Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (review)

The study of fugitive slaves is enjoying a renaissance. During the 1960s and 1970s, Larry Gara's (The Liberty Line, 1961) and Robin Wink's careful studies (Blacks in Canada, 1973), combined with antebellum census data, suggested a small number of fugitive slaves. Most fugitives, however, did not go to Canada, and the census tabulation of runaways may not have been any more accurate than the notorious 1840 figures used by Southerners to support claims that Northern free blacks went insane. By the 1990s, a reappraisal was overdue, which the National Park Service's Underground Railroad initiative helped catalyze. While Gara was correct that early interpreters of the underground railroad slighted African Americans and women while romanticizing the role of white abolitionists, it is becoming clear that the fugitive slave issue was significant locally, and sometimes nationally, as a galvanizing symbol of resistance to slave power tyranny. As Albert Bushnell Hart stated in his introduction to Wilbur Siebert's The Underground Railroad (1896), the very fact that slaves could flee to freedom significantly undercut the security of the slave system in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman, one of the most famous fugitives, has been enjoying a renaissance of her own. Three significant biographies have been recently written by Catherine Clinton (Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, 2004), Kate Larson (Bound for the Promised Land, 2003), and Jean Humez, who has worked on Tubman for a decade.

With the current interest in women's history, African American history, and the underground railroad, Tubman deserved new scholarly study. She was an associate of Frederick Douglass and John Brown, who hoped she would take part in the Harpers Ferry raid. During the Civil War, she guided U.S. troops on raids that freed hundreds of slaves and helped tend the wounded from the murderous assault on Fort Wagner. After the war, she fought against racial and gender discrimination.

What makes the work of her recent biographers critically important is that Tubman was illiterate. Consequently, we do not have an autobiographical slave narrative from her as we do for Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and many others. Humez contends, however, that Tubman did tell her life history according to African American oral tradition, through core stories she often repeated and carefully dictated to her first biographers. Unfortunately, they obscured them with their own preconceptions. This thesis explains this book's unique organizational scheme, which combines a 118-page biographical sketch with sections of core stories, source documents, and other materials. Humez maintains that it is impossible to tell Tubman's story without including these stories, Tubman's own attempts to define the significance of her life. Through them, Humez tries to recover Tubman's voice, how she chose to present herself to different audiences, and not just how white acquaintances chose to remember her.

Humez's biography is careful and accurate. In addition, by assembling and publishing most of the extant documentation about Tubman, and critically assessing its reliability, Humez has laid a foundation for future scholars of Tubman, fugitive slaves, and African Americans in nineteenth-century America. Many topics in African American history are essentially detective stories, piecing together a limited amount of widely disparate information—Humez has done this admirably. The sole criticism is that the meticulous narrative sometimes plods, with abrupt transitions between events. Valuable appendices tackle Tubman's family relationships, how many trips back south she made (about ten), and how many slaves she rescued (probably seventy-seven or fewer).

Tubman was an extraordinary fugitive with typical aspects. Most slaves did not escape to the North; fewer still returned to the South to liberate others. Her motivation for doing so was love of family, something she shared with the members of fugitive communities in border Pennsylvania and Ohio who hoped they could stay in contact with their enslaved kin. Like many other fugitives, she had a deep religious faith and relied on her wits; unlike...