February 15, 2018 • 47 mins
Harriet Tubman is a legendary figure in history, but the details of her life are even more remarkable than what you may have learned in school. Listen in today as Josh and Chuck pay tribute to a true icon of African-American history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour in eighteen and where
are we going? On April four, we're going to be
in Boston at the Wilburg. You can get tickets at
the Wilber dot com, Chuck. And then on April five,
we're gonna be in d C at the Lincoln Theater
and you can get tickets for that at ticket fly
that's right. And then we're going to two new cities,
right yep. On May we're gonna be in St. Louis.
(00:20):
You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May twenty three,
we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets
there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck,
that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood,
Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June and possibly adding
a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned for that, yep.
And you can get ticks at a x S dot com.
(00:41):
So come see us live. We'll have a good time.
Come on out. Welcome to Stuff you should know from
House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and they're is Charles w Chuck Bryant,
(01:01):
and there's Jerry over there, and this is stuff you
should know in Black History month. Toda, how you doing? Man?
I'm tired? Are you? You've been burning the candles at
all three ends? Uh? I didn't know candles had three ends.
And look look at it when they work as hard
as you check, they got three inns. So bright, How
(01:22):
are you doing? You holding up at least? I don't know.
It's TVD I Now you see these uh see these circles. Yeah,
they're a little pronounced. I wasn't gonna say anything, but
that's fine. Yeah. I guess when that circles their half moons?
Yeah there, um, well they're half moons the size of
(01:43):
half dollars. A lot of people say circles into their
eyes when they're not to circles. I wonder if they're
just seeing the rest of it, like their mind is
filling in the rest. Maybe they're all just insane seeing
something we're not maybe so well. At any rate, we're
all pulling for you. You need any super anything. Now,
Jerry's got that as you can smell. Yeah, it's kind
(02:03):
of nice. This this stage chairs. What is that? It's her? Well,
she won't talk so right, She's just she's doing sign
language for Ramen. I love Rahman. Don't you sure? Nothing
perched up like Ramen except a really great history story.
(02:28):
That's right, we're gonna do that today. Way to go
choosing this one, Chuck, is this was this a request
of yours or did just so happened it was on
the site? No, I just you know, I've been wanting
to cover more famous women in history, and um, obviously
during Black History months, this is a perfect time to
talk about Harriet Tubman. And this article points out and
(02:51):
I thought very astutely like her legend in her her
icon ship, I I kind of classic could chip Yes,
uh is so great that? Um? I think sometimes a
lot of people may not even know the nitty gritty
details of her life, you know, I mean, I I know,
(03:14):
I didn't. I I was, you know, raised in America
in the seventies and eighties as a school kid into
the mid nineties, we could even say, um, and I
like I knew of Harriet Tubman. I was taught to
honor and respect her for what she did as a
conductor on the underground railroad. What I didn't know is
that that was about a third of the reason why
(03:36):
she's famous and legendary. Yeah. I mean the school lessons
were shamefully short, because that's about all I learned was
just about the underground railroad her her role in it
to a very limited degree. Um that they taught us
that it's not her role, and that was kind of it. Yeah.
(03:56):
But the fact that, like I mean, there's so much
more to this woman's life. She just did so much.
She packed so much life in, whether it was by
her own accord or against her will, she just had
a very long, full life. Um. And the fact that
we know about the the life of a nineteenth mid
(04:17):
nineteenth century black woman who was born a slave in Maryland,
that we know this much about it really speaks volumes.
I'm glad that there's this much out there, and it
seems like there's more and more being added to it
every day. Yeah, it definitely helps that. Uh. In the
eighteen sixties, there was a very famous biography written by
Sarah Hopkins Bradford, one of the earlier biographies in UM.
(04:41):
Since then, we've learned some more stuff and cleaned up
a bit of the truth from the legend. But you know,
it only got better yeah. I mean, if it's just
the stuff that is verifiable fact is still just astounding.
It kind of makes me feel like a lump and
a loser. Look, I'm not I'm not doing much with
my life. Well, we're teaching people about Harriet tubban It lea,
(05:02):
so it counts for something, I guess. All right, so
you want to start at the beginning. Yeah, in the beginning,
of course, because Harriet tubman Um was born. When she
was born, there weren't great birth records for for black
people in the United States at the time, so we
don't know for sure when she was born. Um eighteen
(05:24):
twenty five is what she has claimed on various documents
later in life. But I've seen everywhere from eighteen eighty five,
so somewhere in that range. Yeah, this article in how
staff Work says eighteen twenty two. I've seen that in
various places too, and that is shameful in and of itself. Yeah,
but again, like it's not like the people who were
(05:44):
not keeping records on slave births at the time. We're like, well,
this lady is actually going to grow up to be
one of the most legendary women in American history, so
we should probably note this. Um. The thing is is,
even though they didn't, they didn't note her birth because
they didn't realize how famous she was going to be.
She started to make a name for herself pretty early
on in life. Um. She had about five years to
(06:08):
kind of be raised as a child before she was
hired out as a basically an infant rocker. Her job
was to stay up at night and rock and infant
to make sure that the infant didn't cry. And every
time the infant cried, she would, um get a lashing
from what I understand. Yeah, and just reading through kind
(06:28):
of her early life, it seems like, um, well let
me couch that for one second. She was one of
nine children born in like you said, in Maryland and
Dorchester County unless they pronounce it Dorster Doyly Doyle County
which is along the eastern shore, to Benjamin Ross and
(06:50):
Harriet uh Rit Green h and her she was actually
born are very beautiful name, are Amanta Ross. Yeah, I
had no idea about that, did you know? And her
parents called her Minty Minty Ross, which is just a
very kind of cute nickname for a kid, it is.
And she was actually a third generation slave in America.
(07:13):
Her grandmother on her maternal side was named Modesty, and
her family has done some research and have concluded that
Modesty was almost certainly um from the Ashanti group and
was stolen either from the Ivory Coast or Ghana and
then was taken eventually to Maryland where she was owned
(07:35):
by a guy named Athol Pattison. Is that right, Pattison?
I think so. The thing about that and the reason
why this guy really kind of figures into the story
in a cringe worthy way. Athol Pattison um who then
owned Harriet Tubman's grandmother and then mother, and then Harriet
and her siblings because they were all from the same line.
(07:59):
He had in his will that when when any of
them turned forty five they were free, they were what
was called manumitted. The problem is that he was dead,
so he wasn't around to enforce his will, and that
actually never happened. So even though on paper, legally Harriet Tubman,
all of her siblings, her mother, and her grandmother all
(08:20):
should have been manumitted whenever they hit age forty five,
absolutely none of them were. Yeah, and her father did
gain his freedom, but was still married to a woman
who uh did not have her freedom. Uh. And you
don't hear about this a lot in in the history
books where families were um divided between free and owned, um,
(08:42):
which makes a bad situation even worse, you know. Yeah,
And I'd like to look into that because that kind
of popped up here there and almost casually, you know,
like without much explanation. So I wonder what that was like.
Was it was it just like, you know, you both
went to work and did basically the same labor, but
one of you, um was paid for it. Uh? Was
(09:02):
there like less like physical punishment or coercion? Like what
was the distinction? Yeah, I'm not really sure, um, but
like you are, you know, what I was setting up
was after she worked as a as a childcare baby
rocker of sorts and got whipped on the neck by
(09:22):
the woman of the house every time her baby cried,
which that's you know, that's a whole other thing. Yeah,
and again she's five at the time, five years old. Um.
She went on to work on the farm later on
when she got a little older, and by all accounts, UM,
for the rest of her her working life, her you know,
(09:43):
as a slave, was much preferred working on the farm
and basically like, I don't want to work for these
white women. Um, they're worse than the men, right, or
at least in her case. Plus also, I mean she
was pretty able bodied. She supposedly was super muscular from
doing um physical labor for so many years. It was
pretty good at it. Five tall and um from what
(10:06):
I could tell, just as strong as could be. Right,
So um she the the owners of her family, um
Ethyl Pattison's daughter and son in law. They were um
kind of like Michael Fossbender's family in twelve years of
slave They were not at all wealthy plantation owners, but
(10:28):
they were just out of the social hierarchy at the
time able to afford and keep slaves. But rather, since
they didn't have a huge plantation for their slaves to
work on, they would hire them out. That's how, um
how Harry ended up like working at age five rocking babies,
(10:48):
or she was hired out to go get muskrats out
of traps and swamps and stuff like that. Just like basically,
whatever somebody needed an extra hand for they would contact
this family and the family would hire out their slaves
just to make ends meet. Basically, Yeah, that's right, and
I think most of her brother and sisters did the
same thing from what I could tell. Uh. And you know,
(11:09):
she grew up working and eventually they brought her inside
his housemaid, even though she preferred to be outside. And
once again, once she was inside, she would be whipped
from the mistress of the house if her work in
her dusting and her cooking and dishwashing was not adequate
enough for her. Uh. And you know she suffered. It
(11:30):
was just part of daily life basically until this incident
as a teenager um really kind of changed things for her. Um.
She was in a store, uh, and there was a
fugitive slave that was I couldn't quite tells in the
store or just trying to get out of the store.
