SYMHC Classics: Harriet Tubman, Part 2

We're continuing our classics with Harriet Tubman's story, which came out in 2016. There was a whole lot more to her life and work than the Underground Railroad. During the U.S. Civil War, she worked as a Union spy, eventually earning the nickname "General."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, Everybody. Today's classic episode is the conclusion of
our two parter on Harriet Tubman, which we started last
Saturday in honor of Juneteenth. This episode originally came out
on June, and it covers Harriet Tubman's service as a
spy during the U s Civil War and her lifelong
dedications to helping and caring for people who were less

(00:25):
fortunate than she was, even when she was in need herself.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy and I'm Holly Fry. We are picking up

(00:48):
today where we left off in the life of Harriet
Tubmant and last time we talked about her life while
enslaved in Maryland and her work with Underground out Road.
There's the parts of her life and work the people
are generally most familiar with unless they have watched drunk History,
thanks in part too, a reponderance of children's books about
her and the prevalence of the Underground Railroad and elementary

(01:10):
school lessons about slavery in the United States. But there
was a whole lot more to Harriet Tubbans life and
work than her time as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
Even during the years between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty,
while she was actively leading enslaved people from Maryland into Canada,
she was also working with the movements for abolition and

(01:31):
women's rights, and she traveled all over New England to
this end. She was connected to abolitionist John Brown before
his raid on Harper's Ferry, which was part of a
failed plan to start a slave uprising in the months
before the Civil War, and in Troy, New York, she
helped prevent an escaped slave named Charles Knall from being
captured by slave catchers uh and being returned South by

(01:54):
literally shielding him with her own body. Basically, she did
a lot in a out of her work beyond the
Underground Railroad is overlooked entirely besides that drunk history episode
that I keep mentioning because it is quite funny, uh,
And that's what we're talking about today. We've talked in
more detail about how the Civil War started in our

(02:15):
podcasts on Robert Small's and there's some overlap in this
story in that one. So if you've heard those podcasts,
some of this information might ring a Bell very long story,
very very short. As the balance of power in the
United States government started to tip in favor of free states,
slave states felt increasingly threatened. Many promise to secede if

(02:36):
Abraham Lincoln were elected president, and he was so they did.
Senator William H. Seward, who actually had sold Harriet Tubman
land in New York that was adjacent to his own property,
was one of the legislators who introduced measures meant to
try to appease the Southern States and an effort to
stop this secession crisis. These measures included the return of

(02:59):
escape slaves back south. When this happened, a lot of
Tubman's friends started trying to get her to flee back
to British North America, which would become Canada, from Albany,
New York, where she had settled with her aging parents.
Because Seward and Tubman knew one another, people were afraid
that he bites send her back to Maryland as a
show of goodwill to the South for the sake of

(03:21):
trying to hold the Union together. The idea that people
would even think this really shed some light on the
links that like the the federal government slashed the Northern
states were willing to go to try to keep the
South from succeeding, like the fact that that would even
occur to people. She did not heed this advice, though,

(03:43):
and in the end Seward did not use her as
a pawn. So we're including that mostly because it's illustrative,
and it's not entirely clear what she did for the
first six months or so of the war. Her biographers
actually disagree, and even with that disagreement in mind, there
are still gaps of open where there's no information. But
by October of eighteen sixty one, she had started passing

(04:06):
the Union information about how the war was affecting enslaved people,
delivering her intelligence to Franklin Sanborn. Sanborn had been one
of the secret Six co conspirators in John Brown's raid
on Harper's Ferry prior to the war. That fall, she
also traveled to Boston to talk to John A. Andrew,
who was the governor of Massachusetts, about how she might

(04:28):
serve the Union in the war. He thought, given how
long she had been undertaking secret missions into slave territory
as part of the Underground Railroad, and how staunchly opposed
she was to slavery, that she might make a good
Union spy. Once the Union captured the Sea islands off
the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, the same

(04:48):
islands that were so familiar to pass podcast subject Robert Smalls,
Tubman did indeed go there to serve. In early eighteen
sixty two, she was sent to Beaufort, South Carolina, and
from there to Poor Royal Island. Her cover was that
she was there as part of a humanitarian mission arranged
by Boston Society's Rebolition to try to provide clothing and

