Harriet Tubman: Visionary American Hero
Harriet Tubman (circa 1822-1913) was a former slave, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She served as a cook, nurse, scout, and spy for the Union Army during the American Civil War and, in her later years, established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in Auburn and Fleming, New York, now a National Historic Site.
Born as a slave in Maryland, Tubman escaped in 1849, making her way to Philadelphia and freedom. She then returned to Maryland to free her family and became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, working with fellow abolitionists William Still (1819-1902), Passmore Williamson (1822-1895), Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), John Brown (1800-1859), and many others in assisting freedom seekers (fugitive slaves) in their flight from slavery.
She supported armed resistance to the "peculiar institution" and helped John Brown plan his assault on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, which they hoped would encourage a large-scale slave revolt. The raid failed, and Brown was executed, but Tubman continued her advocacy for military action against slaveholders, helping to recruit Black soldiers and serving as guide and scout on the Combahee River Raid (Raid on Combahee Ferry) in 1863, which freed over 750 slaves.
After the Civil War, Tubman advocated for women's rights and civil rights from her home in Auburn, New York, established her Home for the Aged, and freely donated to any cause that advocated for equal rights for all. She died of pneumonia in 1913 and was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. In the present day, she is remembered as a great American advocate for freedom and justice for all.
Early Life, Injury, & Family
According to writers Jean Marie Wiesen and Rita Daniels, Tubman's maternal grandmother, known as Modesty, was "an Ashanti maiden…born in Ghana, on the Gold Coast of Africa" and was "among the hundreds of West Africans captured from her village in the late 1700s" (14). Tubman's mother, Harriet ("Rit") Green, married Ben Ross circa 1808 and had nine children, including Araminta ("Minty") Ross (born circa 1822), who would become Harriet Tubman.
The family was separated as Rit was owned by the Brodess family while Ben was a slave of the Thompsons. Since any children born of an enslaved woman were enslaved by her owners, all the children came to be the property of Mary Pattison Brodess and her son Edward. Edward further separated the family by hiring them out to different locations and, at one point, selling two of Tubman's sisters.
When Tubman was six years old, she was hired out to a woman as a nursemaid and, whenever the infant woke and cried, Tubman was whipped. She took to wearing layers of clothing as protection, which may have helped, but still carried the scars of those whippings for the rest of her life.
In 1835, when Tubman was around 13, she was sent on an errand, along with the plantation's cook, to a local store for a few provisions. Tubman later recalled that she was ashamed of how her hair looked, even covered with a shawl, and waited outside the shop while the cook went in. An overseer, chasing a fugitive slave, asked Tubman to help stop him, and she refused. The overseer then hurled a 2-pound weight at the fleeing slave but missed, striking Tubman in the head. Scholar Kate Clifford Larson writes:
The last thing she remembered was the overseer "raising up his arm to throw an iron weight at one of the slaves and that was the last I knew." She remembered vividly how the weight "broke my skull and cut a piece of that shawl clean off and drove it into my head. They carried me to the house all bleeding and fainting. I had no bed, no place to lie down on at all, and they lay me on the seat of the loom, and I stayed there all that day and next."
(42)
Tubman was sent back to the fields the next day, working "with the blood and sweat rolling down my face till I couldn't see" (Larson, 42) but was finally allowed to be treated by her mother, an herbalist healer, who nursed her back to health. According to Larson, this injury resulted in temporal lobe epilepsy, characterized by sleeping spells in which she would experience visions she understood as sent by God. She would remain in these states until she suddenly woke or "persistent shaking by her fellow slaves brought her back to reality, though she protested that she hadn't been asleep at all" (Larson, 43-44).
These visions would continue throughout her life and, she claimed, often told her where to go, when, and how to find those who would offer help to freedom seekers. She claimed to have seen John Brown in her visions, for example, years before she met him.
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⇒ Harriet Tubman: Visionary American Hero