But her overseer went to confront this fugitive slave, and Harriet,
(11:53):
I guess got the bug of trying to help a
slave get away early on and literally got in this
man's way to let this fugitive slave get away. He
already had this weight, this iron that he was I
guess trying to swing and throw at this fugitive slave,
and he end up hitting Harriet in the head uh
and caused a really severe head injury to her. Yeah.
(12:15):
For the rest of her life. She had a traumatic
brain injury, because I mean, getting hit in the head
with a two pound weight, that's gonna that's bad enough.
But the fact that's happening in the middle of the
nineteenth century and there's basically nothing they can do for
you medically, that yeah, you know, they didn't exactly send
her to the best hospital in town. So she as
(12:36):
a result of that brain injury, it's been later diagnosed
that she developed narcolepsy cataplexy. UM. They called it at
the time sleeping sickness. But she developed this um, this
thing where she would just fall asleep out of nowhere.
No matter what she was doing, she would just fall
dead asleep and would stay that way for hours sometimes
(13:01):
and could could not be roused, Like you could not
wake her up at the time. And then during these periods, UM,
she said that she would have very vivid, like religious dreams,
and UM, they kind of attribute her super religiousness. I
guess you would call it that that really she carried
(13:21):
throughout her life kind of came from these dreams. She
was an extremely devout religious person, and UM, a lot
of it was this idea that she was being kind
of personally guided by God through her life thanks to
those dreams, right and this UM that anarcalypse here. The
repercussions from being hit in the head like that did
(13:41):
not serve her well in her life as a slave either,
as you can imagine, UM, her overseers did not. UM.
They were not sympathetic to the fact that she was
injured and could not be roused. Uh you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, No, she was like recovering from her
head injury, still in They were trying to sell her
but couldn't find any buyers. And then I also is
(14:04):
kind of UM pointed to as one of the driving
forces for what made her escape finally when she's like,
I'm out of here. She was very worried about being
sold off and separated from her family. So she would
have rather had control of the situation and separated herself
from her family. She could come back if she needed to.
So she was worried about being sold off, um, because
(14:28):
she just couldn't work like the others anymore. And she
took off an eighteen March eighteen forty nine for the
first time she escaped. Yeah, and she was married by
this point. In eighteen forty four, she married a freeman
named John Tubman Uh and the marriage wouldn't last long,
but she did keep that name and then began, and
(14:49):
I'm not sure why, but began using her mother's first name,
which was Harriet. So that's how she became Harriet Tubman Uh.
And her husband refused to go basically when she said,
I'm getting out of here, so she got her brother's
been in her Henry to run away with her. UM.
After a couple of weeks on the lamb uh Ben
(15:10):
in Henry. You know, it was a scary life out
there as a fugitive slave. UM. And they said, you
know what, I'm gonna go back, and she said, uh, Well,
she went back with them initially, but then said you
know what, I'm I'm out of here. And thence time
she went all by herself. Yeah. So the following September,
September seventy nine, she left again by herself, and she um.
(15:33):
Basically it was a rehearsal for what she would do
later on as a conductor on the underground railroad. She
traveled at night. She used the North Star as a guide. UM.
She stayed during the day with Quaker families who were
abolitionists that would hide her um under under the threat
(15:53):
of persecution and prosecution. I should say this is a
teen forty nine, so at the time the laws weren't
quite a strict but as we'll see, they definitely got stricter,
but it was still like you could, you know, go
to jail or get in trouble for housing a fugitive
slave to these people were definitely putting their next on
the line to help her, And eventually she made her
way through Delaware and into Pennsylvania, which was a free state,
(16:16):
um and I don't know if it was ever a
slate state. I think it was probably founded as a
free state. And when she got into Pennsylvania, she compared
it to to showing up in heaven. Basically, Yeah, the
sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields,
and I felt like I was in heaven, is the
direct quote, which is just a wonderful, wonderful thing to say.
(16:37):
And like, I can't imagine the feeling after being on
her own. Her husband wouldn't come, her brothers went back
to be so brave uh to go on her own,
although she did get help along the way, uh, and
to finally reach Pennsylvania. Man, It's just unbelievable. So the
thing is, though, is she apparently always said later in life,
(17:00):
and a lot of this, we should say, is from
that biography of her um from Sarah Hopkins Bradford, which
was contemporary. It was done while she was alive in
eighteen sixty nine, so this is her telling her own story.
But she said basically right out of the gate, you know,
she was glad to be in Pennsylvania, but there was
a part of her missing, like she left her family behind.
(17:20):
Her husband was still back there. She never had kids. Uh,
she never gave birth to a kid, but later on
she would adopt a kid. But she had like nieces
and nephews there, um, and she just felt like her
her family was back there and they needed to be
free as well. So she resolved basically from the outset
to get them whenever she could. And that's a good
(17:43):
place to take a break. I thought so too, because
it sets up her work on the underground railroad and
we'll talk about that right after this, all right, Chuck,
(18:16):
So we're back eighteen forty nine, and uh, late eighteen
forty nine, Harriet Tubman has escaped and made it to Pennsylvania. Um,
and she settled in Philadelphia. She got work as a housekeeper,
a cook, and she was getting paid now for doing labor,
which was totally novel to her from what I can tell.
(18:39):
And what she did with this money rather than like
go buy some nice stuff or have a ham dinner
or do whatever with it, she saved it to fund
her trip back into the slaved states, into Maryland below
the Mason Dixon line, to retrieve her family. That's what
she did with her me. Yes, she didn't even get
(19:01):
Eagles tickets and it would, uh, and it would it
would actually basically that's the that's the basis of what
she did with their money for the rest of her
working life, which is to say the rest of her life.
She worked her whole life to make ends meet, and
most of the time it was because she could can
she could support herself, but she was also supporting other
(19:22):
people as well, or trying to help other other slaves escape. Yeah.
So the underground Railroad, Um, we should probably do a
full episode on that at some point, But oh, my friend,
we did, did we? June two thousand and eleven? Well, no, wonder,
I don't remember that. It was a good one I
was six years ago. That was good. Well, we got
to bring it out for s Y s K select
(19:42):
for sure. In fact, maybe we should do that this month.
Let's do it so I do remember now. It was
a good one. It was. But the underground railroad was
a it was. It worked differently depending on who you are.
There was not one like growing up as a kid
always thought it was some um direct line. That was.
(20:05):
They always used the same path. But the underground railroad
depending on who you were as a conductor, which is
what they called them, uh, you had your own connections basically,
and and like you said earlier, sometimes they were these
Quaker families, but um they were always friendlies who would
help put you up and guide you from spot to
(20:25):
spot along the way. Um. Harriet Tubman ended up using
because she knew these um this land along the coast.
She would go the route that she knew best as
a friendly area. And they had all these ways of
communicating in front of their UH owners and their overseers.
(20:46):
A lot of times through song. They would use religious
passages and sing things uh, sing these biblical songs that
had all these secret messages in it. And of course
all the while the overseers have no idea that they're
actually sending secret mets. It just a one in there. Uh. Yeah,
one of them, Chuck was um there that they were
headed to Canaan, which is meaning you're heading to the
(21:08):
afterlife heaven, I guess. And what that actually meant in
code for the slaves who were preparing to escape was
that they were heading towards Canada, which was about as
free as it gets, it turns out. Yeah. Uh, she
would go Uh generally during the fall and during the
spring because the days were shorter and the weather was
(21:30):
a little more friendly. Um, she would she would leave
on a Saturday because Sunday the was a day of
rest for the owner, and they wouldn't find out until
Monday morning, and it wouldn't be posted and published till Monday. Uh,
probably not even Monday morning, you know, because it's not
like it was hot off the presses. It would probably
wouldn't even get until later on Monday. Right. Well, if
(21:50):
they only published the slave notices once a week, that
means that the ones that came in on Monday wouldn't
get published to the following Monday. So we give them
like a full week of of time to escape. Oh
did they only publish on Monday? That's what I got.
Oh okay, I didn't see that, So yeah, so she
was she was a pretty sharp tack. She would also
say I'm gonna meet you here. She would pass information
(22:11):
along to the slaves who were preparing to escape that
she was going to conduct where to meet, and it
was um invariably several miles away from where they lived,
so that it would become very clear if they had
been followed by the time they met up with her.
She also kept a pistol very famously with her, not
not just to protect herself for the people that she
(22:32):
was conducting, but also to let the people she was
conducting know that if they decided they were going to
turn back, she was going to shoot him because she
just couldn't risk them giving them up and betraying the
rest of the group. So it was once you were
on on the underground railroad with Harriet Tubman, there was
no going back. You were going on until you reached
(22:53):
a free state or were captured. It was one of
those two. The Tubman train goes in one direction. Yes,
that's what that was what she put on her cards,
that's right, and T shirts Actually I think she had
t shirts too. All right, So she's like you said,
she doesn't make a trip. She makes trip after trip
after trip. Uh. There's a lot of speculation on exactly
(23:14):
how many people I believe in the original biography, and
the number you will hear a lot is three hundred.
