June 19, 2021 • 27 mins
We're revisiting this 2013 topic in honor of Juneteenth. Most people are familiar with Tubman's involvement with the Underground Railroad, but she was also a spy for the Union during the Civil War, among many other things. Untangling the truth from the myth is the trickiest part of her story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This episode is coming out on June tenth,
which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
The date comes from June nineteenth, sixty five, which is
when General Gordon Granger read General Orders Number three in Galveston, Texas,
and that read quote, the people of Texas are informed that,
(00:24):
in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the
United States, all slaves are free. At this point, slavery
had actually been outlawed in Texas under the Emancipation Proclamation
for almost two and a half years. And we've chosen
today's Saturday Classic and next week's in honor of June teenth.
It is our two parter on Harriet Tubman, which originally
(00:46):
came out on June and fifteen, And we have chosen
this episode because Tubman is such an example of how
much of the work of ending slavery came from enslaved
people themselves, in this case, liberating her her self and
other people, and fighting for the end of slavery nationwide.
At the top of this episode, we mentioned the announcement
(01:07):
that Harriet Tubman would be on a redesigned twenty dollar bill,
and while that was announced in it has gone through
a hole back and forth since then. A final timeline
for that has not been determined. Welcome to Stuff you
missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio
(01:34):
Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. Holly.
Do you know who We've gotten a lot of requests
talk about lately. Yes, but I'll let you say it,
Harriet Submas. So many requests we had all I mean,
we've already been getting a lot. They started well before
the announcement that she is going to be on the
new US twenty dollar bill. We also had another big
(01:57):
spike after the Drunk History episode about her. If you
don't mind lots of bleep swear words, that is quite funny.
I watched it three or four times working on this episode.
Um So, most people are familiar with Harriet Tubman's involvement
in the Underground Railroad, but she also as people who
(02:20):
have watched that drug that Drunk History episode no, that
she was also a spy for the Union during the
Civil War, among many other things. At the same time. Uh,
maybe more than anyone else I can think of in
American history. She has this near mythical reputation that makes
her kind of a tricky person to talk about. Everybody
(02:42):
has some tidbits of information, and some of that is
curate and some of them is not. Yeah, there's a
lot about her life and about slavery in the underground
railroad in general that people know with no in serious
air quotes, but it is really like it's really taken
for granted. But a lot of it is on somewhere
(03:03):
on a spectrum between that can't be substantiated and that
definitely did not happen. And a lot of this is
because for a long time, children's books really dominated the
work written about Harriet Tubman. We've talked about that phenomenon before,
how a lot of important figures, especially in Black history,
are the subjects of children's books and not serious academic
(03:23):
scholarship as much, which is frustrating. Uh. Even the books
for adults for a long time could uncritically repeated details
from these nineteenth century accounts of her life that were
definitely embellished, and really serious scholarly examination to try to
get a more accurate picture of Harriet Tubman's life and
work has been a lot harder to come by, and
(03:43):
overall a lot more recent than the things that sort
of set the standards of how we think about Harriet Tubman. So,
because there's so much to talk about, and because so
much of it requires some level setting. To be honest,
we are going to talk about Harriet Tubman's life and
work in two parts, and today's podcast is about her
work liberating enslaved people, many of them her family members,
(04:05):
via the Underground Railroad, and then in our next episode
we will talk about her Civil War work and her
life as a spy and what came after that. Because
there are so many misperceptions about the Underground Railroad and
the institution of slavery in the United States, we're going
to get into some of that context before we talk
about the details of Harriet Tubban's life. The use of unpaid,
(04:27):
unfree labor began long before the United States became an
independent nation. It was a big part of the economy
and the labor force almost from the moment Europeans started
trying to establish permanent colonies in North America. And we
know enslavement existed in North America before European arrival, and
there's an increasing body of historical research on enslavement of
(04:47):
Native Americans by colonists as well, But all of that
is outside the scope of today's episode. Yeah, that is
one of the things people will right to try to
dispel talking about slavery, like slavery existed every way, are
not what we were talking about. So at first, this
system of unfree labor in the colonies was based on indenture. Basically,
(05:11):
people would pay their way from Europe to North America
through indentured servitude, which was essentially an agreement to work
without pay for a particular amount of time in exchange
for shelter and food and passage across the Atlantic Ocean.
Sometimes this was a choice people made. It was sometimes
under duress and sometimes not. It was people just wanted
(05:31):
to move and that was the only way they could
afford it, But other times it was a punishment that
they were sentenced to. Although the conditions indentured servants worked
under could be appalling, and there were definitely cases of
people dying before their indenture was over, this indenture had
some very specific differences when compared with chattel slavery. The
(05:52):
first and biggest was that there was an end date involved.
Indenture was not supposed to be a lifetime condition. Once
the indenture was over, that person was free to go
and was often granted some kind of compensation in the
form of supplies or land. Indentured servitude also wasn't hereditary
or tied to a person's race. As more colonists started
(06:14):
moving to North America, indentured servants included people from places
like England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Africa. The first enslaved
Africans who arrived in North America landed in Virginia Colony
in sixteen nineteen, and the Dutch traded them to the
colonists as indentured servants. However, a number of social, economic,
(06:35):
and industrial factors led to the dominant system of unfree
labor in the colonies, gradually shifting from indentured servitude to
chattel slavery. These factors included uprisings and rebellions on the
part of indentured workers, the expense involved in contracting new
indentured servants as the old indenturs expired, and the ease
with which white indentured servants could blend in with the
(06:57):
rest of white society after escape from an indenture. There
were religious elements as well, In some cases, it was
socially acceptable to hold a non Protestant person in bondage,
but if that person converted, that was no longer the case.