(05:09):
other necessities to Port Royal Islands formerly enslaved population, and
she did do some of this humanitarian work, as well
as acting as a nurse to both soldiers and contraband.
Contraband is the catch all term for formerly enslaved people
who made their way to Union controlled territory. Her first
months in Port Royal were difficult. A number of missionaries

(05:30):
and other volunteers there died due to disease and extreme heat.
General David Hunter had issued an order that all enslaved
people in Union held territory be declared free, but Abraham
Lincoln had reversed that order, afraid it would provoke the
South even further, and this reversal, of course, enraged both
enslaved people and abolitionists. It's another example of lengths to

(05:54):
which the federal government was willing to go to appease
the slave states. Uh. That could be a whole other
podcast anyway. Eventually, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January
one of eighteen sixty three, which freed the enslaved population
in the states that were rebelling against the Union. Also
in January, Colonel James Montgomery was authorized to recruit black

(06:18):
soldiers into military service and train them to be soldiers.
Once those two things happened, Tubman started investing her pay
into building a washhouse so she could teach formerly enslaved
women how to make a living for themselves. She invested
most of the rest of her money into similar endeavors,
and she gave up her privilege of military rations because

(06:39):
she thought it was causing jealousy among the people she
was working with. Instead, she made root beer pies in
gingerbread in her off hours so she could sell them
and earn her own keep. The presence of a black
fighting force played a role in Harriet Tubman's most famous action.
During her time as a Civil War spy which was
a raid up the Cumby River in June of eighteen

(07:01):
sixty three. We know it's a little early, but that
is a pretty exciting story. We want to keep it
all together, so we're going to get to it after
a brief word from a sponsor. By the summer of
eighteen sixty three, Harriet Tubman was definitely putting her underground

(07:24):
railroad experience to use as a spy in addition to
her humanitarian work. Earlier that year, she had been issued
a hundred dollars by the Department of the South, which
she had used to create a spy network. Her spies
were all contraband who had had experience as boat pilots
or doing other work on the water. Tubman ran this
network under the auspices of Colonel James Montgomery, who was

(07:45):
also by that point commanding the newly created second Regiment,
South Carolina Volunteer Infantry African Descent. That June, General Hunter
wanted to plan a raid of the Kumbi River, which
was home to a number of plantations. It's possible that
the whole raid was Tubman's idea, based on intelligence that
she'd gathered from her network of spies. Exactly where this

(08:07):
idea actually came from is hard to pin down, but
the fact that Tubman played a critical role in it
is absolutely undeniable, along with the fact that she told
Hunter she'd only participate if Montgomery was in command. It
also seems as though she and her spine network participated
in other similar raids as well, but the Cumby River
raid is definitely the most famous. The plan was to

(08:30):
take a force up the Cumby River, evading and disabling
minds that had been laid there, and then raiding the
rice and cotton plantations that lay along its length. They
would take what they could carry, liberate the enslaved labor force,
and then towards the rest of it. Apart from the
obviously humanitarian success of liberating hundreds of people from slavery,
this would also destroy a source of Confederate assets and wealth.

(08:55):
Tubman and the eight or nine scouts that she employed
together worked out the locations of all the minds that
needed to be disabled and spread the word to the
enslaved people on the plantations of what was about to happen.
She and at least some of these scouts were aboard
the lead boat when it's set off up the river.
Three gun ships and about three hundred Black troops were

(09:15):
involved as well. On June first, eighteen sixty three, they
started their journey up the river. They raided plantations in
Collaton and Bufort Counties, liberating the enslaved people there, capturing
what provisions they could and destroying what they couldn't so
that the Confederacy couldn't continue to use it. This whole
thing happened with no injuries to Tubman, her spies, or

(09:37):
the Union fighting force who also participated, possibly because the
people who owned and ran the plantations found the sudden
appearance of the second regiment armed terrifying. Farther upriver, plantation
owners fled in advance of the incoming raid. The raid
captured about fifteen thousand dollars worth of property and eight