But they have done some investigating since then. Uh. And
some people have said it may have been like seventy people,
with another seventy that she kind of trained and taught
and empowered to leave. Um. But either way, it's a
lot of folks. Yeah, for sure, it's thirteen trips too.
(23:38):
I mean, like that's that's thirteen trips back to where
she was considered a fugitive slave and eventually grow had
a pretty sizeable bounty on her head. I saw forty
thou dollars, which is about a million dollars in today's money,
which means that there were there was a million dollars
(23:58):
for her capture and she still never got caught. People
still never got her from Philadelphia. Um, because just as
she would steal down to the below the Mason Dixon line,
slave steelers would steal up above the Mason Dixon line
and capture slaves and bring them back, especially ones that
had a huge bounty on their head. So the fact
(24:19):
that she had never been captured, and that she kept
going down below the Mason Dixon line, so supposedly at
one point she she had to go through her old
town where she was where she had escaped from back
in eighteen forty nine. And the fact that she kept
doing the stuff and her legend grew like she just
became well legend like and in her own time. Yeah,
(24:42):
and this is um. After eighteen fifty you kind of
hinted that things got even worse. That's when they passed
Congress past the Fugitive Slave Act, and this basically required
all citizens to assist in recapturing fugitive slaves. Um, it's
not like you had to work full time doing this,
but if you knew about it and you didn't do
(25:02):
something to make it happen, then you were then liable.
So basically everybody was, uh, unless you know, they were
confirmed friendly, everybody was after them, right for sure. And
the that that Fugitive Slave Act, in addition to um, well,
it did a lot of things right So before it
was kind of like if you were in a northern
(25:23):
free state, the fugitive slave laws didn't really apply to
you because you were in a free state. The fact
that that Fugitive Slave Act made it a federal law.
Now everybody in the US was subject to these this
Fugitive Slave Act, and it was one of those laws
where you could be punished for not doing anything like
just looking the other way. You could end up in
(25:44):
jail for six months and be fined a thousand dollars UM.
So anybody who was already helping on the underground railroad
was at risk before, but now they were really at
even more substantial risk after eighteen fifty, and as a result,
the end of the underground railroad got pushed further up
from Pennsylvania up to New York all the way up
(26:05):
to Canada. That was the end of the line for
the underground railroad after eighteen fifty. Yeah. So as this
is going on, as she is over a decade going
back and forth down the eastern shore of Maryland freeing slaves,
she is also um successfully speaking at abolitionist fundraising meetings. Um.
(26:28):
She was well known and they would ask you know
she was. She was a public speaker. UM. Obviously very
much on the download because she was a super big
target for the slave catchers. Like you were saying, but uh,
this only just like enriched her legend that she would
take breaks from rescuing slaves to go speak at a
at a fundraising meeting. Yeah. And one of the reasons
(26:49):
she was doing that in the first place was to
make money to fund her work on the underground railroad. Yeah.
That's pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely, because I mean, I imagine
the most of those families were doing this for nothing,
but I imagine they probably had to pay people off
along the way. Yeah, especially in Canada. Um, apparently you
(27:12):
could bribe the border guards pretty easily to say, oh,
you're visiting, huh, well, enjoy your time in Canada, and right,
and people would settle right across the the Niagara River
and St. Catherine's, Ontario is where a lot of them
ended up. Alright. So, in eighteen sixty, a very very
famous incident, and this is one of the most one
(27:33):
of the most well documented stories of the time. Um.
There this was in Troy, New York, and there was
a captured slave named Charles Noll and he that was
his real name. I can't remember the name that he
had been given, but his real name was Charles Noll.
They were trying to get him back to Virginia after
he had been captured as a fugitive, and everybody knew
(27:56):
about it, and uh, including Harriet Tubman. So she just
got ased herself as a little old lady. Um and
if you've seen pictures of her, almost all of them
are as a little old lady. It's kind of hard
to picture her as a young woman. But she dressed
herself up as the little old lady that she would
become in photos. She slipped into a building, a government building,
(28:18):
in disguise, and then basically gave the signal to all
of these people in town who mobbed as soon as
Unal was brought out under the streets. They basically just
mobbed him and took him away. Yes, she won't get
him a right, No, she went swarm swarm, but it worked,
(28:41):
and I guess they just had enough enough people to
overpower him and whisked him away on a riverboat. Yeah,
and these were federal marshals that they overpowered. Yeah, Like
it was like, yeah, we're we'll be taking this guy
from you. Amazing. That was in eighteen sixty, he said, Yeah,
that was the same year I believe that she did
her last trip on the underground railroad. Her second to
(29:03):
last trip was her parents, who were very elderly at
the time, but they ended up settling in St. Catherine's,
Ontario at first, and then her mother was like, it's
too cold here, so Harriet moved them down to Auburn,
New York, to upstate New York where the winters are
nice and right, yeah, exactly, almost muggy, you know. Um,
(29:23):
but that so that was her penultimate trip on the
underground roroad. The last one she went to go get
her sister Rachel. She had been trying to reach for
a decade, and she went back in eighteen sixty to
get her and found that Rachel had died. Actually, so
she um, she ended up taking a family that was
(29:45):
prepared to leave. Um, the Annals. Did you read about them? Yeah,
I mean Harriet Tubman was not one to waste a
trip down there. As sad as she was about her sister.
She's like, all right, let's I'll take you guys. Yeah.
So the Annals family was from and I can tell
a younger couple with an infant child, and um, Harriet
was like, we're gonna have the dope up the baby
(30:07):
because we can't have that baby crying. So I just
happened to have some tincture of opium and we'll give
the baby some of that. So they kept the baby
pretty high on this trip to make sure it didn't
cry and give away their their position. And that was
her last one. Eight sixty. Yeah, and so like we said,
they relocated from Canada to Auburn, New York. And um,
(30:31):
she bought, she bought land. She was a landowner, uh
remarkably in the eighteen fifties. Uh in Auburn. She bought
seven acres of land at a very friendly price from
William Seward right, and he was the guy who bought
Alaska later, that's right. So yeah, so she's a landowner now,
which is pretty significant. Like you're saying, should we take
(30:52):
another break, I think we shall, all right, we'll we'll
finish up with um geez the rest of our life,
which was also remarkable. So it took the end of
(31:28):
that underground railroad that was basically where my study as
a younger lad of um Harriet Tubman left off the
rest of our I had no idea about, did you M.
I had heard things here and there but I for
sure was not taught this in elementary or high school.
Well to lay it on them, Well, the Civil War
breaks out in eighteen sixty one, and the governor of Massachusetts,
(31:51):
John A. Andrew was very much an abolitionist, and Tubbin
was a friend of his, and he said, you know what,
who do I know that is super stealthy and super
sneaky and has a neck for uh making her way
around the woods without attracting attention, and can get information
(32:13):
from us about the Confederate Army. And how about my
little buddy, Harriet Tubman. Yeah, and so she became a spy. Yeah.
The governor of Massachusetts tapped her to become a spy
for the Union Army. So he paid for her passage
down to Hilton Head, I believe, South Carolina, and she
um was enlisted officially under the cover story that she
(32:37):
was there to um give out like blankets and food
and clothing to the slaves that were escaping from in
the amidst the chaos of war. There's a lot of
slaves that were making their way to Union camps and
finding shelter Um there and her role supposedly was to
make sure that they were cared for that. Like I said,
(32:58):
that was just a cover story. What she was actually
really there to do was to basically lead an intelligence
gathering scouting group, basically assemble a guerrilla scouting special forces
group behind enemy lines in South Carolina. And that's what
she did. Yeah. I wonder if any of the Union
soldiers when she showed up and said, you know, I'm
(33:19):
here to give out blankets and stuff, They're like, yeah, right,
I know who you are, Right, we see those you
see those muscles. Yeah, you're not giving up blankets. We
know your your track record. Uh. So specifically she worked,
it seems like most often with African American troops once
Lincoln authorized African American troops for the Union Army in
(33:40):
eighteen sixty two. She would go ahead of these teams
and do everything from try and get information on Confederate
positions and armaments to uh to working with these guys.
In June sixty three, it's a really cool story, she
accompanied Union Colonel James montgom Re up the Kambahi River
(34:03):
and this was in South Carolina and they were going
to conduct a raid. And so what they found out
was there all these minds that had been set up
uh by uh were they buy slaves or by um So,
under the direction of the Confederates, they had slaves go
set minds out in the river. And so she went
and found the slaves who had set the minds there
(34:25):
so they could tell her where it was. And that
must have been nerve wracking. It was because not only
did she go find out where it was, so that
step one, which is huge, she went and got the
intail where the minds were. She was in charge of
leading directing the Union ships around these mines. So she
(34:45):
I'm sure she has had her fingers across the whole time.