Beginning in the mid sixteen hundreds, colonies started to pass
slave codes, which defined exactly what it meant to be
(07:20):
a slave. Many of these laws were written in terms
of race, so where whether they described slaves in general
or enslaved people of African descent specifically. These codes meant
that in a lot of places it became illegal for
an enslaved person to own property and weapons, to congregate,
to get married, to travel, and to learn to read
or write chattle. Slavery became codified as something that was lifelong,
(07:43):
It was hereditary based on whether a person's mother was enslaved,
and it was tied to African descent. When the Declaration
of Independence was issued in seventeen seventy six, slavery was
legal in all thirteen colonies. When the U s Constitution
was signed, it didn't include words slavery, but it did
include references to the Institution, including Article four, Section two,
(08:06):
Clause three, which specified that a person held in service
or labor in one state would not be discharged from
that service or labor if they escaped to another state.
Then in to jump ahead just a little bit, Eli
Whitney invented the cotton gin. Cotton was already being grown
in the South, especially, and farming cotton was hugely labor intensive.
(08:29):
With the invention of the cotton gin, it was still
labor intensive, but it was a lot more lucrative because
the process of removing the seeds from the harvested cotton
became dramatically faster and easier. Consequence, consequently, the prevalence of
slavery in the American South increased immediately and dramatically in
response to how much easier it became to make a
(08:50):
lot of money growing cotton. At the same time, in
the North, slavery was on the wane, mostly because although
plenty of Northern people and businesses were profiting from slavery,
there wasn't a huge industry that was dependent on slave labor,
like cotton farming or large scale agriculture that was actually
being worked. There. Also present in the North was an
(09:11):
increasingly active movement for abolition, and while there were certainly
abolitionists in the South as well, the institution of slavery
was so entrenched in the South, that the movement was
all but invisible there. All of this history together means
that by the time Harriet Tubman was born a couple
of decades into the nineteenth century, many northern states had
(09:32):
either abolished slavery or had passed laws that were meant
to gradually in the practice within their own borders. The
idea that slavery should be abolished nationwide was at that
point still largely viewed as radical, even among people who
were advocating for its abolition. Within individual states and Southern states,
on the other hand, slavery was flourishing, and other industries
(09:54):
that were related to selling and managing and capturing escaped
slaves were thrown driving in the South as well. In
many border states, including Maryland, where Harriet Tubman was born
and grew up, slavery was still practiced, but often not
quite as entrenched, widespread, and regulated as it was farther south.
For the sake of comparison, in the middle of the
(10:16):
nineteenth century, enslaved people made up about percent of Maryland's population,
compared to fifty seven percent of South Carolina, of Mississippi,
forty percent of Louisiana, and forty four percent of Georgia. So,
in addition to having less of a distance to travel
to reach a free state, slaves escaping from border states
(10:37):
like Maryland were often traveling through territory that had fewer
resources devoted to maintaining and protecting the institution of slavery.
And this is where we get to the Underground Railroad,
which is a name that was applied to a loosely
collected network of people who were all working towards the
same end, which was to liberate slaves. The Underground Railroad
(10:57):
didn't have a formal organization or established leadership structure, and
it liberated people mainly from the border states, not from
the Deep South, as a lot of people may imagine.
And while our focus is really on Maryland today, a
lot of the Underground Railroad's work was really through territory
that was closer to the Mississippi River. It wasn't enough
for the Underground Railroad to guide people to a free state,
(11:19):
though in seventeen ninety three, Congress had passed a Fugitive
Slave Act, which was basically an enforcement clause for Article
for Section two of the Constitution, setting out how escaped
slaves could be captured and returned to the south. A second,
even stricter, fugitive slave law would be passed in eighteen fifty,
about thirty years after Harriet Tubman's birth. So we don't
(11:43):
know precisely when people started to use the term underground
railroad to describe existing efforts to liberate enslaved people from bondage,
but it was appearing and writing by the middle of
the nineteenth century. So we're going to talk about Harriet
Tubman's early life and how she became part of the
underground route after a brief break for a word from
a sponsor. So now we will get to Harriet Tubman's
(12:15):
life specifically, and unfortunately we don't have a lot of
detail about the earlier parts of it. While she was enslaved,
it was illegal for her to learn to read or write,
and if she did learn after she liberated herself, the
historical record doesn't reflect that. A lot of people think
she probably did not learn. Instead, she dictated her life
to people who were literate, and one of these people
(12:37):
was Sarah Hopkins Bradford, whose biographies of Tubman were definitely
filtered through her own lens and in some case. In
some cases we're specifically written for the purpose of helping
Tubman to raise money to support herself and other people,
so they were books written to sell. Also, Harriet Tubman
was herself an incredible storyteller who spun out compelling of
(13:00):
pockative and dramatic stories. So in many cases, once she
narrated her autobiography, she was telling stories that she had
told again and again for years. It's probable and really
even inevitable that these stories had been refined and embellished
along the way through her years of retellings. I mean,
if you tell the same joke at a party and
it's your go to if you tell it today, five
(13:23):
years from now, you're still telling it, You've probably changed
some things, and you probably don't remember. It's not necessarily
a conscious move right in your mind. That's how it happened.
