by Bruce Feiler
“For some reason, I had really been thinking about slavery a lot,” Joan said of the day she came up with the idea. “I was always eager and articulate as a student. I was a teacher’s pet. But when slavery was the lesson, I was suddenly ashamed of the people I came from. Then one day a few years ago I was taking my usual, stay-healthy walk, and I kept thinking, ‘Who were those amazing people who walked to freedom? How could they do it? And how should I praise them?’”
With the approval of her doctor, Joan began fourteen months of training alongside her black cat, Nelson Mandela. She mapped her route and arranged safe houses in every town. And one April morning she climbed Rankin Hill and began making her way. Her goal was to walk ten miles a day. “I rarely feel old,” she said, “but that first week I functioned like an old lady. Napping in the morning. Letting people take care of me.” At one point she had a panic attack when she thought her damaged foot would require surgery, but one of her conductors arranged for an after-hours visit to a shoe store to get something more comfortable to walk in. “I really did hear heavenly organ music playing when I strode pain-free around the store.”
For the better part of a day, Joan and her friend Fran Stewart, a journalist who cowrote Joan’s memoir of her journey, In Their Path!, drove me from small town to smaller town, from preserved safe house to crumbling safe house. We visited the Burrell House, a semi-restored two-story home in Sheffield Village, where Captain Jabez Burrell housed twenty students from nearby Oberlin College in the 1830s. He also kept runaway slaves in his barn, where a recently unearthed tunnel led them to the Black River and north to Lake Erie, across which lay Canada. We strolled through Oberlin, an antislavery bastion, where some students recently erected an Underground Railroad Healing Garden consisting of eight railroad ties surrounded by herbal plants used by African Americans during the journey. These included catnip for insomnia, hives, diarrhea, and menstrual cramps; evening primrose for tumors, coughs, depression, and rashes; butterfly weed for insect bites and poison oak; and black cohosh for heart trouble, bronchitis, and when times called for it, an aphrodisiac. I couldn’t help wondering how many of those on the Underground Railroad with heart trouble and bronchitis really had the need for an aphrodisiac.
Then Joan told me something that stunned me and made me realize how close these events still were to our day. She had a personal connection to the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, a woman known in her time as “the Moses of Her People.”
The future Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1822. In 1844 she married a free man, John Tubman. Five years later, fearing that she was about to be sold, Tubman tapped into a local network, received two names of safe houses from a white neighbor, and fled north toward Philadelphia. The journey was terrifying and mystical. She navigated using the North Star; she may have followed the drinkin’ gourd, a code name for the Big Dipper; and in a clear homage to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, she recalled that she felt led by an “invisible pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night.”
In other echoes of the Exodus, she described her feeling upon reaching freedom as solemn and lonely. “I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land.” The Mosaic theme of estrangement that had captivated both William Bradford and George Whitefield, that would influence Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Statue of Liberty and would shape the scholarship of Harvard’s Peter Gomes and the Institute for Advanced Study’s Michael Walzer, here appears almost verbatim in the words of an uneducated slave woman from the Maryland shore. What ensured Tubman’s reputation was how she reacted to her feeling of alienation. The following year she trekked hundreds of miles back into slave territory to free her sister and her sister’s children. A few months later she returned to rescue her brother Moses and two others. On a third trip she intended to bring back her husband, only to find he had taken up with another woman. She vowed at first to create “all the trouble she could,” but quickly resolved, “if he could do without her, she could do without him,” and freed two others on that trip.
“The Moses of Her People,” Harriet Tubman, as photographed by H. B. Lindsley, c. 1860–1875. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)
Harriet Tubman made as many as thirteen expeditions into “Egypt land,” guiding seventy slaves to freedom and giving instructions to dozens more. She became infamous across the South, her name plastered on posters, and rewards offered for her capture totaled forty thousand dollars. Frederick Douglass said that with the exception of John Brown, “I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.” Brown himself described her as “one of the bravest persons on the continent.”
From her earliest days as a conductor, Tubman employed the Exodus story. At times she used it as code to communicate with slaves still in captivity. In 1854 she wrote to her brothers that they should be ready to climb aboard “when the good old ship of Zion comes along.” To avoid detection by white postmasters, she sent the letter to a free black, Jacob Jackson, and signed it “William Henry Jackson.” Jacob Jackson was grilled by authorities but pointed out that he knew no one by that name. Jackson then relayed the plot to its intended subjects. Tubman also used spirituals to communicate in the middle of an operation. Once at the meeting point, she would sing one verse to announce her arrival and another to signify that the coast was clear. But she reserved one verse to warn that there was danger in the area and the slaves should stay put:
Moses go down in Egypt,
Tell ole Pharo’ let my people go;
Hadn’t ben for Adam’ fall,
Shouldn’t hab to died at all.