But prior to that, even she had also led a
raid of um this the scouts that she had assembled
to gather intel and to get supplies behind Confederate lines
from some sort of Confederate encampment. And that made her
the first women woman in US history to command an
(35:08):
expedition force in wartime. Yeah, but sadly, for all her efforts,
she was never given military pension like she should have
a federally that is no, so that's like a whole
that's a whole other can of worms. Right, So she
she successfully makes it through the Civil War um and
(35:28):
starting right. I think in eighteen sixty five she applied
for benefits, right um, she asked for something like thirty
dollars a month. Even though scouts in the Civil War
were paid sixty dollars a month and regular soldiers were
given a pension of fifteen dollars a month, she asked
for thirty um and she was denied. Officially, the reason
(35:49):
she was denied was because there was no documentation. Remember, like,
officially her cover story was that she was handing out
blankets and all that. And that first petition for a
pension started a thirty four year quest to finally get
recognition in the form of a pension from the federal
(36:09):
government for the amazing amount of stuff she did in
the Civil War. And finally they despite the fact that
there were Cabinet members and congress people and governors who
were personally involving themselves in this matter, trying to get
this pushed through the pensions Bureau, was like, we can't
do it. If we give it to her, it's going
to open it up for all these other people. So
(36:31):
it just so happens that she she married a Civil
War veteran um who was much younger than her and
he when he died, she started collecting a pension. So
she got a pension, not because of all of the
stuff she did in the war. She got a pension
because she married a Civil War veteran, a man who died,
(36:51):
and she got a widows pension instead. Yeah, well, she
would eventually go getting her own pension, but not for
the work she does a spy, but for work she
does an army nurse. Right, So they uped it finally
in eight thirty four years after she applied from I
think twelve dollars a month to now eight dollars a
month to twenty dollars a month was what she got
(37:14):
for the rest of her life. Yeah, and guess guess
who she spent that money on Philadelphia Eagles tickets. No,
she's she's spent it to open up a home. Uh. Well,
she she bought some more property adjacent to her own
property there in Auburn, New York, and she started home
(37:34):
for elderly African American people. And seven years after that,
she you know, she was kind of getting up in
age by that point, so she turned the property over
to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church where she went
uh and said you guys, can you please still run
this thing? They said, no problem, And she lived next
door to it until she got old enough to where
(37:56):
she needed to be in the home that she founded,
and that is where she finally passed away in nineteen thirteen. Yeah.
The family legend is that on the day she died,
she had been bedridden for a while, but she suddenly
regained her strength and you know, got up out of
bed with some help and ate some food and went
around and the just kind of shuffled around from room
(38:17):
to room, just taking in the house. Uh, and then
went back to bed and died. Man. It's just pretty neat. Yeah.
And in between that time, when she was living in
upstate New York, she uh, you know, she farmed and
she uh, by all accounts, was like a was a
great farmer and lived off the land. Uh. And you know,
(38:39):
the life was okay for her. But she also had
had a lot of you know, fresh out off of
the Civil War, had a lot of rude awakenings. It's
not like things instantaneously changed, uh for African Americans in
the United States. UM. One case, in fact, she was
on a train and she had what's called the soldiers
pass which she could, you know, ride the rails for
free as a soldier. And she legitimately got this pass
(39:01):
and the train conductor wouldn't accept it. Uh. She got
into an argument with them, and then he got together
with other passengers and physically threw her into the baggage car,
which broke her arm, broke three ribs. She couldn't work
for months, and you know, famous Harriet Tubman had basically
was forced to be bedridden for a while except handouts
(39:23):
from her neighbors just to keep her family fed because
she had had her arm and ribs broken at the
hands of a conductor and that horribly ironic. Yes, so
that happened right after the Civil War, right, Uh yeah,
So she was nursed back to health and and like
you said, she made ends meet um farming, um selling.
(39:46):
I think she was known for selling pies and root
beer and gingerbread is what she sold, which is pretty
happy stuff really if you think about it. I bet
that was some good gingerbread and um she lived with
her parents. Remember her mom complained ab out the weather
in St. Catharines, Ontario. Um, so she moved them down
to Auburn, New York, to her land and she cared
(40:09):
for them. Uh. And she used some of the money
to put one of her nephews, who she'd earlier helped
escape from slavery through school. Uh. He studied to become
a teacher and moved down to South Carolina and taught
and he eventually became part of the reconstructionist legislature there. Um.
She used her money pretty wisely. Yes, she opened the
(40:29):
Old Folks Home. She did a lot of really great
stuff from from the day she first got paid to
the last day of her life. Yeah, she got married
again too. She married a man Union Army veteran named
Nelson Davis. Uh, twenty two years younger than her. Yeah,
that's the guy she got the pension from. Right, and
(40:50):
they married in eighteen sixty nine. And on her gravestone
it says Harriet Tubman Davis. And Um. She ended up
being buried with full military honors at four Hill Cemetery
in Auburn, which is really really great. Uh. They commissioned
a liberty ship, the s S. Harriet Tubman during World
War Two. Um, she's been in Um. Well, they're developing
(41:13):
a couple of movies right now, one with Viola Davis,
which you know she's fantastic, so that should be good.
What else? National Historic Landmarks from where she lived? Um,
National Register of Historic Places. And then finally, in a
couple of years ago, President Obama and his administration said,
you know what, we are going to take Andrew Jackson
(41:35):
off the twenty dollar bill and we're gonna put Harriet
Tubman on it. Uh. And it's hard to tell if
that's still an active thing, because all we know right
now is current Treasury Secretary Steve Nuncheon UM basically is
declining comment right now and saying we got a lot
of other stuff to focus on. I saw follow up
two weeks later. That's the latest I saw, but two
(41:57):
weeks after he initially said that UM, they were proceeding,
that it was basically going through, but that it wouldn't
be out until after because I think the ten dollar
bill and then the five dollar bill were scheduled to
be updated first, and then the twenty dollar bill. So
she's in the queue. She's in the queue, yeah, for sure.
And she that won't be the first time she's appeared
(42:19):
on anything. She was UM on a stamp, I believe
back in nineteen seventy nine. I think she might have
been the first African American woman on a stamp. YEP,
it's pretty pretty significant. But her being on currency is
just that's just a sea change in America and wanted
to be proud of for sure. Um, so what else? Man?
(42:43):
You got anything else on her? I got nothing else.
That's Harriet Tubman in a nutshell. God bless her. If
you want to know more about Harriet Tubman, there's tons
more stuff out there. There's actually really good site that
we both used called I think Harriet dashed Codman dot org.
Don't spell out. I think that was just me saying
(43:04):
that they have a lot of really good information on there.
You can look for this article on how stuff works
dot com by typing in the search bar too. And
since I said search parts, time for listener mail? Uh,
you know instead of listener mail today we need to
shout out our CIVA team because we have not done
that in a long time and now we've been kind
(43:25):
of neglectful. So k I v a dot org slash
team slash stuff you should know, or you can just
go to Cuba and look up on the teams. UM
many years ago, we started Freezy. Don't those of you
who don't know. Kiva is a micro lending organization and
website where you can um donate money and small amounts
(43:46):
to entrepreneurs and business people all over the world who
who don't have the means to to raise money themselves
for their small businesses. And then you can re lend
that money once they pay it back, or you can
draw it out if you want to draw it out.
So we started a team many years ago, UM, and
(44:06):
I haven't looked in a while, and I was astonished.
Have you seen what we've raised? All? Right, hold onto
your hats the stuff you should know. Team has now
raised four point seven million bucks. What how about that?
That's amazing. That is a hundred and sixty nine thousand
loans uh, nine thousand, nine hundred and twelve members. And
(44:28):
just to give you guys an idea of how this works, UM,
I put in and this was what was this eight
eight or nine years ago? Put in three d and
fifty bucks, uh, the only money I've ever put into it.
And since then that money has been reloaned to the
tune of twenty three hundred dollars over the years. So
(44:50):
you can even put in fifty dollars and just keep
reloaning that over the years and through all those eight years,
I looked at my account today, I've only had forty
two dollars in loss. Is that is not bad, not
bad at all. So that's money that does not get
paid back and it, as you can tell, that does
not happen much. Yeah. Yeah, uh, And if you want
to join our team, go to kiva dot org slash
(45:13):
teams slash stuff you should know and uh that team
is our team has led unofficially slash officially by Glenn
and Sonja who keep things going pretty smoothly for us
over there. So thanks again Glenn and Sonia for everything
you've been doing all these years. Yeah. So I think
a goal we can set right now. We always set
money goals, but since we have nine thousand and twelve members,
(45:36):
why don't we try and get to ten thousand members?
And that is not much, that's like, you know, less
than a hundred people signing onto the team, leaning a
little bit of dough, let's do. Let's do so ten
thousand members by the end by the summer, by June one. Yeah,
that should be easy. And one trillion dollars by June
(45:57):
one as well. That would be great. And it's really cool.
You can see if you go to your account, you
can they have follow ups from people who you loan
the money to, like real stories of what happened with
your money. Uh, and they're always just great stories. And
it's a really easy way if you have, um, you know,
five cups of coffee worth of money laying around. Yeah,
(46:19):
it's a donated Yeah. And if you want to know
more about it, we've blogged about it extensively. So goes
the Stuff you Should Know dot com and look up
Kiva and it should bring up a bunch of posts
and um for a good I think overview to just
go listen to the micro lending episode from back in
the day too. That's right. Well, Uh, if you want
to get in touch with us, you can. You can
(46:40):
do that. You can do it on Twitter at s
Y s K podcast or at Josh M. Clark can
do it on Facebook, Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can
send all of us an email. The Stuff podcast at
how Stuffworks dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web Stuff you Should Know com
(47:05):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works? Dot com mhm m
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour in eighteen and where
are we going? On April four, we're going to be
in Boston at the Wilburg. You can get tickets at
the Wilber dot com, Chuck. And then on April five,
we're gonna be in d C at the Lincoln Theater
and you can get tickets for that at ticket fly
that's right. And then we're going to two new cities,
right yep. On May we're gonna be in St. Louis.
