They Called Her Moses - The Harriett Tubman Story (Article 58)
She was born a slave in about 1820 but the date is not certain. Her birth name was recorded by her owner as Araminta Ross, but she was known as Minty. As a young woman, she was only about five feet tall, probably never weighed more than one hundred pounds, and suffered seizures due to a childhood injury. She was illiterate until adulthood. She escaped her slave master’s plantation 1848, when she was about twenty-seven; however, legally, she was considered a fugitive slave until 1865. For nearly twenty years, she risked capture, returning numerous times to the area around her former home in southern Maryland to guide other escaping slaves to freedom in Pennsylvania, New York and Canadian provinces. For her exploits, she was dubbed “Moses,” but at the time most slave-owners thought their nemesis was a man. During the Civil War, she was an armed scout for the Union Army and once participated in a raid to free a group of slaves from several large plantations. After the war and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, she became active in the suffrage movement; but she was never allowed to vote. She remained devoted to her life’s work, which was to improve the lives of former slaves by helping them find work and try to build a life on their own. Then, as she grew older, she formed a retirement home for those with no family to help with their care.
This is the remarkable legacy of Harriett Tubman.
Minty, as she was known then to master and family alike, endured the hardships and degradations that were common for slaves in those days. Always a feisty girl, she was frequently beaten for disobedience, and occasionally rented out to other slave-holders as a form of punishment. Those periods away from her home were especially difficult for Minty because she was very close to her large family. In 1840, her initial owner died and, under provisions of his will, her father was manumitted from slavery; but, Minty, her mother, and her siblings remained slaves; and she was able to observe first-hand the difference freedom made for her father. To drive home their status as slaves, soon after her new master took control, Minty witnessed the horrific effect on her mother and father when three of her siblings were sold, breaking up their family. As a child, she was once innocently caught in a confrontation between a slave owner and a male slave who was attempting to flee, and suffered a severe head injury when a heavy metal object thrown by the owner at the slave, struck Minty instead. Thereafter, for the rest of her life, she would occasionally have seizures and debilitating headaches. In 1844, her owner arranged for Minty to marry a Black man who had gained his freedom, probably expecting that Minty would bear children. Under Maryland law at the time, any child born to a female slave, became a slave owned by the same master. However, Minty did not have any children and, although she never explained the matter, it is reasonable to assume that she did not want to bring a child into slavery. After her marriage, Minty changed her name to Harriett and soon, unknown to her husband, began to hope for an opportunity to escape!
Late one night, she and two of her brothers took off, with no real escape plan. They were quickly missed and identified in a wanted poster as fugitive slaves, with a reward of $100 each for their return. When the three were unable to find a route to safety and freedom, or even help with food and shelter, they turned themselves in. As they probably expected, they were returned to their owner and beaten before being re-assigned to hard labor tasks.
But Harriett had tasted freedom, if only for a short while, and again thought of escape. Although, this time she did more than just hope. She gathered information from other slaves about possible routes, developed a plan for evasion, including travel only at night through waterways; and her most critical decision was to go alone! She later wrote of her feelings during her preparations to escape: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.”
Within weeks, Harriett was again on the run and this time for good. She found refuge in the homes of several Quakers as she travelled at night north along what was becoming known as the Underground Railroad, which was neither a railroad nor underground. She worked her way through Maryland and Delaware (also a slave state), then, finally into Pennsylvania.
When she realized that she was probably safe (for now) she wrote: “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”
While she was now relatively “free” and had found steady work to build a new life, she missed her family. The following year she slipped back into Maryland to rescue a niece with two small children and, six months later in a return trip, guided other family members to safety. Over the next two years, she made at least ten more clandestine trips bringing over seventy slaves into her “Promised Land.” In fact, one northern newspaper editor, without naming her, or even her gender, began to refer to her as “Moses” and the name stuck. Slave-holders in Maryland who knew of “Minty” never suspected that the small, disabled, girl who had escaped earlier, could possibly be “Moses” and several thought it was really a male abolitionist conducting the group escapes while deceptively leaving the impression it was a woman.
Harriet’s true identity as a primary “conductor” in the underground railroad inexplicably remained unknown to slave-holders despite her growing recognition in the north from numerous appearances at abolitionist society meetings arranged by publisher William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, the nation’s most famous former slave. She even met with John Brown, the violent abolitionist who later led the failed raid against the U.S. Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, which he had hoped would arm slaves for a rebellion. While many historians believe Harriett knew about Brown’s general plan, most know that she opposed violence, even against White slave-holders, and, therefore, probably would not have supported an attack on U.S. Army troops.