(09:58):
hundred and forty slaves, according to a letter from a
member of the Massachusetts fifty four Colored Regiment, which was
published in the New Bedford newspaper. According to a letter
that Tubman dictated herself, there were seven hundred and fifty
six slaves who were liberated. It was this and other
actions that wound up earning Tubman the nickname General with newspapers,

(10:19):
even going so far as calling her the U. S.
Armies first woman general, even though she didn't actually hold
an official military rank. She is, however, the only woman
known to have led a military operation like this during
the Civil War. As a side note, after this mission,
Tubman wrote a letter to ask for money to buy
a bloomer dress of sturdy material because she tripped on

(10:41):
her own dress and tore it to shreds while trying
to hurry escaping slaves to the boats. A bloomer dress,
as the name suggests, had billowy pants under a shorter skirt,
so it would have been much more practical for running around.
That story really cracked me up. I need a better outfit. Yeah,

(11:02):
that's one of the one of the things that I
am do you while I was researching, was this story
about the bloomer dress. Uh. The Coumpy River raid was
the most dramatic moment in Harriet Tubmans's Civil War service.
I mean, a troop troops of one of the first
regiments for black soldiers making their way up the river
and burning down plantations is by itself pretty dramatic. But

(11:26):
for about a year after it was over, she stayed
in the Sea Islands, she maintained the spy network, acted
as a nurse, and continued supporting herself with her baking
and root beer. Following the raid, a big part of
her work turned towards seeing to the welfare of the
people that she had just liberated. While healthy adult men
were mostly recruited into the army, many others were ill

(11:48):
or injured, and none of them had what they needed
in terms of basic necessities. So as Harriet continued her
work as a nurse, she also developed a reputation of
being particularly skilled with herbal remedy, including a treatment for
dysenterry during an outbreak in eighteen sixty three and eighteen
sixty four. We mentioned it in the previous episode, but

(12:09):
we should pointed out here again that a lot of
this was probably folk traditions that had been passed down
from her ancestors who had learned them in Africa and
then brought them. Her grandmother was most likely a member
of the Ashanti tribe. In early eighteen sixty five, Harriet
Tubman went on leave and left the Sea Islands to
go north to try to visit her parents. Her leave

(12:30):
wasn't originally planned to be very long. The goal had
been to go back to the Sea Islands and continue
to educate the freed population on how to make a
living on their own, but she got sick while she
was away, and the war was nearly over when she
went south again, so she was still in the North
when Lincoln won reelection and when the thirteenth Amendment was
passed and abolished slavery. When she did go south again,

(12:53):
rather than to see island, she spent time working as
a nurse in military hospitals in Virginia. In addition to
this work in nursing, she observed abuses that were going
on in some of the hospitals that she visited, and
she reported this information back to officials in Washington. After
the Civil War was over, Tubman and a number of
her abolitionist and civil rights allies really struggled for years

(13:17):
to try to get back pay for the time that
she had spent working for the Union Army, as well
as a veterans pension. These attempts were really unsuccessful because
she hadn't been enlisted. Because women couldn't enlist, she wasn't
viewed as a veteran, even though she spent all that
time serving Once the war was over, Tubman went back
to Auburn, New York, and we're going to talk about

(13:39):
her time there after we paused for a brief word
from a sponsor, So going back to our tail. While
Harriet Tubman was on her way back to Auburn, New
York after the Civil War, a train conductor tried to
remove her from the train car that she was on.

(14:02):
She was traveling on a government pass rather than a
full price ticket, and the conductor, in addition to calling
her a racial epithet, tried to forcibly remove her from
the train. Subbin had been doing manual labor for most
of her life. She was consequently very strong and she
resisted him powerfully. He called three men to assist him,
and they threw her bodily into the baggage car. Her

(14:25):
arm was injured in all of this, and it's unclear
whether it was sprained or broken, but she wound up
having to wear it in a sling for a long
time afterward. She considered suing the railroad, especially because the
injury meant that she couldn't work, but nothing ever came
of it, apart from abolitionists and civil rights circles using
it to illustrate this discrimination on the railroad. Back in Auburn,

(14:47):
Tubban started something that would be her focus for the
rest of her life, and that was caring for people who,
because of age, poverty, illness, or other circumstances, couldn't take
care of themselves. Her home became temporary lodging for people
that she had guided to freedom as they returned back
from Canada hoping to make their way home. She typically
had at least two or three people staying with her

