859.

  Harriet Tubman grieved for her friend John Brown. After his death she was visiting a friend’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, where she was shown a bust of Brown. The sight of it sent her into a spell of deep sorrow.15 When Brown died, Harriet Tubman finally understood the meaning of that strange dream of the old white man struck down in the wilderness.

  On December 1, 1860, Harriet Tubman made her last trip on the Underground Railroad. She brought out Stephen Ennets, his wife, Maris, six-year-old Harriet, four-year-old Amanda, and a three-month-old baby. Tubman had to use paregoric, a sedative, to quiet the baby when the child’s crying imperiled the party. Tubman got the Ennets family safely to Canada.

  On April 12, 1861, the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, was fired on by southern guns. The Civil War was under way and Harriet Tubman’s life would change drastically. During the war she would serve her people and her country in a new and dangerous way.

  Chapter 8

  SCOUT, SPY, NURSE, SOLDIER

  As war broke out between the North and South in 1861, Harriet Tubman recalled a vision she had in 1857. She was visiting the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet in New York when she dreamed that all black people in the United States were free. She awoke singing, “My people are free!”1 Garnet, who was also black, scolded her. He warned her that they would never see freedom for black people in their lifetimes. But perhaps their grandchildren would see it, he thought. Tubman replied, “You’ll see it and you’ll see it soon.”2

  Harriet Tubman hoped that President Abraham Lincoln would free the slaves at once, but that did not happen. She believed that God would not let Lincoln win the war until he had set the slaves free.3

  With the war under way, the slaves had new problems. As plantations were overrun with Union troops, the slaves scattered. Without any means of support, they were a vast group of hu
ngry, homeless, desperate people.

  The displaced slaves who milled about the roads were called “contraband.” Tubman learned that the government needed help to deal with them. The slaves no longer had masters, but still they were not free. The contraband had no shelter or food. They were malnourished, cold, and wet, and many were sick. Thousands of men, women, and children clogged the roads. The very force of their numbers prevented some units of the Union Army from functioning.

  A white soldier recalled a group of slaves who approached the Union lines after struggling for nine days through a swamp. He asked the people what sustained them during their terrible ordeal. One said, “I saw the lamp of life ahead and the lamp of death behind.”4

  Harriet Tubman left her home in New York to offer her services. She traveled to Beaufort, South Carolina, which had one of the largest concentrations of contraband. She went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, too, where there was also a swelling contraband population. Tubman was promptly assigned to a contraband hospital where many people were suffering from dysentery—severe diarrhea—which could result in dehydration and death. Tubman worked under the command of General David Hunter at Hilton Head, the headquarters of the Union Army in the South.

  Beaufort was a large town, and it was filled with Union soldiers, government agents, and homeless slaves. Tubman’s work with the slaves was made more difficult by the fact that they could not understand her well, and she could not understand them. They spoke the Gullah dialect common among blacks in South Carolina. But Tubman patiently made herself understood, and though she had no medical training, she did have a good working knowledge of medicinal herbs. She went to the nearby river and found water lilies, pulling them up root and all. Then she collected crane’s bill (geranium). She beat the plants into a powder and boiled the powder into a dark, bitter tea that helped the people suffering from dysentery. The only other medicine available to her at the makeshift hospitals was whisky, which was used as a sedative.