(00:20):
You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May twenty three,
we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets
there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck,
that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood,
Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June and possibly adding
a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned for that, yep.
And you can get ticks at a x S dot com.
(00:41):
So come see us live. We'll have a good time.
Come on out. Welcome to Stuff you should know from
House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and they're is Charles w Chuck Bryant,
(01:01):
and there's Jerry over there, and this is stuff you
should know in Black History month. Toda, how you doing? Man?
I'm tired? Are you? You've been burning the candles at
all three ends? Uh? I didn't know candles had three ends.
And look look at it when they work as hard
as you check, they got three inns. So bright, How
(01:22):
are you doing? You holding up at least? I don't know.
It's TVD I Now you see these uh see these circles. Yeah,
they're a little pronounced. I wasn't gonna say anything, but
that's fine. Yeah. I guess when that circles their half moons?
Yeah there, um, well they're half moons the size of
(01:43):
half dollars. A lot of people say circles into their
eyes when they're not to circles. I wonder if they're
just seeing the rest of it, like their mind is
filling in the rest. Maybe they're all just insane seeing
something we're not maybe so well. At any rate, we're
all pulling for you. You need any super anything. Now,
Jerry's got that as you can smell. Yeah, it's kind
(02:03):
of nice. This this stage chairs. What is that? It's her? Well,
she won't talk so right, She's just she's doing sign
language for Ramen. I love Rahman. Don't you sure? Nothing
perched up like Ramen except a really great history story.
(02:28):
That's right, we're gonna do that today. Way to go
choosing this one, Chuck, is this was this a request
of yours or did just so happened it was on
the site? No, I just you know, I've been wanting
to cover more famous women in history, and um, obviously
during Black History months, this is a perfect time to
talk about Harriet Tubman. And this article points out and
(02:51):
I thought very astutely like her legend in her her
icon ship, I I kind of classic could chip Yes,
uh is so great that? Um? I think sometimes a
lot of people may not even know the nitty gritty
details of her life, you know, I mean, I I know,
(03:14):
I didn't. I I was, you know, raised in America
in the seventies and eighties as a school kid into
the mid nineties, we could even say, um, and I
like I knew of Harriet Tubman. I was taught to
honor and respect her for what she did as a
conductor on the underground railroad. What I didn't know is
that that was about a third of the reason why
(03:36):
she's famous and legendary. Yeah. I mean the school lessons
were shamefully short, because that's about all I learned was
just about the underground railroad her her role in it
to a very limited degree. Um that they taught us
that it's not her role, and that was kind of it. Yeah.
(03:56):
But the fact that, like I mean, there's so much
more to this woman's life. She just did so much.
She packed so much life in, whether it was by
her own accord or against her will, she just had
a very long, full life. Um. And the fact that
we know about the the life of a nineteenth mid
(04:17):
nineteenth century black woman who was born a slave in Maryland,
that we know this much about it really speaks volumes.
I'm glad that there's this much out there, and it
seems like there's more and more being added to it
every day. Yeah, it definitely helps that. Uh. In the
eighteen sixties, there was a very famous biography written by
Sarah Hopkins Bradford, one of the earlier biographies in UM.
(04:41):
Since then, we've learned some more stuff and cleaned up
a bit of the truth from the legend. But you know,
it only got better yeah. I mean, if it's just
the stuff that is verifiable fact is still just astounding.
It kind of makes me feel like a lump and
a loser. Look, I'm not I'm not doing much with
my life. Well, we're teaching people about Harriet tubban It lea,
(05:02):
so it counts for something, I guess. All right, so
you want to start at the beginning. Yeah, in the beginning,
of course, because Harriet tubman Um was born. When she
was born, there weren't great birth records for for black
people in the United States at the time, so we
don't know for sure when she was born. Um eighteen
(05:24):
twenty five is what she has claimed on various documents
later in life. But I've seen everywhere from eighteen eighty five,
so somewhere in that range. Yeah, this article in how
staff Work says eighteen twenty two. I've seen that in
various places too, and that is shameful in and of itself. Yeah,
but again, like it's not like the people who were
(05:44):
not keeping records on slave births at the time. We're like, well,
this lady is actually going to grow up to be
one of the most legendary women in American history, so
we should probably note this. Um. The thing is is,
even though they didn't, they didn't note her birth because
they didn't realize how famous she was going to be.
She started to make a name for herself pretty early
on in life. Um. She had about five years to
(06:08):
kind of be raised as a child before she was
hired out as a basically an infant rocker. Her job
was to stay up at night and rock and infant
to make sure that the infant didn't cry. And every
time the infant cried, she would, um get a lashing
from what I understand. Yeah, and just reading through kind
(06:28):
of her early life, it seems like, um, well let
me couch that for one second. She was one of
nine children born in like you said, in Maryland and
Dorchester County unless they pronounce it Dorster Doyly Doyle County
which is along the eastern shore, to Benjamin Ross and
(06:50):
Harriet uh Rit Green h and her she was actually
born are very beautiful name, are Amanta Ross. Yeah, I
had no idea about that, did you know? And her
parents called her Minty Minty Ross, which is just a
very kind of cute nickname for a kid, it is.
And she was actually a third generation slave in America.
(07:13):
Her grandmother on her maternal side was named Modesty, and
her family has done some research and have concluded that
Modesty was almost certainly um from the Ashanti group and
was stolen either from the Ivory Coast or Ghana and
then was taken eventually to Maryland where she was owned
(07:35):
by a guy named Athol Pattison. Is that right, Pattison?
I think so. The thing about that and the reason
why this guy really kind of figures into the story
in a cringe worthy way. Athol Pattison um who then
owned Harriet Tubman's grandmother and then mother, and then Harriet
and her siblings because they were all from the same line.
(07:59):
He had in his will that when when any of
them turned forty five they were free, they were what
was called manumitted. The problem is that he was dead,
so he wasn't around to enforce his will, and that
actually never happened. So even though on paper, legally Harriet Tubman,
all of her siblings, her mother, and her grandmother all
(08:20):
should have been manumitted whenever they hit age forty five,
absolutely none of them were. Yeah, and her father did
gain his freedom, but was still married to a woman
who uh did not have her freedom. Uh. And you
don't hear about this a lot in in the history
books where families were um divided between free and owned, um,
(08:42):
which makes a bad situation even worse, you know. Yeah,
And I'd like to look into that because that kind
of popped up here there and almost casually, you know,
like without much explanation. So I wonder what that was like.
Was it was it just like, you know, you both
went to work and did basically the same labor, but
one of you, um was paid for it. Uh? Was
(09:02):
there like less like physical punishment or coercion? Like what
was the distinction? Yeah, I'm not really sure, um, but
like you are, you know, what I was setting up
was after she worked as a as a childcare baby
rocker of sorts and got whipped on the neck by
(09:22):
the woman of the house every time her baby cried,
which that's you know, that's a whole other thing. Yeah,
and again she's five at the time, five years old. Um.
She went on to work on the farm later on
when she got a little older, and by all accounts, UM,
for the rest of her her working life, her you know,
(09:43):
as a slave, was much preferred working on the farm
and basically like, I don't want to work for these
white women. Um, they're worse than the men, right, or
at least in her case. Plus also, I mean she
was pretty able bodied. She supposedly was super muscular from
doing um physical labor for so many years. It was
pretty good at it. Five tall and um from what
(10:06):
I could tell, just as strong as could be. Right,
So um she the the owners of her family, um
Ethyl Pattison's daughter and son in law. They were um
kind of like Michael Fossbender's family in twelve years of
slave They were not at all wealthy plantation owners, but
(10:28):
they were just out of the social hierarchy at the
time able to afford and keep slaves. But rather, since
they didn't have a huge plantation for their slaves to
work on, they would hire them out. That's how, um
how Harry ended up like working at age five rocking babies,
(10:48):
or she was hired out to go get muskrats out
of traps and swamps and stuff like that. Just like basically,
whatever somebody needed an extra hand for they would contact
this family and the family would hire out their slaves
just to make ends meet. Basically, Yeah, that's right, and
I think most of her brother and sisters did the
same thing from what I could tell. Uh. And you know,
(11:09):
she grew up working and eventually they brought her inside
his housemaid, even though she preferred to be outside. And
once again, once she was inside, she would be whipped
from the mistress of the house if her work in
her dusting and her cooking and dishwashing was not adequate
enough for her. Uh. And you know she suffered. It
(11:30):
was just part of daily life basically until this incident
as a teenager um really kind of changed things for her. Um.
She was in a store, uh, and there was a
fugitive slave that was I couldn't quite tells in the
store or just trying to get out of the store.