As her fame grew, Harriet Tubman adopted the alias Moses to keep her identity anonymous. The name became renowned across the South—beloved in the black community, cursed in the white. Newspapers reported on the clandestine activities of “Moses.” The Liberator reported in 1860 that “Moses” spoke before an antislavery gathering in her “quaint and amusing style.” Posters appeared across the upper South bearing the name “Moses” in large letters and a description of Tubman. I can think of few images more vivid in the evolving role of the Exodus in American life than the idea of posters tacked up on fence poles and shop walls across slaveholding territories of the United States saying WANTED: MOSES, DEAD OR ALIVE. Decades earlier, Washington had been hailed as the American Moses; now Americans wanted Moses locked back into shackles.
Late in her life, when Tubman was suffering financial hardships, her friends commissioned an authorized biography to help her generate some income. Originally published in 1869 as Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, it was republished in 1886 as Harriet, the Moses of Her People. The author, Sarah Bradford, wrote that the title might seem a little ambitious “considering that this Moses was a woman.”
But I only give her here the name by which she was familiarly known, both at the North and the South, during the years of terror of the Fugitive Slave Law, and during our last Civil War, in both of which she took so prominent a part. And though the results of her unexampled heroism were not to free a whole nation of bond-men and bond-women,…her cry to the slave-holders, was ever like his to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”
During these later years, Tubman lived in Auburn, New York, near where Joan Southgate was born. “My mother knew Harriet in those years,” Joan explained. “When ‘Aunt Harriet’ would go through the town, sometimes she would fall asleep while driving her carriage. The horse would stop, and my mother and her friends would sit on the curb and wait for her to rouse. They made sure it was just one of her sleeping fits.
“But when I was growing up,” she continued, “I thought ‘Aunt Harriet’ meant the same as my Aunt Val or Aunt Pauline. I thought, ‘Great! I’m related to Harriet Tubman.’ That part turned out not to be true.”
I asked Joan why she thought Harriet Tubman was so famous, especially considering sh
e didn’t save that many people when compared with others.
“Probably because she was a woman. She was bold. She risked her freedom to save others. But since she was a woman, few people thought she was smart enough. During one trip, she watched some men putting up a wanted poster for her that said she was illiterate, so she just sat down in their presence and read a book because she knew they’d never suspect her!”
We reached our final destination, the terminus of the Black River, where it flows into the Erie Canal. A sign identified the spot as Station #100, the last stop on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. On the far side of the lake is Canada, the real land of freedom for many slaves, since there they could not be claimed by bounty hunters. I had been thinking all day that Joan, an ordinary person by her own account, was connected by family, and now through her own journey, to an extraordinary chapter in American history. I was reminded how young America is. The connections that link the Puritans with the Revolution, with the Great Awakening, with the Underground Railroad—and all of these events with today—took place in less time than the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt.
But what I found most stirring is how alive these connections still seemed to people like Jerry Gore, Carl Westmoreland, and Joan Southgate. Their ancestral slaves in America were as close to them as the enslaved Israelites had been to their ancestors. For those in pain, biblical time becomes any time. Now becomes then. And the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that a similar message echoes in the Jewish commemoration of the Exodus. A chief message of the Passover story is that the Exodus is perpetually now. As the Passover liturgy puts it, “In every generation, a person should look upon himself as if he personally had come out of Egypt.” We all are in pain. We are all strangers in a strange land. And the proper way to acknowledge that suffering is to relieve the suffering of others. “Befriend the stranger,” says Deuteronomy 10:19, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Few people I met understood this message better than Joan. As we were leaving, I asked her how her experience affected her.
“I never thought of myself as a religious person,” she said. “But once I got started, so many things I call miracles happened. In the first week, a truck driver, a white guy named Al, heard about my walk and pulled his eighteen-wheeler to the side of the road and was waiting for me. He said, ‘Mrs. Southgate, I just had to stop and say thank you. I think we have not done a good job of telling our children the stories.’ And then he said, ‘Do you mind if we pray?’ At first I thought, ‘Oh, he’s one of those fanatics,’ but the way he spoke was exactly as I would have spoken. I kept thinking of all these people on the roads who are just like us.
“There’s an African word, sankofa,” Joan continued, “that kept coming back to me during my walk. It means ‘go back and fetch it.’ Step back into the past and bring it to the present, so we don’t make the same mistakes. That’s what I learned on the Underground Railroad. We have to keep our past alive.”
VI
THE WAR BETWEEN THE MOSESES
I’M LOST. I’M searching for a white Victorian mansion on a hill overlooking Cincinnati. In the early years of American expansion, the house was a meeting point of East and West. In the buildup to the Civil War, it was a battleground of North and South. Today it’s nearly impossible to find, trapped in a sad sprawl of abandoned car dealerships, one-room BBQ joints, and urban blight.