After the Civil War began, she was able to find work as a cook and nurse with various Union Army units, however, her most valuable service to the Army came as a scout. Because Harriett knew the backwoods, rivers and streams so well, she offered her services to guide Union army units on patrol in the area. Accounts written by others make it clear that she was often more than just a scout and was an adept gatherer of intelligence as she would enter Confederate held territory, dressed in the garb of a slave, pretending to be on an errand for a master. She was always armed, but later said she was grateful that she had never had to fire her weapon at another person, even an avowed enemy, because, “Killing someone would have worn on my mind as a Christian.” However, she recalled one situation in which she was prepared to use her small pistol, but the need never arose. In June, 1863, she guided a raiding party of Union troops led by Colonel James Montgomery to liberate slaves from several plantations along the Combahee River, in South Carolina. She had earlier infiltrated the nearby plantations and told the slaves to “run like wind” when they heard steam boat whistles. Then, at the first blast of the whistles, the slave-owners and the few Confederate soldiers in the area could not slow the stampede of slaves running toward the river and the waiting boats. Over 700 slaves were freed in what became known as the Combahee River Raid. Her efforts were recognized by Colonel Montgomery and he petitioned for Harriett to receive regular Army compensation.
It was denied.
In fact, numerous U.S. Army officers supported some form of compensation for Harriett, during and after the War, some even requesting that she receive a pension. All were denied, until 1899, thirty-five years after her Army service ended. However, even then, the Army still refused to recognize her service as a scout; instead, she was given $20.00 per month for her service as a nurse. She was eighty years old.
Along with almost all former slaves, on April 15, 1865, Harriett Tubman mourned the death of Abraham Lincoln and spoke of the grief she felt at his loss. She appreciated his personal beliefs that slavery must be abolished and his efforts to drive the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress; however, she was a stern critic of the President’s earlier policies toward slavery. When Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was first published in September 1862 to become effective on January 1, 1863, it did not include slaves held in the four border states of Maryland (her original home), Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, and Harriett was dismayed. She said: “God won’t let Master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he’s a great man, and I am a poor Negro; but the Negro can tell Master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negro free.” Harriett offered to help recruit former slaves into the Army, understanding that the units would consist of only Black enlisted men, commanded by White officers; but, she considered it a start. After several months, Lincoln and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, approved the new regiments and the first real test for Black soldiers in the regular U.S. Army, was about to occur.
In July, 1863, Harriett was providing nursing support as well as guide services to Army units in South Carolina, near Charleston, as the Union Army was mobilizing to assault Fort Wagner, the largest of the nearby installations still held by the Confederates. The unit chosen to lead the initial assault was a regiment of Black enlisted men, led by Colonel Robert G. Shaw, a White officer and avowed abolitionist. The assault was certainly a suicide mission and almost all of Shaw’s men were killed, as was the Colonel. Harriett helped care for the few survivors as some White doctors and nurses refused to aid the Black soldiers. While their assault failed to breech the walls of the fort, the 54th Massachusetts efforts, despite enormous losses, impressed other commanders and there was little hesitation afterward to forming Black units and employing them against Confederate forces.
Harriett wrote poetically of the experience, comparing the fighting to a storm; “We saw the lightening, that was the guns. Then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns. Then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood. And when we went to get the crops, it was only dead men that we reaped.”
Throughout the rest of the war, Harriett would stay close to Army units, helping the growing number of escaping slaves pass through the lines toward safety. Most found themselves, not in northern states building a new home, but in large encampments, with meager rations and tattered tents for shelter. However, they were free and those who worked for the Army received the first wages of their lives.
Except for occasional seizures and headaches from her childhood injury, Harriett remained generally healthy and was active in causes she believed in until well into her eighties. In 1912, at age ninety, Harriett’s health began to fail and she spent the rest of her life at the Harriett Tubman Home for the Aged, the home which she had built for elderly former slaves.
She died on March 10, 1913.
But Harriett Tubman’s legacy lives on. In towns throughout Pennsylvania, New York, and in the Canadian province of Ontario, there are enclaves of families whose forefathers were saved by her many rescue missions into slave territory. Moses was an apt title for this woman who led so many to the promised land and, for over sixty years, from the most humble beginnings, she was a force to be reckoned with, as this country awakened from the era of slavery.