But her overseer went to confront this fugitive slave, and Harriet,
(11:53):
I guess got the bug of trying to help a
slave get away early on and literally got in this
man's way to let this fugitive slave get away. He
already had this weight, this iron that he was I
guess trying to swing and throw at this fugitive slave,
and he end up hitting Harriet in the head uh
and caused a really severe head injury to her. Yeah.
(12:15):
For the rest of her life. She had a traumatic
brain injury, because I mean, getting hit in the head
with a two pound weight, that's gonna that's bad enough.
But the fact that's happening in the middle of the
nineteenth century and there's basically nothing they can do for
you medically, that yeah, you know, they didn't exactly send
her to the best hospital in town. So she as
(12:36):
a result of that brain injury, it's been later diagnosed
that she developed narcolepsy cataplexy. UM. They called it at
the time sleeping sickness. But she developed this um, this
thing where she would just fall asleep out of nowhere.
No matter what she was doing, she would just fall
dead asleep and would stay that way for hours sometimes
(13:01):
and could could not be roused, Like you could not
wake her up at the time. And then during these periods, UM,
she said that she would have very vivid, like religious dreams,
and UM, they kind of attribute her super religiousness. I
guess you would call it that that really she carried
(13:21):
throughout her life kind of came from these dreams. She
was an extremely devout religious person, and UM, a lot
of it was this idea that she was being kind
of personally guided by God through her life thanks to
those dreams, right and this UM that anarcalypse here. The
repercussions from being hit in the head like that did
(13:41):
not serve her well in her life as a slave either,
as you can imagine, UM, her overseers did not. UM.
They were not sympathetic to the fact that she was
injured and could not be roused. Uh you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, No, she was like recovering from her
head injury, still in They were trying to sell her
but couldn't find any buyers. And then I also is
(14:04):
kind of UM pointed to as one of the driving
forces for what made her escape finally when she's like,
I'm out of here. She was very worried about being
sold off and separated from her family. So she would
have rather had control of the situation and separated herself
from her family. She could come back if she needed to.
So she was worried about being sold off, um, because
(14:28):
she just couldn't work like the others anymore. And she
took off an eighteen March eighteen forty nine for the
first time she escaped. Yeah, and she was married by
this point. In eighteen forty four, she married a freeman
named John Tubman Uh and the marriage wouldn't last long,
but she did keep that name and then began, and
(14:49):
I'm not sure why, but began using her mother's first name,
which was Harriet. So that's how she became Harriet Tubman Uh.
And her husband refused to go basically when she said,
I'm getting out of here, so she got her brother's
been in her Henry to run away with her. UM.
After a couple of weeks on the lamb uh Ben
(15:10):
in Henry. You know, it was a scary life out
there as a fugitive slave. UM. And they said, you
know what, I'm gonna go back, and she said, uh, Well,
she went back with them initially, but then said you
know what, I'm I'm out of here. And thence time
she went all by herself. Yeah. So the following September,
September seventy nine, she left again by herself, and she um.
(15:33):
Basically it was a rehearsal for what she would do
later on as a conductor on the underground railroad. She
traveled at night. She used the North Star as a guide. UM.
She stayed during the day with Quaker families who were
abolitionists that would hide her um under under the threat
(15:53):
of persecution and prosecution. I should say this is a
teen forty nine, so at the time the laws weren't
quite a strict but as we'll see, they definitely got stricter,
but it was still like you could, you know, go
to jail or get in trouble for housing a fugitive
slave to these people were definitely putting their next on
the line to help her, And eventually she made her
way through Delaware and into Pennsylvania, which was a free state,
(16:16):
um and I don't know if it was ever a
slate state. I think it was probably founded as a
free state. And when she got into Pennsylvania, she compared
it to to showing up in heaven. Basically, Yeah, the
sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields,
and I felt like I was in heaven, is the
direct quote, which is just a wonderful, wonderful thing to say.
(16:37):
And like, I can't imagine the feeling after being on
her own. Her husband wouldn't come, her brothers went back
to be so brave uh to go on her own,
although she did get help along the way, uh, and
to finally reach Pennsylvania. Man, It's just unbelievable. So the
thing is, though, is she apparently always said later in life,
(17:00):
and a lot of this, we should say, is from
that biography of her um from Sarah Hopkins Bradford, which
was contemporary. It was done while she was alive in
eighteen sixty nine, so this is her telling her own story.
But she said basically right out of the gate, you know,
she was glad to be in Pennsylvania, but there was
a part of her missing, like she left her family behind.
(17:20):
Her husband was still back there. She never had kids. Uh,
she never gave birth to a kid, but later on
she would adopt a kid. But she had like nieces
and nephews there, um, and she just felt like her
her family was back there and they needed to be
free as well. So she resolved basically from the outset
to get them whenever she could. And that's a good
(17:43):
place to take a break. I thought so too, because
it sets up her work on the underground railroad and
we'll talk about that right after this, all right, Chuck,
(18:16):
So we're back eighteen forty nine, and uh, late eighteen
forty nine, Harriet Tubman has escaped and made it to Pennsylvania. Um,
and she settled in Philadelphia. She got work as a housekeeper,
a cook, and she was getting paid now for doing labor,
which was totally novel to her from what I can tell.
(18:39):
And what she did with this money rather than like
go buy some nice stuff or have a ham dinner
or do whatever with it, she saved it to fund
her trip back into the slaved states, into Maryland below
the Mason Dixon line, to retrieve her family. That's what
she did with her me. Yes, she didn't even get
(19:01):
Eagles tickets and it would, uh, and it would it
would actually basically that's the that's the basis of what
she did with their money for the rest of her
working life, which is to say the rest of her life.
She worked her whole life to make ends meet, and
most of the time it was because she could can
she could support herself, but she was also supporting other
(19:22):
people as well, or trying to help other other slaves escape. Yeah.
So the underground Railroad, Um, we should probably do a
full episode on that at some point, But oh, my friend,
we did, did we? June two thousand and eleven? Well, no, wonder,
I don't remember that. It was a good one I
was six years ago. That was good. Well, we got
to bring it out for s Y s K select
(19:42):
for sure. In fact, maybe we should do that this month.
Let's do it so I do remember now. It was
a good one. It was. But the underground railroad was
a it was. It worked differently depending on who you are.
There was not one like growing up as a kid
always thought it was some um direct line. That was.
(20:05):
They always used the same path. But the underground railroad
depending on who you were as a conductor, which is
what they called them, uh, you had your own connections basically,
and and like you said earlier, sometimes they were these
Quaker families, but um they were always friendlies who would
help put you up and guide you from spot to
(20:25):
spot along the way. Um. Harriet Tubman ended up using
because she knew these um this land along the coast.
She would go the route that she knew best as
a friendly area. And they had all these ways of
communicating in front of their UH owners and their overseers.
(20:46):
A lot of times through song. They would use religious
passages and sing things uh, sing these biblical songs that
had all these secret messages in it. And of course
all the while the overseers have no idea that they're
actually sending secret mets. It just a one in there. Uh. Yeah,
one of them, Chuck was um there that they were
headed to Canaan, which is meaning you're heading to the
(21:08):
afterlife heaven, I guess. And what that actually meant in
code for the slaves who were preparing to escape was
that they were heading towards Canada, which was about as
free as it gets, it turns out. Yeah. Uh, she
would go Uh generally during the fall and during the
spring because the days were shorter and the weather was
(21:30):
a little more friendly. Um, she would she would leave
on a Saturday because Sunday the was a day of
rest for the owner, and they wouldn't find out until
Monday morning, and it wouldn't be posted and published till Monday. Uh,
probably not even Monday morning, you know, because it's not
like it was hot off the presses. It would probably
wouldn't even get until later on Monday. Right. Well, if
(21:50):
they only published the slave notices once a week, that
means that the ones that came in on Monday wouldn't
get published to the following Monday. So we give them
like a full week of of time to escape. Oh
did they only publish on Monday? That's what I got.
Oh okay, I didn't see that, So yeah, so she
was she was a pretty sharp tack. She would also
say I'm gonna meet you here. She would pass information
(22:11):
along to the slaves who were preparing to escape that
she was going to conduct where to meet, and it
was um invariably several miles away from where they lived,
so that it would become very clear if they had
been followed by the time they met up with her.
She also kept a pistol very famously with her, not
not just to protect herself for the people that she
(22:32):
was conducting, but also to let the people she was
conducting know that if they decided they were going to
turn back, she was going to shoot him because she
just couldn't risk them giving them up and betraying the
rest of the group. So it was once you were
on on the underground railroad with Harriet Tubman, there was
no going back. You were going on until you reached
(22:53):
a free state or were captured. It was one of
those two. The Tubman train goes in one direction. Yes,
that's what that was what she put on her cards,
that's right, and T shirts Actually I think she had
t shirts too. All right, So she's like you said,
she doesn't make a trip. She makes trip after trip
after trip. Uh. There's a lot of speculation on exactly
(23:14):
how many people I believe in the original biography, and
the number you will hear a lot is three hundred.
But they have done some investigating since then. Uh. And
some people have said it may have been like seventy people,
with another seventy that she kind of trained and taught
and empowered to leave. Um. But either way, it's a
lot of folks. Yeah, for sure, it's thirteen trips too.