Between 1820 and 1840, Cincinnati was the fastest-growing city in the world and one of five American cities with a population of more than 25,000. It was also the City of Many Nicknames. “Porkopolis” was a teeming mix of swine and swindle, where southern pork farmers sold their pigs to northern packers. “The London of the West” was a fierce testing ground for American religious freedoms, where Protestants fought vicious battles with Catholics and where Jews and Mormons made early stands for legitimacy. And “the Queen City” was a tinderbox in the battle over slavery. Though nominally free, the city depended for its wealth on selling goods—including humans—from plantations in Kentucky. Cincinnati stood in the North, the saying went, but it faced the South.
All of these reasons helped make the Victorian mansion a center of intrigue. In the 1830s, the fledgling Lane Theological Seminary built the “peculiarly pleasant” house on a choice perch above town in an attempt to lure the most famous preacher in America to become its president. Lyman Beecher was the last great oak of New England Puritanism and a deacon of Old World oratory. As one contemporary recalled, “No American, except Benjamin Franklin, has given utterance to so many pungent, wise, sentences as Lyman Beecher.” He was also the father of thirteen children, two of whom became central players in the dominant showdown of American identity.
The first of Beecher’s prominent offspring was Harriet, his fifth child. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so influential in shaping public opinion that Abraham Lincoln was said to have remarked on meeting Harriet in 1862, “So you’re the woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” The second of Beecher’s progeny to dominate the era was his ninth child, Henry Ward, who by 1860 had become the most important preacher in the country and, according to a biographer, “the most famous man in America.” Grateful for Henry’s role in helping turn the English against the South, Lincoln asked the portly preacher to give a sermon at the raising of the Union flag at Fort Sumter in April 1865, the symbolic end of the war. “Had it had not been for Beecher,” Lincoln said, “there would have been no flag to raise.”
Harriet and Henry were reared by their Calvinist father in the most storied Christian family of the century. They shared a love of fireside debate, a passion for Scripture, and an interest in mining one biblical narrative to support abolition. A chief tension in nineteenth-century America was that half the country disagreed with the Beechers but used the same Bible, the same narrative, and the same central figure to argue the opposite case.
Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, photograph, c. 1868. (Courtesy Harriet Beecher Stowe Center)
The Civil War was a battle between North and South, between Union and states’ rights, between slavery and emancipation. But it was also an exegetical battle over who controlled the Bible. The least understood dimension in the War Between the States is that it was also a War Between the Moseses. Both North and South claimed that Moses was on their side. Southerners pointed out that the Five Books of Moses are full of laws, given by God on Sinai, that govern the ownership of slaves. Why would God spend so much time regulating an institution he disapproved of? The Northern case was more indirect. It drew on the larger themes of the Bible that all humans are created in God’s image, and stressed the triumph of the Exodus in which Moses leads the Israelites out of bondage. Why would God free his people from slavery only to allow them to enslave others?
When one side eventually lost the War Between the Moseses, the result was the most severe theological crisis the United States had ever seen. It took perhaps America’s most Bible-quoting president, Abraham Lincoln, to try to salve the wound. In doing so, he was hailed as America’s greatest Moses.
AS A MARK of the world it helped create, the Stowe House sits on Gilbert Avenue between Lincoln Avenue and Beecher Street, just a block from Martin Luther King Drive, in the once heyday thriving community of Walnut Hills. The stately home is hidden under broad trees at the top of a slope that in its heyday brimmed with locust trees, rosebushes, and honeysuckle. On this day, as on most, it’s empty.
“The Beechers moved here in 1833,” explained Barbara Furr, the chief docent. An African American, Barbara is not much taller than Harriet, but she’s more feisty than the famed introvert. “Harriet moved out in 1836 when she married Calvin Stowe, but came back a few months later to give birth to their twins. Calvin was a biblical scholar and was off collecting books in Europe. Can you imagine? He could have took her! He just didn’t want to spend all that money on a woman.”
But soon that woman began earning more money than everyone else in her family combined.
Rush and Beecher got their wish. Religion boomed in nineteenth-century America, but it was not the top-down Calvinism of Beecher’s youth. Instead, it was closer to the populist model introduced by the Great Awakening, in which believers could experience a “new birth” and form their own relationship with God. The Enlightenment notion of universal rights, so crucial to American politics, became equally central to religion as Americans decided they had the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. The result was the Second Great Awakening, the most sweeping wave of voluntary religious conversions since the Reformation. In 1780, one in fifteen Americans belonged to a Protestant church; by 1835, the ratio had nearly doubled to one in eight. By 1850, 40 percent of Americans defined themselves as evangelical Christians.
Baptists and Methodists, denominations that held that individuals were responsible for their own salvation, benefited the most. The number of Baptist churches grew fifteenfold during these years; the number of Methodist churches twice that. The old Puritans, meanwhile, dropped from 20 percent of the population to 4. The impact on American life was profound. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, America was “the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over souls.”