(15:10):
who were elderly, sick, or otherwise in need of care.
She developed a reputation for never turning away anyone who
needed her help, whether she could actually afford to help
them or not. She also collected clothing and their nations
for schools for South Carolina's newly free population. Along with
other members of her household, she tried to make a

(15:30):
living through growing vegetables and fruit, raising chickens, bartering, and
doing domestic work. One of her Sarah Hopkins Bradford biographies
was actually a fundraising effort during this time. Their nations
from former abolitionists and civil rights reformers also helped to
pay the bills. Although she generally was extremely reluctant to
ask for money for herself. She would, however, ask for

(15:52):
money to help the people she was trying to help.
In the years after the Civil War was over, the
United States was struck with ongoing waves of racial violence.
In one of these, John Tubman, Harriet's former husband, was
shot and killed by a white man named Robert Vincent,
who was found not guilty by an all white jury,

(16:13):
and that event took place in eighteen sixty seven. In
eighteen sixty nine, Tubman remarried to a man named Nelson
Davis at Central Presbyterian Church in Auburn. Davis had also
liberated himself from slavery. He had served in the Civil War,
and he had been boarding in her house for about
three years. In eighteen seventy three, Harriet Tubman and her

(16:34):
brother John Stewart had an unfortunate run in with a
couple of con men. They claimed to have five thousand
dollars worth of gold, which they were going to sell
Stewart for a mere two thousand dollars. They framed it
with a story that was taylor made to play on
tubman sensibilities. They said it was a trunk full of
gold that an ex slave had carried out of the
South and wanted to sell to her because he needed

(16:55):
money and he didn't trust white people. Stewart did not
have that kind of money, and neither did a sister.
But because of her work during the abolition movement and
her reputation from the underground railroad, she was very well
connected with some of Auburn's most affluent and influential citizens.
Stewart looked some of them for money and a future.

(17:16):
A few people tried to discourage him from this whole
endeavor because they suspected correctly that it might be a scam,
but a man named Anthony Scheimer advanced them two thousand
dollars in cash, which the fraudsters said could only be
delivered by tubman to a secret location. When the time came,
she went into the woods by herself and found the

(17:37):
gold man, who claimed he had forgotten the key to
the trunk. She waited there for him while he went
to get it, and after he left, someone knocked her out,
probably with chloroform, tied her up, gagged her, and stole
the two thousand dollars. She actually managed to get home
again while she was still bound and gagged. Authorities briefly

(18:00):
suspected that Tubman and Stewart were in cahoots with these conmen,
and Scheimer claimed that he had loaned the two thousand
dollars with Tubman's house as collaterals, so her home and
the shelter she was affording to many other people were
all at risk. In the end, though, Tubman and Stuart
were cleared of all suspicion, with multiple prominent people in
Auburn speaking up for her absolute, unfailing integrity. In the

(18:25):
eighteen seventies, Tubman began attending the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church in Auburn, where her husband was elected as a
church trustee. In eighteen seventy five, Tubman's father died, her
mother died in eighteen eighty. Her husband, Nelson Davis, died
of tuberculosis in eight By the late eighteen eighties, Tubman

(18:47):
was trying to turn her home based care for other
people into a more official charity, in part because most
of the places that we'd call nursing homes today weren't
open to black people. So she wanted to start a
quote home for aged and indigent negroes, which she hoped
to name John Brown Hall To that end, she expanded
the industries being done at her home to include a

(19:10):
pig farm and a brickyard. She bid on neighboring land
and buildings at auction, even though she didn't have the
financing lined up to pay for it. Having successfully won
the auction, she called on her network at church and
in the community to scrape together a down payment and
secure a mortgage. From here, she turned to public appearances
and a new edition of her biography in the hope

(19:31):
of funding the rest of the one thousand, four hundred
and fifty dollars that she needed. A lot of her
speaking engagements were at meetings and rallies to promote women's suffrage,
and she also spoke at the founding convention of the
National Association of Colored Women. But even so, raising the
money that she needed was extremely difficult, and she wound
up needing to remortgage her own home in After speaking