(23:38):
I mean, like that's that's thirteen trips back to where
she was considered a fugitive slave and eventually grow had
a pretty sizeable bounty on her head. I saw forty
thou dollars, which is about a million dollars in today's money,
which means that there were there was a million dollars
(23:58):
for her capture and she still never got caught. People
still never got her from Philadelphia. Um, because just as
she would steal down to the below the Mason Dixon line,
slave steelers would steal up above the Mason Dixon line
and capture slaves and bring them back, especially ones that
had a huge bounty on their head. So the fact
(24:19):
that she had never been captured, and that she kept
going down below the Mason Dixon line, so supposedly at
one point she she had to go through her old
town where she was where she had escaped from back
in eighteen forty nine. And the fact that she kept
doing the stuff and her legend grew like she just
became well legend like and in her own time. Yeah,
(24:42):
and this is um. After eighteen fifty you kind of
hinted that things got even worse. That's when they passed
Congress past the Fugitive Slave Act, and this basically required
all citizens to assist in recapturing fugitive slaves. Um, it's
not like you had to work full time doing this,
but if you knew about it and you didn't do
(25:02):
something to make it happen, then you were then liable.
So basically everybody was, uh, unless you know, they were
confirmed friendly, everybody was after them, right for sure. And
the that that Fugitive Slave Act, in addition to um, well,
it did a lot of things right So before it
was kind of like if you were in a northern
(25:23):
free state, the fugitive slave laws didn't really apply to
you because you were in a free state. The fact
that that Fugitive Slave Act made it a federal law.
Now everybody in the US was subject to these this
Fugitive Slave Act, and it was one of those laws
where you could be punished for not doing anything like
just looking the other way. You could end up in
(25:44):
jail for six months and be fined a thousand dollars UM.
So anybody who was already helping on the underground railroad
was at risk before, but now they were really at
even more substantial risk after eighteen fifty, and as a result,
the end of the underground railroad got pushed further up
from Pennsylvania up to New York all the way up
(26:05):
to Canada. That was the end of the line for
the underground railroad after eighteen fifty. Yeah. So as this
is going on, as she is over a decade going
back and forth down the eastern shore of Maryland freeing slaves,
she is also um successfully speaking at abolitionist fundraising meetings. Um.
(26:28):
She was well known and they would ask you know
she was. She was a public speaker. UM. Obviously very
much on the download because she was a super big
target for the slave catchers. Like you were saying, but uh,
this only just like enriched her legend that she would
take breaks from rescuing slaves to go speak at a
at a fundraising meeting. Yeah. And one of the reasons
(26:49):
she was doing that in the first place was to
make money to fund her work on the underground railroad. Yeah.
That's pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely, because I mean, I imagine
the most of those families were doing this for nothing,
but I imagine they probably had to pay people off
along the way. Yeah, especially in Canada. Um, apparently you
(27:12):
could bribe the border guards pretty easily to say, oh,
you're visiting, huh, well, enjoy your time in Canada, and right,
and people would settle right across the the Niagara River
and St. Catherine's, Ontario is where a lot of them
ended up. Alright. So, in eighteen sixty, a very very
famous incident, and this is one of the most one
(27:33):
of the most well documented stories of the time. Um.
There this was in Troy, New York, and there was
a captured slave named Charles Noll and he that was
his real name. I can't remember the name that he
had been given, but his real name was Charles Noll.
They were trying to get him back to Virginia after
he had been captured as a fugitive, and everybody knew
(27:56):
about it, and uh, including Harriet Tubman. So she just
got ased herself as a little old lady. Um and
if you've seen pictures of her, almost all of them
are as a little old lady. It's kind of hard
to picture her as a young woman. But she dressed
herself up as the little old lady that she would
become in photos. She slipped into a building, a government building,
(28:18):
in disguise, and then basically gave the signal to all
of these people in town who mobbed as soon as
Unal was brought out under the streets. They basically just
mobbed him and took him away. Yes, she won't get
him a right, No, she went swarm swarm, but it worked,
(28:41):
and I guess they just had enough enough people to
overpower him and whisked him away on a riverboat. Yeah,
and these were federal marshals that they overpowered. Yeah, Like
it was like, yeah, we're we'll be taking this guy
from you. Amazing. That was in eighteen sixty, he said, Yeah,
that was the same year I believe that she did
her last trip on the underground railroad. Her second to
(29:03):
last trip was her parents, who were very elderly at
the time, but they ended up settling in St. Catherine's,
Ontario at first, and then her mother was like, it's
too cold here, so Harriet moved them down to Auburn,
New York, to upstate New York where the winters are
nice and right, yeah, exactly, almost muggy, you know. Um,
(29:23):
but that so that was her penultimate trip on the
underground roroad. The last one she went to go get
her sister Rachel. She had been trying to reach for
a decade, and she went back in eighteen sixty to
get her and found that Rachel had died. Actually, so
she um, she ended up taking a family that was
(29:45):
prepared to leave. Um, the Annals. Did you read about them? Yeah,
I mean Harriet Tubman was not one to waste a
trip down there. As sad as she was about her sister.
She's like, all right, let's I'll take you guys. Yeah.
So the Annals family was from and I can tell
a younger couple with an infant child, and um, Harriet
was like, we're gonna have the dope up the baby
(30:07):
because we can't have that baby crying. So I just
happened to have some tincture of opium and we'll give
the baby some of that. So they kept the baby
pretty high on this trip to make sure it didn't
cry and give away their their position. And that was
her last one. Eight sixty. Yeah, and so like we said,
they relocated from Canada to Auburn, New York. And um,
(30:31):
she bought, she bought land. She was a landowner, uh
remarkably in the eighteen fifties. Uh in Auburn. She bought
seven acres of land at a very friendly price from
William Seward right, and he was the guy who bought
Alaska later, that's right. So yeah, so she's a landowner now,
which is pretty significant. Like you're saying, should we take
(30:52):
another break, I think we shall, all right, we'll we'll
finish up with um geez the rest of our life,
which was also remarkable. So it took the end of
(31:28):
that underground railroad that was basically where my study as
a younger lad of um Harriet Tubman left off the
rest of our I had no idea about, did you M.
I had heard things here and there but I for
sure was not taught this in elementary or high school.
Well to lay it on them, Well, the Civil War
breaks out in eighteen sixty one, and the governor of Massachusetts,
(31:51):
John A. Andrew was very much an abolitionist, and Tubbin
was a friend of his, and he said, you know what,
who do I know that is super stealthy and super
sneaky and has a neck for uh making her way
around the woods without attracting attention, and can get information
(32:13):
from us about the Confederate Army. And how about my
little buddy, Harriet Tubman. Yeah, and so she became a spy. Yeah.
The governor of Massachusetts tapped her to become a spy
for the Union Army. So he paid for her passage
down to Hilton Head, I believe, South Carolina, and she
um was enlisted officially under the cover story that she
(32:37):
was there to um give out like blankets and food
and clothing to the slaves that were escaping from in
the amidst the chaos of war. There's a lot of
slaves that were making their way to Union camps and
finding shelter Um there and her role supposedly was to
make sure that they were cared for that. Like I said,
(32:58):
that was just a cover story. What she was actually
really there to do was to basically lead an intelligence
gathering scouting group, basically assemble a guerrilla scouting special forces
group behind enemy lines in South Carolina. And that's what
she did. Yeah. I wonder if any of the Union
soldiers when she showed up and said, you know, I'm
(33:19):
here to give out blankets and stuff, They're like, yeah, right,
I know who you are, Right, we see those you
see those muscles. Yeah, you're not giving up blankets. We
know your your track record. Uh. So specifically she worked,
it seems like most often with African American troops once
Lincoln authorized African American troops for the Union Army in
(33:40):
eighteen sixty two. She would go ahead of these teams
and do everything from try and get information on Confederate
positions and armaments to uh to working with these guys.
In June sixty three, it's a really cool story, she
accompanied Union Colonel James montgom Re up the Kambahi River
(34:03):
and this was in South Carolina and they were going
to conduct a raid. And so what they found out
was there all these minds that had been set up
uh by uh were they buy slaves or by um So,
under the direction of the Confederates, they had slaves go
set minds out in the river. And so she went
and found the slaves who had set the minds there
(34:25):
so they could tell her where it was. And that
must have been nerve wracking. It was because not only
did she go find out where it was, so that
step one, which is huge, she went and got the
intail where the minds were. She was in charge of
leading directing the Union ships around these mines. So she
(34:45):
I'm sure she has had her fingers across the whole time.
