Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

Introduction

In the twenty-first century we continue to be inspired by the larger-thanlife figure of Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), still the most famous African American female hero. In her own day she was called “the most remarkable woman of this age” for her courage and success in guiding fugitive slaves out of slave territory in the 1850s and for her Union army service behind Confederate lines. The frontispiece illustration of the first fulllength Tubman biography captured her in a pose as war scout holding a rifle at rest and looking directly and unsmilingly out at the viewer1 — an image that would convey to later generations both African American militant resistance to racial oppression and African American female dignity , strength, and empowerment. 3 introduction One of the teachers lately commissioned by the New-England Freedmen’s Aid Society is probably the most remarkable woman of this age. That is to say, she has performed more wonderful deeds by the native power of her own spirit against adverse circumstances than any other. She is well known to many by the various names which her eventful life has given her; Harriet Garrison, General Tubman, etc.; but among the slaves she is universally known by her well-earned title of Moses,—Moses the deliverer. She is a rare instance, in the midst of high civilization and intellectual culture, of a being of great native powers, working powerfully, and to beneficent ends, entirely unaided by schools or books. —ednah cheney, “Moses” Her name (we say it advisedly and without exaggeration) deserves to be handed down to posterity side by side with the names of Joan of Arc, Grace Darling, and Florence Nightingale; for not one of these women has shown more courage and power of endurance in facing danger and death to relieve human suffering, than has this woman in her heroic and successful endeavors to reach and save all whom she might of her oppressed and suffering race, and to pilot them from the land of Bondage to the promised land of Liberty. —sarah hopkins bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman in Civil War scout attire. This is the woodcut frontispiece (by J. C. Darby of Auburn) from Sarah Bradford’s Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869). Her life history has been told and retold many times, by both black and white biographers, as part of the political effort to construct and pass on a history of effective African American resistance to white supremacist attitudes, policies, and institutions.2 Her celebrity today, as in her own time, also reflects her violation of dominant gender norms. She was one of very few women whose escape from slavery was widely publicized in her own time among antislavery activists, and she was virtually the only woman celebrated as a guide for fleeing fugitives. Though other women certainly were involved in the rescue of bondspeople, she was unique in repeating so many times, over many years, the secret rescue work that put her own life in danger.3 Her celebrity in her own day was based both on her unusual career itself and on her ability to form and keep close relationships with a group of well-connected white antislavery activists in the North, upon whom she relied for both funding and the opportunities to transmit her story in public . Her three earliest biographers, Franklin B. Sanborn, Ednah Cheney, and Sarah Hopkins Bradford, were among her many white Northern political allies, and as it turned out, all remained loyal supporters during her long lifetime.4 They all inserted editorial commentary on her personality and character into their biographies—much of which reflects white racial attitudes of the times that are highly repellent today—and to different degrees they distorted her spoken narratives, summarizing longer accounts by leaving out detail and using nonstandard English spellings to reproduce what they heard as uneducated Southern dialect. Yet all three were in genuine awe of her abilities and accomplishments, and all considered her life story to be one for the ages. Tubman herself wrote none of the biographical texts on which our culture’s collective memories of her life are based. As a child in the 1820s, she was a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland. She had no access to formal education, and she remained a bondswoman until she was nearly thirty years of age...