Now we do know that she was born in Maryland, which,
as we said earlier, was at the time a slave state.
Her birth date is unknown, although it was probably within
(13:43):
a couple of years of eighteen twenty. Tubman's parents were
Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, and Tubban's name at birth
seems to have been Arementa, and she was often called Minty.
She sticked the name Harriet later on in her life.
We don't know much about her relationship with her familyther
than that she did have several siblings and was charged
with caring for the ones who were younger than her
(14:05):
when she was still a child. We also know that
two older sisters were sold south. The family had some
religious instruction, probably Methodist, and religious observance was part of
their family and social life. Based on Harriett's later knowledge
of folk healing and herbal medicines, it's also likely that
they observed folk traditions passed down from her grandmother, who
(14:26):
was part of the Ashanti tribe. Tubman and many of
her family were owned by a man named Edward Broadest.
Tubben was often hired out, including a brief apprenticeship as
a weaver and work as a housemaider and nursemaid, but
a lot of her work involved manual labor, including working
with timber. While still in her adolescence, Tubman experienced a
(14:47):
head injury that led to her being disabled for the
rest of her life. An overseer or slave owner threw
a weight while trying to stop an escaping slave, and
it hit Tubman instead. The resulting injury led to what
seems to have been a form of narcolepsy or epilepsy,
which her biographers described as somnolence. She was basically prone
to periods of what sounds like seizures or unexpected periods
(15:11):
of sleep. There are also some people who theorized that
the reason she never learned to read was that this
head injury damaged the part of her brain that works
with literacy. So h totally unclear whether that was the
case or not, but that is a thing that people theorize.
This disability, along the with the fact that a lot
(15:33):
of her work involved heavy manual labor, might be one
of the reasons that she didn't marry John Tubman until
she was about twenty four, which was relatively late for
an enslaved woman living at the time. The Tubmans had
no children, and their relationship was kind of unusual, not
necessarily unusual in Maryland, but unusual as in a general sense,
because John Tubman was free and Harriet Tubman, his wife,
(15:56):
was actually another man's property. Harriet's efforts to free other
people started while she was still enslaved herself. In eighteen
forty five, about a year after her marriage, she paid
a lawyer five dollars to look into her suspicion that
her mother's enslavement was not legal, and it turned out
she was right. According to the will of her prior owner,
(16:17):
Tubman's mother should have been freed when she reached the
age of forty five. She had already been enslaved for
another eleven years when Tubman confirmed those suspicions. Nothing seems
to have come of this investigation, though, Tubman's father, who
had been freed in eighteen forty, legally purchased her mother
in eighteen fifty five, a full decade after Tubman's investigation
(16:37):
revealed that she was in fact being enslaved illegally. Yeah.
I went to a thing called History Camp that was
here in Boston a few weeks ago, and I watched
a several presentations that were about tracking down formally enslaved
people in New England and try trying to figure out
what their family histories where. And one of the rules, uh,
like it was sort of like the rules for doing
(16:59):
this kind of research. Chin it was dispelling misconceptions about
about enslavement, and one of them was people did not
necessarily follow the law, like people can't be like, well,
it was illegal to do that to a slave, people
didn't necessarily follow the law. Clearly, Subban's mother was supposed
to have been free way before her husband legally bought
(17:22):
her as a way to set her free anyway. Edward
brought us died on March nine of eighteen forty nine,
and in his will he specified that his widow would
have quote use and hire of Tubman and any children
she had for the rest of her life, so that
Tubman could help raise his children. However, Tubman and the
(17:42):
rest of her family were really worried that instead some
of them might be sold to pay off debts or
settle estate fees, which was a common occurrence when a
slave owner died, possibly because of the potential threat of
being sold south. It was not long after this that
Tubman escaped. Later that same year, she and two or
three brothers left the plantation, although her brother soon turned
(18:05):
back and took her with them because they were afraid
of the dangers they would face in escaping, So when
Tubman struck out again, it was on her own. In
the earliest accounts of Tubman's escape, she had the help
of a sympathetic white woman. She's described in the earliest
biography of Tubman as quote a white lady who knew
her story and helped her on her way, and who
(18:26):
Tubman repaid for these efforts with giving her a quilt. However,
later biographers added, in one of the first fantastic embellishments
that has become tied to sort of everyone's collective memory
of Harriet's Hubman, that she had a vision that she
needed to follow the North Star. That probably an embellishment.
She did, however, talk later about feeling as though she
(18:47):
had been called by God to help people to freedom.
She made her way to Philadelphia, where she immediately began
working with the anti slavery community in the Underground Railroad.
And we were going to talk about all of that
after we paused another break from one of our fabulous sponsors.
(19:13):
So back to Harriet Tubman. When she escaped to Pennsylvania
in eighteen forty nine, she found work at a resort
to support herself, and she began making connections with the
anti slavery movement in the area. Soon she was working
with the Underground Railroad. By the time Harriet Tubman became
involved in the Underground Railroad, the idea that the entire
(19:34):
nation should abolish slavery, which, as we mentioned at the
top of the show, had been considered radical just thirty
thirty years before, was starting to gain some traction. An
organized abolition movement had been growing in the North for
a couple of decades, and by the time Harriet Tubman
reached Philadelphia, there were multiple anti slavery societies, including women's
anti slavery societies, operating there. There were also anti slavery
(19:58):
newspapers like will you Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, which was established
in eighteen thirty one, and newspapers run by Frederick Douglas.
