Harriet Tubman

Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the 19th Century

Kristen T. Oertel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135948979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Escaped slave, Civil War spy, scout, and nurse, and champion of women's suffrage, Harriet Tubman is an icon of heroism. Perhaps most famous for leading enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, Tubman was dubbed "Moses" by followers. But abolition and the close of the Civil War were far from the end of her remarkable career. Tubman continued to fight for black civil rights, and campaign fiercely for women's suffrage, throughout her life.

In this vivid, concise narrative supplemented by primary documents, Kristen T. Oertel introduces readers to Tubman's extraordinary life, from the trauma of her childhood slavery to her civil rights activism in the late nineteenth century, and in the process reveals a nation's struggle over its most central injustices.

Part I
HARRIET TUBMAN

INTRODUCTION

A is an Abolitionist—A man who wants to free
The wretched slave—and give to all
An equal liberty.

B is a Brother with a skin
Of somewhat darker hue,
But in our Heavenly Father’s sight,
He is as dear as you.

C is the Cotton-field, to which
This injured brother’s driven,
When, as the white-man’s slave, he toils,
From early morn till even.

D is the Driver, cold and stern,
Who follows, whip in hand,
To punish those who dare to rest,
Or disobey command …¹

In 1847, two years before Harriet Tubman escaped from her master’s plantation, an anonymous writer published “The Anti-Slavery Alphabet,” a pamphlet that gained widespread appeal after its introduction at the Philadelphia Antislavery Fair that same year. The “alphabet” conveyed abolitionist sentiment as it introduced nineteenth-century children to the building blocks of literacy, so perhaps it is curious that these letters open a book dedicated to unearthing the life of Harriet Tubman, a woman who never learned to read. Yet “The Anti-Slavery Alphabet” illustrates many of the themes that a study of Tubman can reveal. First, the Tubman myth that occupies the public’s imagination originated in children’s books. In fact, most adults probably learned about this iconic conductor of the Underground Railroad from one of the more than one hundred children’s and youth biographies published about Tubman since the 1950s.² Second, the characters of the “alphabet,” the abolitionist who “wants to free the wretched slave” and the “brother with a skin of somewhat darker hue,” highlight the important connections between slaves and their allies in freedom, linkages that Tubman would cement during her many trips back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line. Finally, the “driver” who whips the slave who “disobeys” conjures up the slave rebel, a role Tubman embodied both before and during the Civil War as she helped dismantle the system that had kept her family enslaved for generations.

The “alphabet” also obscures several important themes, however, that Tubman’s biography can help illuminate. The causation of the emancipation process implied by the “alphabet”—that white, male abolitionists would free black “brothers”—ignores the ways in which slaves carved out their own paths to freedom, with and without the help of abolitionists (who were both white and black). Tubman’s courageous work on the Underground Railroad opens up a window into a world inhabited by the many slaves who “voted with their feet” and weakened the peculiar institution in the decade before the Civil War by emancipating themselves.³ The male subjects of the “alphabet” also ignore the women, both enslaved and free, who challenged slavery and patriarchy and who have gained impressive historical traction in recent studies about slavery, abolition, and the Civil War.⁴ Tubman’s life story encapsulates these historiographic trends; she represents the many women who shattered gender barriers in the context of political and military crises and the many slaves and free blacks who boldly attacked slavery in theory and in practice. And yet ultimately, Tubman is a singular and heroic historical figure who defies categorization, which perhaps explains why we know more about her myth than her history. It is my goal to explore the unique richness of Tubman’s story while also considering how her life connects us to the history of slavery, the Civil War, and civil rights in the nineteenth century.

***

Harriet Tubman’s parents, Ben Ross and Harriet “Rit” Green, were born in Dorchester County, Maryland, just as the ink on the U.S. Constitution was drying. The country’s founding document simultaneously ensconced slavery in U.S. law by defining Ben and Rit as property and each of them as three-fifths of a person, but it also opened up the possibility for slavery’s extinction, as it mandated the cessation of the Atlantic slave trade and lifted up “the Blessings of Liberty.” In 1822, the year Rit gave birth to her daughter Araminta Ross, later known as Harriet Tubman, the United States and the institution of slavery had expanded westward, and the cotton economy fueled the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Slavery had also become increasingly sectionalized, thriving in the Deep South and dying a gradual but stubborn death in the upper South and the North.

Forty years later, after Tubman had rescued dozens of slaves, including her elderly parents and the bulk of her extended family, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a military order that set the nation on a path toward de jure black freedom. Tubman knew that a piece of paper could not guarantee the freedom of a race of people who had been held captive for centuries, so in 1862 she joined the Union army in South Carolina, where she helped over 700 slaves escape to Union lines and nursed countless soldiers and freedmen back to health. Tubman worked for another kind of freedom thirty years later as she participated in woman’s suffrage conventions at the end of the century. She recognized that women, particularly black women, could not claim the freedom she fought so hard to win while they remained second-class citizens. When Tubman died in 1913 at the age of ninety-one, she could relish in the fact that she helped destroy an institution that had thrived in the Americas for hundreds of years, but she also lamented the stubborn legacies of tyranny that persisted in Jim Crow laws in the South and that disfranchised women everywhere.

