Finding Harriet Tubman

Last week I asked the question, “Where’s Harriet?”—referring to the decision to put the new Harriet Tubman twenty-dollar bill on hold. I also told you a little more about the woman called Moses, who led scores of slaves to freedom after she herself escaped a plantation on Maryland’s east shore.

Severely beaten as a child and adult, hardened by her work in field and forest, Tubman disappeared into the woods one night in October 1849. She had seen three sisters sold away South to pay debts, and feared she would be next.

Sleeping days, she followed the North Star, sheltered occasionally by sympathetic blacks and whites. Crossing to the free state of Pennsylvania, she later recalled the moment. “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.”

Over the next decade, she made at least eight more trips back to rescue her parents, brothers and friends and guide them to the North, settling them in upper New York and Canada, then taking on menial jobs to raise money for her next venture. Deeply religious, she followed her intuition, believing God was guiding her.

Although her “underground” journeys ran largely from Maryland to Canada, Tubman made several visits to Boston. She slept at the home of abolitionists in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of former slaves and free blacks. In Boston she would inspire small and large crowds and raise money, all the time aware that she, too, was a fugitive. On Independence Day, 1860, Tubman spoke at a women’s suffrage meeting in Boston, linking anti-slavery with women’s rights.

Throughout the pre-war years, Tubman became a friend and ally of abolitionists throughout the north, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, William Still and William Seward, who would later become Lincoln’s secretary of state. On one trip to Boston, she met John Brown, whom she came to admire. Later she raised money and recruited for his cause. Brown, for his part, admired Tubman’s intellect, passion and talent for strategy. He called her “General Tubman” and confided in her his plan to spark a national slave revolt with a raid at Harper’s Ferry.

There are too many stories about Harriet Tubman for this small space. So I’ll leave you, now, with one of my favorites. It’s about her daring, although tragic, venture to rescue her sister Rachel and her children, Angerine and Ben.

Having delayed her trip in order to raise funds to carry it out, Harriet arrived on the Eastern Shore only to find out she was too late. Rachel had died a few weeks before. All day in a driving snowstorm, Tubman waited for her sister, nephew and niece to meet her in the forest. Finally, she had to turn away. She did, however, connect with another slave family, John and Maria Ennals and their three children, including a three-month old infant. She would guide them, instead.

Traveling in the rain, Harriet led the Ennals to the first of a network of safe houses, gave the coded knock, and was surprised to find a new owner, a white man, at the door. Pushing on, she fled out of town, wading through water to an island of tall swamp grass, where the family rested, giving the baby paregoric to keep it quiet.

Meanwhile, the alarm had been given, and they could hear patrols searching nearby homes and fields. When it grew quiet, Harriet heard a man walking on the pathway beside the swamp, singing softly to himself. Listening carefully, she realized his song was actually instructions on how to find his barn.

At the barn, the man, a Quaker, had a horse and wagon waiting, with food and provisions for their journey. That night Harriet and the Ennals family were driven to the next safe place, and eventually to freedom.

This story illustrates the vital role Quakers played in the abolitionist movement and as conductors on the Underground Railroad. And it reminds us that the struggle for justice and freedom in Harriet Tubman’s time was the courageous work of both blacks and whites.

It still is.

©Ben Jacques

Note: Stories in this column derive from the biography Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, by Kate Clifford Larson.