(19:56):
extensively at meetings and conventions for women's suffrage and the
National Association of Colored Women, reissuing her biography, and continuing
to try to fundraise for John Brown Hall, by the
mid nineties, Tubman realized she simply could not do it
all on her own, She turned to both her friends
from the Abolition movement and friends from the A. M. E.
Zion Church for help. Unfortunately, these two groups did not

(20:20):
work well together and they were sometimes at cross purposes. Yeah,
some of the biographers that look at this part of
her life get into probably some implicit racial bias on
the part of her friends from the Abolition movement, because
there were definitely some cases where it was like her
white abolitionist friends were making decisions based on what they

(20:42):
thought was best without actually consulting what was needed or
or what the people that they were trying to fundraise
for actually wanted. Over the years, the name and the
purpose of this project shifted as well. It went from
being John Brown Hall, which was a home for impoverished
l really people, particularly black women, to the Harriet Tubman Home,

(21:04):
which was both a residence for the elderly and an
industrial school to educate black women to do domestic work.
She actually felt kind of conflicted about this goal. There's
a whole other debate going on at the time about
what types of education the black community would be best
served by, Like was it best to have vocational education

(21:26):
so that people could learn to make a living for
themselves outside of the like the umbrella of slavery, and
then um and then that would trickle down to like
the next generations going to more academic colleges or was
it better to give people a more academic education that
would basically expand everyone's social standing and awareness. Was a

(21:48):
whole big debate about it. Um and then Harriet Tubb
and herself was kind of conflicted because she didn't actually
like doing domestic work. She had not been happy doing
that when she was younger. They didn't totally it behind
the idea of using her name to train black women
to do domestic work, but that's where it all ended up.
In eighteen ninety, Harriet applied for a Civil War widows

(22:10):
pension and she was finally granted one in the amount
of eight dollars a month. She and some of her
supporters once again renewed an effort to get a pension
based on her own service, and ultimately her widows pension
was raised to twenty dollars a month in light of
her work as a wartime nurse. She also received a
small lump sum of about five hundred dollars, and that

(22:31):
payout happened in eight This wasn't a lot of money though,
and as we kept talking about, Harriet Tubman was more
interested in helping other people than she was seeing to
her own financial security. It's pretty clear from her actions.
So she spent the last years of her life in
poverty while still trying to see to the needs of

(22:53):
people who were even less fortunate than she was. This
sometimes drew the concerns of her old friends and allies
from the abolitionist movement. Uh They were worried that she
was being taken advantage of sometimes, and that worry actually
was not entirely misplaced. In nineteen o seven, she was
robbed of money she had been given as a Christmas gift,
and that robbery was probably done by someone who had

(23:14):
been living with her. On May nineteenth of nineteen eleven,
she became ill enough to have to move into the
Tubman Home as a resident and be looked after by nurses.
She died there on March tenth of nineteen thirteen, at
the age of roughly ninety three and two thousand and three.
A payment of eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars

(23:35):
was included in a Senate appropriations bill basically as back
pay for Harriet Tubmans wartime service, with the idea that
it would go toward restoring historical sites that were associated
with her life and work. Uh and as was announced
in April of twenty sixteen, which fostered a flurry of
requests about her, she is slated to appear on a

(23:56):
redesigned twenty dollar bill in the US. On back will
be the White House and President Andrew Jackson, who is
currently on the front of that bill. There are, of course,
many other lifetime and posthumous accolades granted to her, and
many things named after her, all kinds of stuff. But
that's really the highlights of the life and work of

(24:17):
Harriet Tubman, who's pretty awesome. Like a lot of people
know the Underground Railroad part, people that watch drunk History
or have seen that video on the internet know the
part about the Cumby River raid. I don't feel like
it's particularly well known, especially maybe outside of Auburn, New York.
That then, once the war was over, she basically spent

(24:39):
the rest of her life trying to take care of people,
even though she did not have the money to take
care of herself. She was basically like, I'm just I'm
going to take care of these old people who don't
have anybody to look after them. I'm gonna do whatever
it takes to scrape up enough money to make that work.
I have one question, what is it? Did she get

(24:59):
the UM address? I don't know. That's a great question though.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
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(25:20):
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(25:42):
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