The movement for ambolition had largely originated with escaped slaves
and free African Americans, and as it grew throughout the
early mid eighteen hundreds, it also attracted more white participants,
particularly Quakers, who objected to slavery on religious grounds. Most
(20:23):
Likely Harriet Tubman's introduction to the organized anti slavery movement
in general and the Underground Road in particular, came by
a William Still, who was a free black man who
would later self publish a book on the Underground rail Road,
or it might have come from Lucretia or James Mott
Tubman started making trips back into Maryland to try to
free enslaved people, beginning in December of eighteen fifty when
(20:46):
she went to Baltimore to bring back her niece and
two children. Her niece's husband, who was free, helped plan
this escape. Another trip to Baltimore may have followed, but
the historical record on that one is a little bit spottier.
In the fall of eighteen fifty one, Tubman went back
to Dorchester County, where she had grown up to try
to get her husband, who was free as we said before,
(21:08):
but he had stayed behind in Maryland when Tubman escaped. However,
when she got there, she learned that he had married
someone else after she left. Marriages involving enslaved people really
had no legal standing, so from a legal standpoint, his
marriage to Harriet was not really a barrier to him
marrying someone else. After she left, for about a decade,
(21:32):
Tubman continued to make trips into Maryland to help people
liberate themselves, many of the members of her family, because
it wasn't enough to make it to a free state.
She also established a base of operations in British North America,
which is now Canada. She secured some land in St. Catharine's,
which was across a suspension bridge from Buffalo, New York,
near Niagara Falls, and to get there she had to
(21:54):
guide people from Maryland to Philadelphia and then into New
York through Albany, Syracuse, and Rochester before crossing the bridge.
Getting started in St. Catharine's wasn't easy. After having liberated themselves,
most of the people Tubmen guided there had virtually nothing
to live on or it used to make a living.
It's like a while before Tubman could establish a real
(22:15):
foothold there, and even after she did, money continued to
be a real problem. According to the letters of Thomas Garrett,
by eighteen fifty five, Harriet Tubman had successfully returned to
her old neighborhood four times and had liberated seventeen family
members and friends. By eighteen sixty that number had grown
to eight or nine forays into slave territory. The grand
(22:37):
total is probably somewhere in the vicinity of ten to
thirteen missions, leading seventy to eighty people to freedom herself
and instructing fifty or so others how to escape on
their own. One of these trips was to bring back
her parents, who were elderly by that point, after her
father was caught sheltering escaping slaves. After she returned with
(22:57):
her parents, Tubmen resettled in all the New York that
maintained her ties to St. Catharine's because her parents just
were not happy living in Canada. Harriet Tubman's last trip
into Maryland was an attempt to bring out a woman
described as a sister, who sadly died before the trip
could actually be made. The journey was documented in the
(23:17):
letters of Martha Coffin right, and some elements of that
letter are now firmly rooted in what people quote no
again in in those air quotes about the underground Railroad.
For example, Tubman and the seven people she was guiding
used songs not to convey coded information, which has become
a popular part of underground Railroad war, but to help
(23:38):
Tubman find the rest of the group after she had
left them to forage for food, and for them to
signal back to her that it was safe to approach.
These missions that Harriet Tubman took between Maryland and Canada
really illustrate how the underground Railroad really operated. A lot
of people envisioned the underground railroad as being a firmly
(24:00):
established network of mostly white conductors who were secreting enslaved
quote cargo from deep in the South through a series
of fixed hiding places and homes and barns and other
buildings known as stations. So you would go from one
station to the next one day at a time, and
our collective imaginations, every stop is planned in advance and
as part of a regularly used route from one place
(24:23):
to another. And while there were white people involved in
the underground Railroad, particularly among Quakers, as we mentioned earlier,
and there were definitely people who repeatedly sheltered escaping slaves
in their homes or other buildings, in reality, the whole
thing worked a lot more like what Harriet Tubman was
doing here. They were planned, but they were also improvisational.
(24:45):
These trips were, you know, mainly into border states, frequently
carried out by free or escaped African Americans, traveling by
night and hiding by day, who made use of connections
they had and roots that they knew to do it.
Contrary to popular mythology, Harriet Tubman did not invent the
underground Railroad, and the number of people that she guided
(25:05):
to freedom before the Civil war was much lower than
the three hundred that is often cited. However, none of
this should take away from what she was doing. Harriet
Tubman's liberty and even her life were at enormous risk
every time she returned to to slave territory, and when
she was in free States in the company of escaping
(25:26):
slaves who were also putting themselves at enormous risk by
trying to escape. Really, she was jeopardizing her own life
and safety any time she was in the United States
at all, because she had escaped rather than being legally freed.
There was also at times of bounty for her capture.
Although the number forty dollars that's routinely specified is inflated,
(25:49):
it was probably either twelve hundred or twelve thousand dollars.
There's some debate about the existence of that last zero.
