Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

7. “Testimony” Given in Canada (1855)

7 “Testimony” Given in Canada (1855) Harriet Tubman harriet tubman (c. 1820–1913) was born a plantation slave in Maryland. Growing up in the southern slavery system, she observed its brutality when two older sisters were taken away to a chain gang. Married to John Tubman, but childless, she fled to the North in 1849, possibly with the help of a white woman (Humez 16–18), and vowed to liberate her entire family through dangerous trips back south for each of them. Sustained by her family’s spiritual practices and Christian beliefs, despite the hypocrisy of antebellum churches, she affiliated with the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia and began working with the Quaker community in the Underground Railroad, earning the name “Moses.” Her success in bringing her entire family north to Auburn, New York, after time in Canada won her acclaim in antislavery networks. She encountered Frederick Douglass, John Brown, William Wells Brown, and other black antislavery activists as she gave speeches around the Northeast (Humez 29–37). Tubman also associated with the growing women’s rights movement, arguing for the importance of the work done by women of African origin. During the Civil War she served in the Union Army as a spy and scout in the South and afterward, as a nurse, she aided newly freed women in the refugee camps. Injured when a train conductor ejected her from a railroad car, 202 Tubman criticized the violence and inequities that persisted during Reconstruction. The violence included the murder of her estranged husband and the perpetrator’s acquittal, which mobilized a drive for black male suffrage (Humez 76–77). Living in Auburn, Tubman, who never learned to read or write, collaborated on a memoir with Sarah Hopkins Bradford as a fundraising project. While Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), telling her story as a former slave, depicts Tubman sentimentally as a “suffering saint,” its reissue as Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886) offers insight, if highly mediated, into her sense of being “a stranger in a strange land” (Humez 85, 94). In her later years Tubman spoke at gatherings around Auburn on behalf of women’s suffrage, telling tales of women’s brave deeds during the war. She was welcomed at the founding convention of the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and was hailed as a heroic figure. In 1908 the Tubman Home was dedicated in Auburn. The first-person testimony from Tubman included here is a version of the oral storytelling of her life that Tubman performed at fundraisers, with eloquent gestures and scriptural references, to enthralled audiences. In this transcribed form it mixes the writer’s perspective with Tubman’s and is not her unmediated life narrative, although as a text dictated to Benjamin Drew (who published it in The Refugee: or, a North-Side View of Slavery [cited in Humez, 279–80]), it was closely under her control. - “Testimony” I grew up like a neglected weed,—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented; every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang,—one of them left two children. We were always uneasy. Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. “Testimony” 203 I have no opportunity to see my friends in my native land. We would rather stay in our native land, if we could be as free there as we are here. I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell, if he could. 204 harriet tubman ...