But prior to that, even she had also led a
raid of um this the scouts that she had assembled
to gather intel and to get supplies behind Confederate lines
from some sort of Confederate encampment. And that made her
the first women woman in US history to command an
(35:08):
expedition force in wartime. Yeah, but sadly, for all her efforts,
she was never given military pension like she should have
a federally that is no, so that's like a whole
that's a whole other can of worms. Right, So she
she successfully makes it through the Civil War um and
(35:28):
starting right. I think in eighteen sixty five she applied
for benefits, right um, she asked for something like thirty
dollars a month. Even though scouts in the Civil War
were paid sixty dollars a month and regular soldiers were
given a pension of fifteen dollars a month, she asked
for thirty um and she was denied. Officially, the reason
(35:49):
she was denied was because there was no documentation. Remember, like,
officially her cover story was that she was handing out
blankets and all that. And that first petition for a
pension started a thirty four year quest to finally get
recognition in the form of a pension from the federal
(36:09):
government for the amazing amount of stuff she did in
the Civil War. And finally they despite the fact that
there were Cabinet members and congress people and governors who
were personally involving themselves in this matter, trying to get
this pushed through the pensions Bureau, was like, we can't
do it. If we give it to her, it's going
to open it up for all these other people. So
(36:31):
it just so happens that she she married a Civil
War veteran um who was much younger than her and
he when he died, she started collecting a pension. So
she got a pension, not because of all of the
stuff she did in the war. She got a pension
because she married a Civil War veteran, a man who died,
(36:51):
and she got a widows pension instead. Yeah, well, she
would eventually go getting her own pension, but not for
the work she does a spy, but for work she
does an army nurse. Right, So they uped it finally
in eight thirty four years after she applied from I
think twelve dollars a month to now eight dollars a
month to twenty dollars a month was what she got
(37:14):
for the rest of her life. Yeah, and guess guess
who she spent that money on Philadelphia Eagles tickets. No,
she's she's spent it to open up a home. Uh. Well,
she she bought some more property adjacent to her own
property there in Auburn, New York, and she started home
(37:34):
for elderly African American people. And seven years after that,
she you know, she was kind of getting up in
age by that point, so she turned the property over
to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church where she went
uh and said you guys, can you please still run
this thing? They said, no problem, And she lived next
door to it until she got old enough to where
(37:56):
she needed to be in the home that she founded,
and that is where she finally passed away in nineteen thirteen. Yeah.
The family legend is that on the day she died,
she had been bedridden for a while, but she suddenly
regained her strength and you know, got up out of
bed with some help and ate some food and went
around and the just kind of shuffled around from room
(38:17):
to room, just taking in the house. Uh, and then
went back to bed and died. Man. It's just pretty neat. Yeah.
And in between that time, when she was living in
upstate New York, she uh, you know, she farmed and
she uh, by all accounts, was like a was a
great farmer and lived off the land. Uh. And you know,
(38:39):
the life was okay for her. But she also had
had a lot of you know, fresh out off of
the Civil War, had a lot of rude awakenings. It's
not like things instantaneously changed, uh for African Americans in
the United States. UM. One case, in fact, she was
on a train and she had what's called the soldiers
pass which she could, you know, ride the rails for
free as a soldier. And she legitimately got this pass
(39:01):
and the train conductor wouldn't accept it. Uh. She got
into an argument with them, and then he got together
with other passengers and physically threw her into the baggage car,
which broke her arm, broke three ribs. She couldn't work
for months, and you know, famous Harriet Tubman had basically
was forced to be bedridden for a while except handouts
(39:23):
from her neighbors just to keep her family fed because
she had had her arm and ribs broken at the
hands of a conductor and that horribly ironic. Yes, so
that happened right after the Civil War, right, Uh yeah,
So she was nursed back to health and and like
you said, she made ends meet um farming, um selling.
(39:46):
I think she was known for selling pies and root
beer and gingerbread is what she sold, which is pretty
happy stuff really if you think about it. I bet
that was some good gingerbread and um she lived with
her parents. Remember her mom complained ab out the weather
in St. Catharines, Ontario. Um, so she moved them down
to Auburn, New York, to her land and she cared
(40:09):
for them. Uh. And she used some of the money
to put one of her nephews, who she'd earlier helped
escape from slavery through school. Uh. He studied to become
a teacher and moved down to South Carolina and taught
and he eventually became part of the reconstructionist legislature there. Um.
She used her money pretty wisely. Yes, she opened the
(40:29):
Old Folks Home. She did a lot of really great
stuff from from the day she first got paid to
the last day of her life. Yeah, she got married
again too. She married a man Union Army veteran named
Nelson Davis. Uh, twenty two years younger than her. Yeah,
that's the guy she got the pension from. Right, and
(40:50):
they married in eighteen sixty nine. And on her gravestone
it says Harriet Tubman Davis. And Um. She ended up
being buried with full military honors at four Hill Cemetery
in Auburn, which is really really great. Uh. They commissioned
a liberty ship, the s S. Harriet Tubman during World
War Two. Um, she's been in Um. Well, they're developing
(41:13):
a couple of movies right now, one with Viola Davis,
which you know she's fantastic, so that should be good.
What else? National Historic Landmarks from where she lived? Um,
National Register of Historic Places. And then finally, in a
couple of years ago, President Obama and his administration said,
you know what, we are going to take Andrew Jackson
(41:35):
off the twenty dollar bill and we're gonna put Harriet
Tubman on it. Uh. And it's hard to tell if
that's still an active thing, because all we know right
now is current Treasury Secretary Steve Nuncheon UM basically is
declining comment right now and saying we got a lot
of other stuff to focus on. I saw follow up
two weeks later. That's the latest I saw, but two
(41:57):
weeks after he initially said that UM, they were proceeding,
that it was basically going through, but that it wouldn't
be out until after because I think the ten dollar
bill and then the five dollar bill were scheduled to
be updated first, and then the twenty dollar bill. So
she's in the queue. She's in the queue, yeah, for sure.
And she that won't be the first time she's appeared
(42:19):
on anything. She was UM on a stamp, I believe
back in nineteen seventy nine. I think she might have
been the first African American woman on a stamp. YEP,
it's pretty pretty significant. But her being on currency is
just that's just a sea change in America and wanted
to be proud of for sure. Um, so what else? Man?
(42:43):
You got anything else on her? I got nothing else.
That's Harriet Tubman in a nutshell. God bless her. If
you want to know more about Harriet Tubman, there's tons
more stuff out there. There's actually really good site that
we both used called I think Harriet dashed Codman dot org.
Don't spell out. I think that was just me saying
(43:04):
that they have a lot of really good information on there.
You can look for this article on how stuff works
dot com by typing in the search bar too. And
since I said search parts, time for listener mail? Uh,
you know instead of listener mail today we need to
shout out our CIVA team because we have not done
that in a long time and now we've been kind
(43:25):
of neglectful. So k I v a dot org slash
team slash stuff you should know, or you can just
go to Cuba and look up on the teams. UM
many years ago, we started Freezy. Don't those of you
who don't know. Kiva is a micro lending organization and
website where you can um donate money and small amounts
(43:46):
to entrepreneurs and business people all over the world who
who don't have the means to to raise money themselves
for their small businesses. And then you can re lend
that money once they pay it back, or you can
draw it out if you want to draw it out.
So we started a team many years ago, UM, and
(44:06):
I haven't looked in a while, and I was astonished.
Have you seen what we've raised? All? Right, hold onto
your hats the stuff you should know. Team has now
raised four point seven million bucks. What how about that?
That's amazing. That is a hundred and sixty nine thousand
loans uh, nine thousand, nine hundred and twelve members. And
(44:28):
just to give you guys an idea of how this works, UM,
I put in and this was what was this eight
eight or nine years ago? Put in three d and
fifty bucks, uh, the only money I've ever put into it.
And since then that money has been reloaned to the
tune of twenty three hundred dollars over the years. So
(44:50):
you can even put in fifty dollars and just keep
reloaning that over the years and through all those eight years,
I looked at my account today, I've only had forty
two dollars in loss. Is that is not bad, not
bad at all. So that's money that does not get
paid back and it, as you can tell, that does
not happen much. Yeah. Yeah, uh, And if you want
to join our team, go to kiva dot org slash
(45:13):
teams slash stuff you should know and uh that team
is our team has led unofficially slash officially by Glenn
and Sonja who keep things going pretty smoothly for us
over there. So thanks again Glenn and Sonia for everything
you've been doing all these years. Yeah. So I think
a goal we can set right now. We always set
money goals, but since we have nine thousand and twelve members,
(45:36):
why don't we try and get to ten thousand members?
And that is not much, that's like, you know, less
than a hundred people signing onto the team, leaning a
little bit of dough, let's do. Let's do so ten
thousand members by the end by the summer, by June one. Yeah,
that should be easy. And one trillion dollars by June
(45:57):
one as well. That would be great. And it's really cool.
You can see if you go to your account, you
can they have follow ups from people who you loan
the money to, like real stories of what happened with
your money. Uh, and they're always just great stories. And
it's a really easy way if you have, um, you know,
five cups of coffee worth of money laying around. Yeah,
(46:19):
it's a donated Yeah. And if you want to know
more about it, we've blogged about it extensively. So goes
the Stuff you Should Know dot com and look up
Kiva and it should bring up a bunch of posts
and um for a good I think overview to just
go listen to the micro lending episode from back in
the day too. That's right. Well, Uh, if you want
to get in touch with us, you can. You can
(46:40):
do that. You can do it on Twitter at s
Y s K podcast or at Josh M. Clark can
do it on Facebook, Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can
send all of us an email. The Stuff podcast at
how Stuffworks dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web Stuff you Should Know com
(47:05):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works? Dot com mhm m
Stuff You Should Know News
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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