By the late eighteen fifties and into the eighteen sixties,
Harriet Tubman had become well known and well respected in
New England's anti slavery circles. Her work guiding escaped slaves
was at first a secret, but became more widely known
(26:11):
in the years just before the Civil War. She earned
the nickname Moses, and at anti slavery meetings. People spoke
often of the escaped slave who had returned to slave
territory again and again to liberate others. The Civil War
began in eighteen sixty one, which really changed the nature
of Harriet's work. So that is where we are going
to pause to pick up the next time. Pay so
(26:39):
much for joining us on this Saturday, since this episode
is out of the archive. If you heard an email
address or a Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(27:00):
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
(27:23):
listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday, everybody. This episode is coming out on June tenth,
which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
The date comes from June nineteenth, sixty five, which is
when General Gordon Granger read General Orders Number three in Galveston, Texas,
and that read quote, the people of Texas are informed that,
(00:24):
in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the
United States, all slaves are free. At this point, slavery
had actually been outlawed in Texas under the Emancipation Proclamation
for almost two and a half years. And we've chosen
today's Saturday Classic and next week's in honor of June teenth.
It is our two parter on Harriet Tubman, which originally
(00:46):
came out on June and fifteen, And we have chosen
this episode because Tubman is such an example of how
much of the work of ending slavery came from enslaved
people themselves, in this case, liberating her her self and
other people, and fighting for the end of slavery nationwide.
At the top of this episode, we mentioned the announcement
(01:07):
that Harriet Tubman would be on a redesigned twenty dollar bill,
and while that was announced in it has gone through
a hole back and forth since then. A final timeline
for that has not been determined. Welcome to Stuff you
missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio
(01:34):
Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. Holly.
Do you know who We've gotten a lot of requests
talk about lately. Yes, but I'll let you say it,
Harriet Submas. So many requests we had all I mean,
we've already been getting a lot. They started well before
the announcement that she is going to be on the
new US twenty dollar bill. We also had another big
(01:57):
spike after the Drunk History episode about her. If you
don't mind lots of bleep swear words, that is quite funny.
I watched it three or four times working on this episode.
Um So, most people are familiar with Harriet Tubman's involvement
in the Underground Railroad, but she also as people who
(02:20):
have watched that drug that Drunk History episode no, that
she was also a spy for the Union during the
Civil War, among many other things. At the same time. Uh,
maybe more than anyone else I can think of in
American history. She has this near mythical reputation that makes
her kind of a tricky person to talk about. Everybody
(02:42):
has some tidbits of information, and some of that is
curate and some of them is not. Yeah, there's a
lot about her life and about slavery in the underground
railroad in general that people know with no in serious
air quotes, but it is really like it's really taken
for granted. But a lot of it is on somewhere
(03:03):
on a spectrum between that can't be substantiated and that
definitely did not happen. And a lot of this is
because for a long time, children's books really dominated the
work written about Harriet Tubman. We've talked about that phenomenon before,
how a lot of important figures, especially in Black history,
are the subjects of children's books and not serious academic
(03:23):
scholarship as much, which is frustrating. Uh. Even the books
for adults for a long time could uncritically repeated details
from these nineteenth century accounts of her life that were
definitely embellished, and really serious scholarly examination to try to
get a more accurate picture of Harriet Tubman's life and
work has been a lot harder to come by, and
(03:43):
overall a lot more recent than the things that sort
of set the standards of how we think about Harriet Tubman. So,
because there's so much to talk about, and because so
much of it requires some level setting. To be honest,
we are going to talk about Harriet Tubman's life and
work in two parts, and today's podcast is about her
work liberating enslaved people, many of them her family members,
(04:05):
via the Underground Railroad, and then in our next episode
we will talk about her Civil War work and her
life as a spy and what came after that. Because
there are so many misperceptions about the Underground Railroad and
the institution of slavery in the United States, we're going
to get into some of that context before we talk
about the details of Harriet Tubban's life. The use of unpaid,
(04:27):
unfree labor began long before the United States became an
independent nation. It was a big part of the economy
and the labor force almost from the moment Europeans started
trying to establish permanent colonies in North America. And we
know enslavement existed in North America before European arrival, and
there's an increasing body of historical research on enslavement of
(04:47):
Native Americans by colonists as well, But all of that
is outside the scope of today's episode. Yeah, that is
one of the things people will right to try to
dispel talking about slavery, like slavery existed every way, are
not what we were talking about. So at first, this
system of unfree labor in the colonies was based on indenture. Basically,
(05:11):
people would pay their way from Europe to North America
through indentured servitude, which was essentially an agreement to work
without pay for a particular amount of time in exchange
for shelter and food and passage across the Atlantic Ocean.
Sometimes this was a choice people made. It was sometimes
under duress and sometimes not. It was people just wanted
(05:31):
to move and that was the only way they could
afford it, But other times it was a punishment that
they were sentenced to. Although the conditions indentured servants worked
under could be appalling, and there were definitely cases of
people dying before their indenture was over, this indenture had
some very specific differences when compared with chattel slavery. The
(05:52):
first and biggest was that there was an end date involved.
Indenture was not supposed to be a lifetime condition. Once
the indenture was over, that person was free to go
and was often granted some kind of compensation in the
form of supplies or land. Indentured servitude also wasn't hereditary
or tied to a person's race. As more colonists started
(06:14):
moving to North America, indentured servants included people from places
like England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Africa. The first enslaved
Africans who arrived in North America landed in Virginia Colony
in sixteen nineteen, and the Dutch traded them to the
colonists as indentured servants. However, a number of social, economic,
(06:35):
and industrial factors led to the dominant system of unfree
labor in the colonies, gradually shifting from indentured servitude to
chattel slavery. These factors included uprisings and rebellions on the
part of indentured workers, the expense involved in contracting new
indentured servants as the old indenturs expired, and the ease
with which white indentured servants could blend in with the
(06:57):
rest of white society after escape from an indenture. There
were religious elements as well, In some cases, it was
socially acceptable to hold a non Protestant person in bondage,
but if that person converted, that was no longer the case.
