Women's History: Harriet Tubman

Imagine not knowing the year you were born...She thought she was born in 1825, While her death certificate said she was born in 1815 and her gravestone listed her birth in 1820.
Who am I talking about? Araminta Ross, or by the name you know her Harriet Tubman.

She was born near Bucktown, Maryland to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross a slave couple that was lucky enough to spend most of their life in close proximity to one another. Harriet was one of around a dozen children. It is assumed she was a middle child. Though no records were found that listed her sisters or brothers, she had indicated that she did have older and younger siblings.

Harriet was born a slave, and anyone who was born to a mother who was a slave than would become a slave themselves as said by Maryland’s law set in 1712 when the colonial legislators adopted a new measure: the status of a child would follow the status of its mother.

This radical shift was in response to sex across the color line, mostly white males coupling with slave women. Basically it allowed white men to pursue their appetites and maintain the status quo, while white women were hemmed in by increasingly rigid prohibitions and restrictions on their behavior. A white man who fathered a slave child could mask his sexual connection with a black slave. While a white women risked not just ostracism, but exile and even worse if she was discovered to have any form of a sexual connection with a black. Because by law any child born to her (the white woman) would be born free and they could not afford to let that happen.

Basically that means that Harriet was born into bondage, born into slavery. Her childhood was a series of never ending seasons. From the earliest of age, her sense of the world was defined by the displacement whites imposed as much by any loving circle forged by her parents and siblings. In interviews she gave later in life Harriet indicated the treatment she experienced growing up: “I grew up like a neglected weed, - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it”.

When Harriet was only five years old she sent off to deal with the realities of bondage. A woman in the neighborhood, a “Miss Susan”, drove up to her master’s plantation and requested “a young girl to take care of a baby” and without hesitation Harriet was sent off. She was far too young to be able to take on the responsibilities given to her.
She said she remembered being so small that she had to sit on the floor to safely hold the white baby in her lap. Right away she was given a full load of domestic duties in her new master’s house as well as taking care of the infant. After a full day of her mistresses bidding she would than have to stay up all night rocking the infants crib so it would not cry and wake up its mother and father. If the baby did wail than the parents would not go to comfort their child but instead pick up a whip from its shelf to punish the slave attendant for negligence.

By the age of twelve Harriet had graduated from domestic labor.
By then she resented the close company and smothering supervision of the white women that she was considered unsuitable as a domestic slave. Therefore she became more valuable in the fields, where she could hoe and harvest, more contented alongside her fellow African Americans.

When Harriet was an adolescent she was hired to work on the harvest for a man named Barrett. When another slave, a male, left the fields and headed toward Bucktown, The overseer followed him. Harriet raced ahead to warn her fellow slave, knowing that there would trouble. The confrontation took place at a crossroads in town at a small store. The overseer was determined to punish the slave for abandoning his post with a whipping.

In the confusion of the confrontation, the frightened slave bolted from the store. As the slave made haste, Harriet reportedly blocked the doorway so the overseer could not go after him. But the overseer had picked up a lead weight and had just thrown it at the escapee. The weight instead of hitting the escapee, Hit Harriet in the head and delivered a stunning blow.
Harriet’s wound was deep and severe and she later recalled that she had been wearing a covering on her head, and when the weight struck her it “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 the next.” Harriet’s condition was so grave that she was sent back to her owner Brodess, with the report that she was “not worth a sixpence”. Her parents feared she might never recover. And in the following weeks, she would slip into a lethargic sleep from which it was almost impossible to awaken her. She would do this often and it would come without warning. All her family could do was pray for her. Brodess tried to sell her but he could find no takers.

In 1849 Harriet heard a rumor that her owner was going to “sell her down the river” to which Harriet started to change her prayers she bad been doing to in her own words “[I] changed my prayer, and I said ‘Lord, if you ain’t never going to change the man’s heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way, so he won’t do no more mischief” She expressed guilt when shortly there after, Brodess did die. At this juncture her faith and her fate become powerfully entwined. The year 1849 became a turning point for Harriet Tubman. It was time for her to fulfill her destiny and she realized she must actively seek a role in god’s plan, rather than letting others decide what path she should take.

Harriet knew by 1849 that she needed to combine faith with action. By escaping to the north, she felt, she would be doing Gods will.
It was time to plan her escape, Harriet was given a piece of paper by a white neighbor with two names, and told how to find the first house on her path to freedom. At the first house she was put into a wagon, covered with a sack, and driven to her next destination. Following the route to Pennsylvania, she initially settled in Philadelphia, where she met William Still, the Philadelphia Stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. With the assistance of Still, and other members of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, she learned about the workings of the UGRR.

After freeing herself from slavery, Harriet Tubman returned to Maryland to rescue other members of her family. In all she is believed to have conducted approximately 300 persons to freedom in the North. The tales of her exploits reveal her highly spiritual nature, as well as a grim determination to protect her charges and those who aided them. She always expressed confidence that God would aid her efforts, and threatened to shoot any of her charges who thought to turn back.

It is impossible to tell you all about Harriet Tubman just thru this blog, but I found this transcript that someone wrote about her in The Underground Railroad in 1871 and it says it all if you ask me.

“Harriet Tubman had been their "Moses," but not in the sense that Andrew Johnson was the "Moses of the colored people." She had faithfully gone down into Egypt, and had delivered these six bondmen by her own heroism. Harriet was a woman of no pretensions, indeed, a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found among the most unfortunate-looking farm hands of the South. Yet, in point of courage, shrewdness and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow-men, by making personal visits to Maryland among the slaves, she was without her equal.” – Thomas Garret