In essence, Tubman’s life reveals the arc of a nation’s struggle with its most divisive and ironic feature: how a country, founded in liberty, could perpetuate racial and gender inequalities for centuries. Tubman provides us with a remarkable example of the enduring human spirit that challenged this injustice. Indeed, it was Tubman’s faith in God, her family, and her future that motivated her activism, but it was also her ability to connect with an existing and expanding network of like-minded black and white activists that ensured her success. One Civil War reporter described Tubman as a “Black ‘She Moses,’” and the title is fitting. She was black and female when white and male ruled the day, but Moses determined to set all of her people free.⁵

NOTES

1 Anonymous (although now attributed to Philadelphia Quakers Hannah and Mary Townshend), “The Anti-Slavery Alphabet” (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1847), reprinted at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16081/16081-h/16081-h.htm.

2 Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 37.

3 Recent studies that explore African Americans’ role in the emancipation process include: Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015); Richard Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and David Blight, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2007).

4 Recent studies on enslaved women include: Daina Ramey Berry and Deleso A. Alford, eds., Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Stephanie Camp, Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

5 The term “Black ‘She Moses’” was coined by a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal in a June 20, 1863, story about the Combahee River raid. See Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2004), 365n55.

Chapter 1
MINTY

Minty, short for Araminta, was a feisty and headstrong young slave.… When she grew up she became Harriet Tubman, the courageous and heroic woman who helped hundreds of slaves escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

From Minty, A Story of Young Harriet Tubman ¹

Google Harriet Tubman’s name with the word “hero,” and over 215,000 websites will flood your computer screen in 0.31 seconds. First on the list is the site “MyHero.com,” a source that uses “media, art, and technology to celebrate the best of humanity” and that features Tubman as “a shining example of self-determination and faith, fueled by rugged endurance.” ² Another site claims that Tubman’s name is “synonymous with bravery and freedom” and reprints a poem that locates the origins of Tubman’s heroism:

Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff
Wasn’t scared of nothing neither
Didn’t come in this world to be no slave
And didn’t stay one either. ³

The poem and the many websites that note Tubman’s heroic qualities often speak of her time as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and her courageous resistance to the institution of slavery. Tubman stands out among the majority of her peers for her ability to escape from slavery’s chains and to voluntarily return to the South and lead dozens of her friends and family members to freedom.

But Tubman’s resistance to the slave regime was hardly unique, and even her return trips into slave territory were not unprecedented. Rather, she joined a rising tide of enslaved and free blacks and white abolitionists who challenged slaveholders’ claims to their “property” and had encouraged freedom seekers along the porous border for decades. Furthermore, even those slaves who never left the plantation resisted white attempts to control their lives and their futures. Slave resistance spanned a wide range of behaviors—from small-scale actions like feigning sickness or breaking tools to more overt challenges like running away or poisoning one’s master—but most slaves created spaces in which they could assert their humanity, constantly reminding their masters of slavery’s instability. Scholars have identified this resistance as a primary factor in causing the downfall of the institution, claiming that “black women and men’s struggles against slavery ultimately contributed to their emancipation… slaves’ persistence in pushing for temporary or permanent forms of freedom strained slave owners, the South, and the nation.” ⁴ Tubman and other slaves who “didn’t come in this world to be no slave and didn’t stay one either” collectively pierced a thorn in the slaveholder’s side, a thorn that festered until the Civil War.

In order to fully comprehend Tubman’s heroism and that of the countless other slaves who chose to be thorns and resist the slave regime, we first must construct the scaffolding that kept the institution of slavery in place for centuries. Economics, culture, and law coalesced to maintain the slave system, and the twin ideals of patriarchy and white supremacy dominated social relations in the colonial South. The cotton economy that emerged after Eli Whitney introduced the cotton gin in 1793 expanded the institution in the Deep South and the West and tied the economic future of the country to its success. As the peculiar institution marched westward from Georgia to Texas, planters scrambled to buy more slaves in order to grow more cotton in order to buy more slaves. From birth to death, generation after generation, most black folk in America were enslaved, and the democratic nation they called home conspired to keep them that way. It is against these remarkable odds that Harriet Tubman, or “Minty” as she was first called, emerged as a hero. ⁵

***

When Harriet Tubman’s grandparents were born in the mid-eighteenth century, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, and only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Vermont, abolished the institution in the immediate wake of the American Revolution. Other states, like New York and Pennsylvania, passed gradual emancipation laws during or after the Revolution, so that by 1820 the overwhelming majority of blacks living above the Mason-Dixon Line were free. Yet even in the free states of New England and the mid-Atlantic, a few aging blacks, born before the passage of the gradual emancipation acts, remained in slavery until the 1840s, as did a few slaves in Illinois, born there during the territorial period. Just below these mid-Atlantic states, in what historians now refer to as the upper or border South, numerous masters voluntarily manumitted their slaves, even as their neighbors tenaciously supported slavery and retained their slaves. Thus, for example, by 1860 most blacks in Delaware were free. By this time about half the blacks in Maryland were free, but of course the other half were slaves. Outside of Delaware slavery remained vibrant and enormously profitable, and the massive expansion of cotton cultivation in the Deep South and Southwest provided a steady market for slaves born in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas who could be sold further south. By this time even southerners called their system a “peculiar institution” because it was geographically isolated and fundamentally contrary to the ethos of the new democratic American republic. ⁶

At least three generations of Tubman’s ancestors called the Eastern Shore of Maryland home, and slavery’s roots ran very deep in the Chesapeake Bay. At the time of Tubman’s birth the institution was declining in the upper South, as tobacco cultivation gave way to less labor-intensive crops like corn and wheat, but mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Harriet Tubman
• PART II Documents
• Bibliography
• Index