Beginning in the mid sixteen hundreds, colonies started to pass
slave codes, which defined exactly what it meant to be
(07:20):
a slave. Many of these laws were written in terms
of race, so where whether they described slaves in general
or enslaved people of African descent specifically. These codes meant
that in a lot of places it became illegal for
an enslaved person to own property and weapons, to congregate,
to get married, to travel, and to learn to read
or write chattle. Slavery became codified as something that was lifelong,
(07:43):
It was hereditary based on whether a person's mother was enslaved,
and it was tied to African descent. When the Declaration
of Independence was issued in seventeen seventy six, slavery was
legal in all thirteen colonies. When the U s Constitution
was signed, it didn't include words slavery, but it did
include references to the Institution, including Article four, Section two,
(08:06):
Clause three, which specified that a person held in service
or labor in one state would not be discharged from
that service or labor if they escaped to another state.
Then in to jump ahead just a little bit, Eli
Whitney invented the cotton gin. Cotton was already being grown
in the South, especially, and farming cotton was hugely labor intensive.
(08:29):
With the invention of the cotton gin, it was still
labor intensive, but it was a lot more lucrative because
the process of removing the seeds from the harvested cotton
became dramatically faster and easier. Consequence, consequently, the prevalence of
slavery in the American South increased immediately and dramatically in
response to how much easier it became to make a
(08:50):
lot of money growing cotton. At the same time, in
the North, slavery was on the wane, mostly because although
plenty of Northern people and businesses were profiting from slavery,
there wasn't a huge industry that was dependent on slave labor,
like cotton farming or large scale agriculture that was actually
being worked. There. Also present in the North was an
(09:11):
increasingly active movement for abolition, and while there were certainly
abolitionists in the South as well, the institution of slavery
was so entrenched in the South, that the movement was
all but invisible there. All of this history together means
that by the time Harriet Tubman was born a couple
of decades into the nineteenth century, many northern states had
(09:32):
either abolished slavery or had passed laws that were meant
to gradually in the practice within their own borders. The
idea that slavery should be abolished nationwide was at that
point still largely viewed as radical, even among people who
were advocating for its abolition. Within individual states and Southern states,
on the other hand, slavery was flourishing, and other industries
(09:54):
that were related to selling and managing and capturing escaped
slaves were thrown driving in the South as well. In
many border states, including Maryland, where Harriet Tubman was born
and grew up, slavery was still practiced, but often not
quite as entrenched, widespread, and regulated as it was farther south.
For the sake of comparison, in the middle of the
(10:16):
nineteenth century, enslaved people made up about percent of Maryland's population,
compared to fifty seven percent of South Carolina, of Mississippi,
forty percent of Louisiana, and forty four percent of Georgia. So,
in addition to having less of a distance to travel
to reach a free state, slaves escaping from border states
(10:37):
like Maryland were often traveling through territory that had fewer
resources devoted to maintaining and protecting the institution of slavery.
And this is where we get to the Underground Railroad,
which is a name that was applied to a loosely
collected network of people who were all working towards the
same end, which was to liberate slaves. The Underground Railroad
(10:57):
didn't have a formal organization or established leadership structure, and
it liberated people mainly from the border states, not from
the Deep South, as a lot of people may imagine.
And while our focus is really on Maryland today, a
lot of the Underground Railroad's work was really through territory
that was closer to the Mississippi River. It wasn't enough
for the Underground Railroad to guide people to a free state,
(11:19):
though in seventeen ninety three, Congress had passed a Fugitive
Slave Act, which was basically an enforcement clause for Article
for Section two of the Constitution, setting out how escaped
slaves could be captured and returned to the south. A second,
even stricter, fugitive slave law would be passed in eighteen fifty,
about thirty years after Harriet Tubman's birth. So we don't
(11:43):
know precisely when people started to use the term underground
railroad to describe existing efforts to liberate enslaved people from bondage,
but it was appearing and writing by the middle of
the nineteenth century. So we're going to talk about Harriet
Tubman's early life and how she became part of the
underground route after a brief break for a word from
a sponsor. So now we will get to Harriet Tubman's
(12:15):
life specifically, and unfortunately we don't have a lot of
detail about the earlier parts of it. While she was enslaved,
it was illegal for her to learn to read or write,
and if she did learn after she liberated herself, the
historical record doesn't reflect that. A lot of people think
she probably did not learn. Instead, she dictated her life
to people who were literate, and one of these people
(12:37):
was Sarah Hopkins Bradford, whose biographies of Tubman were definitely
filtered through her own lens and in some case. In
some cases we're specifically written for the purpose of helping
Tubman to raise money to support herself and other people,
so they were books written to sell. Also, Harriet Tubman
was herself an incredible storyteller who spun out compelling of
(13:00):
pockative and dramatic stories. So in many cases, once she
narrated her autobiography, she was telling stories that she had
told again and again for years. It's probable and really
even inevitable that these stories had been refined and embellished
along the way through her years of retellings. I mean,
if you tell the same joke at a party and
it's your go to if you tell it today, five
(13:23):
years from now, you're still telling it, You've probably changed
some things, and you probably don't remember. It's not necessarily
a conscious move right in your mind. That's how it happened.
Now we do know that she was born in Maryland, which,
as we said earlier, was at the time a slave state.
Her birth date is unknown, although it was probably within
(13:43):
a couple of years of eighteen twenty. Tubman's parents were
Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, and Tubban's name at birth
seems to have been Arementa, and she was often called Minty.
She sticked the name Harriet later on in her life.
We don't know much about her relationship with her familyther
than that she did have several siblings and was charged
with caring for the ones who were younger than her
(14:05):
when she was still a child. We also know that
two older sisters were sold south. The family had some
religious instruction, probably Methodist, and religious observance was part of
their family and social life. Based on Harriett's later knowledge
of folk healing and herbal medicines, it's also likely that
they observed folk traditions passed down from her grandmother, who
(14:26):
was part of the Ashanti tribe. Tubman and many of
her family were owned by a man named Edward Broadest.
Tubben was often hired out, including a brief apprenticeship as
a weaver and work as a housemaider and nursemaid, but
a lot of her work involved manual labor, including working
with timber. While still in her adolescence, Tubman experienced a
(14:47):
head injury that led to her being disabled for the
rest of her life. An overseer or slave owner threw
a weight while trying to stop an escaping slave, and
it hit Tubman instead. The resulting injury led to what
seems to have been a form of narcolepsy or epilepsy,
which her biographers described as somnolence. She was basically prone
to periods of what sounds like seizures or unexpected periods
(15:11):
of sleep. There are also some people who theorized that
the reason she never learned to read was that this
head injury damaged the part of her brain that works
with literacy. So h totally unclear whether that was the
case or not, but that is a thing that people theorize.
This disability, along the with the fact that a lot
(15:33):
of her work involved heavy manual labor, might be one
of the reasons that she didn't marry John Tubman until
she was about twenty four, which was relatively late for
an enslaved woman living at the time. The Tubmans had
no children, and their relationship was kind of unusual, not
necessarily unusual in Maryland, but unusual as in a general sense,
because John Tubman was free and Harriet Tubman, his wife,
(15:56):
was actually another man's property. Harriet's efforts to free other
people started while she was still enslaved herself. In eighteen
forty five, about a year after her marriage, she paid
a lawyer five dollars to look into her suspicion that
her mother's enslavement was not legal, and it turned out
she was right. According to the will of her prior owner,
(16:17):
Tubman's mother should have been freed when she reached the
age of forty five. She had already been enslaved for
another eleven years when Tubman confirmed those suspicions. Nothing seems
to have come of this investigation, though, Tubman's father, who
had been freed in eighteen forty, legally purchased her mother
in eighteen fifty five, a full decade after Tubman's investigation
(16:37):
revealed that she was in fact being enslaved illegally. Yeah.
I went to a thing called History Camp that was
here in Boston a few weeks ago, and I watched
a several presentations that were about tracking down formally enslaved
people in New England and try trying to figure out
what their family histories where. And one of the rules, uh,
like it was sort of like the rules for doing
(16:59):
this kind of research. Chin it was dispelling misconceptions about
about enslavement, and one of them was people did not
necessarily follow the law, like people can't be like, well,
it was illegal to do that to a slave, people
didn't necessarily follow the law. Clearly, Subban's mother was supposed
to have been free way before her husband legally bought
(17:22):
her as a way to set her free anyway. Edward
brought us died on March nine of eighteen forty nine,
and in his will he specified that his widow would
have quote use and hire of Tubman and any children
she had for the rest of her life, so that
Tubman could help raise his children. However, Tubman and the
(17:42):
rest of her family were really worried that instead some
of them might be sold to pay off debts or
settle estate fees, which was a common occurrence when a
slave owner died, possibly because of the potential threat of
being sold south. It was not long after this that
Tubman escaped. Later that same year, she and two or
three brothers left the plantation, although her brother soon turned
(18:05):
back and took her with them because they were afraid
of the dangers they would face in escaping, So when
Tubman struck out again, it was on her own. In
the earliest accounts of Tubman's escape, she had the help
of a sympathetic white woman. She's described in the earliest
biography of Tubman as quote a white lady who knew
her story and helped her on her way, and who
(18:26):
Tubman repaid for these efforts with giving her a quilt. However,
later biographers added, in one of the first fantastic embellishments
that has become tied to sort of everyone's collective memory
of Harriet's Hubman, that she had a vision that she
needed to follow the North Star. That probably an embellishment.
She did, however, talk later about feeling as though she
(18:47):
had been called by God to help people to freedom.
She made her way to Philadelphia, where she immediately began
working with the anti slavery community in the Underground Railroad.
And we were going to talk about all of that
after we paused another break from one of our fabulous sponsors.
(19:13):
So back to Harriet Tubman. When she escaped to Pennsylvania
in eighteen forty nine, she found work at a resort
to support herself, and she began making connections with the
anti slavery movement in the area. Soon she was working
with the Underground Railroad. By the time Harriet Tubman became
involved in the Underground Railroad, the idea that the entire
(19:34):
nation should abolish slavery, which, as we mentioned at the
top of the show, had been considered radical just thirty
thirty years before, was starting to gain some traction. An
organized abolition movement had been growing in the North for
a couple of decades, and by the time Harriet Tubman
reached Philadelphia, there were multiple anti slavery societies, including women's
anti slavery societies, operating there. There were also anti slavery
(19:58):
newspapers like will you Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, which was established
in eighteen thirty one, and newspapers run by Frederick Douglas.
The movement for ambolition had largely originated with escaped slaves
and free African Americans, and as it grew throughout the
early mid eighteen hundreds, it also attracted more white participants,
particularly Quakers, who objected to slavery on religious grounds. Most
(20:23):
Likely Harriet Tubman's introduction to the organized anti slavery movement
in general and the Underground Road in particular, came by
a William Still, who was a free black man who
would later self publish a book on the Underground rail Road,
or it might have come from Lucretia or James Mott
Tubman started making trips back into Maryland to try to
free enslaved people, beginning in December of eighteen fifty when
(20:46):
she went to Baltimore to bring back her niece and
two children. Her niece's husband, who was free, helped plan
this escape. Another trip to Baltimore may have followed, but
the historical record on that one is a little bit spottier.
In the fall of eighteen fifty one, Tubman went back
to Dorchester County, where she had grown up to try
to get her husband, who was free as we said before,
(21:08):
but he had stayed behind in Maryland when Tubman escaped. However,
when she got there, she learned that he had married
someone else after she left. Marriages involving enslaved people really
had no legal standing, so from a legal standpoint, his
marriage to Harriet was not really a barrier to him
marrying someone else. After she left, for about a decade,
(21:32):
Tubman continued to make trips into Maryland to help people
liberate themselves, many of the members of her family, because
it wasn't enough to make it to a free state.
She also established a base of operations in British North America,
which is now Canada. She secured some land in St. Catharine's,
which was across a suspension bridge from Buffalo, New York,
near Niagara Falls, and to get there she had to
(21:54):
guide people from Maryland to Philadelphia and then into New
York through Albany, Syracuse, and Rochester before crossing the bridge.
Getting started in St. Catharine's wasn't easy. After having liberated themselves,
most of the people Tubmen guided there had virtually nothing
to live on or it used to make a living.
It's like a while before Tubman could establish a real
(22:15):
foothold there, and even after she did, money continued to
be a real problem. According to the letters of Thomas Garrett,
by eighteen fifty five, Harriet Tubman had successfully returned to
her old neighborhood four times and had liberated seventeen family
members and friends. By eighteen sixty that number had grown
to eight or nine forays into slave territory. The grand
(22:37):
total is probably somewhere in the vicinity of ten to
thirteen missions, leading seventy to eighty people to freedom herself
and instructing fifty or so others how to escape on
their own. One of these trips was to bring back
her parents, who were elderly by that point, after her
father was caught sheltering escaping slaves. After she returned with
(22:57):
her parents, Tubmen resettled in all the New York that
maintained her ties to St. Catharine's because her parents just
were not happy living in Canada. Harriet Tubman's last trip
into Maryland was an attempt to bring out a woman
described as a sister, who sadly died before the trip
could actually be made. The journey was documented in the
(23:17):
letters of Martha Coffin right, and some elements of that
letter are now firmly rooted in what people quote no
again in in those air quotes about the underground Railroad.
For example, Tubman and the seven people she was guiding
used songs not to convey coded information, which has become
a popular part of underground Railroad war, but to help
(23:38):
Tubman find the rest of the group after she had
left them to forage for food, and for them to
signal back to her that it was safe to approach.
These missions that Harriet Tubman took between Maryland and Canada
really illustrate how the underground Railroad really operated. A lot
of people envisioned the underground railroad as being a firmly
(24:00):
established network of mostly white conductors who were secreting enslaved
quote cargo from deep in the South through a series
of fixed hiding places and homes and barns and other
buildings known as stations. So you would go from one
station to the next one day at a time, and
our collective imaginations, every stop is planned in advance and
as part of a regularly used route from one place
(24:23):
to another. And while there were white people involved in
the underground Railroad, particularly among Quakers, as we mentioned earlier,
and there were definitely people who repeatedly sheltered escaping slaves
in their homes or other buildings, in reality, the whole
thing worked a lot more like what Harriet Tubman was
doing here. They were planned, but they were also improvisational.
(24:45):
These trips were, you know, mainly into border states, frequently
carried out by free or escaped African Americans, traveling by
night and hiding by day, who made use of connections
they had and roots that they knew to do it.
Contrary to popular mythology, Harriet Tubman did not invent the
underground Railroad, and the number of people that she guided
(25:05):
to freedom before the Civil war was much lower than
the three hundred that is often cited. However, none of
this should take away from what she was doing. Harriet
Tubman's liberty and even her life were at enormous risk
every time she returned to to slave territory, and when
she was in free States in the company of escaping
(25:26):
slaves who were also putting themselves at enormous risk by
trying to escape. Really, she was jeopardizing her own life
and safety any time she was in the United States
at all, because she had escaped rather than being legally freed.
There was also at times of bounty for her capture.
Although the number forty dollars that's routinely specified is inflated,
(25:49):
it was probably either twelve hundred or twelve thousand dollars.
There's some debate about the existence of that last zero.
By the late eighteen fifties and into the eighteen sixties,
Harriet Tubman had become well known and well respected in
New England's anti slavery circles. Her work guiding escaped slaves
was at first a secret, but became more widely known
(26:11):
in the years just before the Civil War. She earned
the nickname Moses, and at anti slavery meetings. People spoke
often of the escaped slave who had returned to slave
territory again and again to liberate others. The Civil War
began in eighteen sixty one, which really changed the nature
of Harriet's work. So that is where we are going
to pause to pick up the next time. Pay so
(26:39):
much for joining us on this Saturday, since this episode
is out of the archive. If you heard an email
address or a Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(27:00):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
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