Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

The Later Years

Bl ack Institution Building in the Post-Reconstruction Era I ndustrial, technological, and economic expansion followed the Civil War in the North, but the sharecropping system that developed in the still largely agricultural South locked the majority of the landless rural black population there into deep economic dependency and poverty. The continuing economic exploitation was backed up by new strategies of political disenfranchisement. After the end of Federal Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states moved to create legal restrictions that would curtail the voting rights of Southern black males, as well as a system of racial intimidation based on terrorism. By the 1890s, the Jim Crow system of racial segregation had been developed throughout the South, and the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that such a system was constitutional (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896). Racial segregation was rationalized by a “scientific” theory of race heavily influenced by Social Darwinism, which elevated “AngloSaxons ” (whites of English ancestry) and other northern European populations over such racial groups deemed less civilized and therefore genetically inferior. This included Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Irish, Jews, Asians, and members of the African Diaspora. White mob intimidation and lynching of Southern blacks who threatened the racial order could now be understood as simple justice, enacted by knights of threatened white civilization upon those who were dangerously “brutal.” Northern African American communities enlarged as Southern migrants sought less restrictive and dangerous lives in Northern cities, but race-based discrimination in public service, housing, education and employment 91 the l ater years was widely practiced in the North as well. Although white women were streaming into previously male-only clerical and sales occupations in these decades, most African American women wage earners in the North were restricted to live-in domestic service or laundry work. (Black workers were barred from factory employment until World War I.) Yet during these same years African American and white educational leaders built schools and colleges for the under-served black population in the South; substantial advances were made by black professionals (many of whom were the early products of these schools and colleges); and many other black social and cultural institutions and businesses sprang up to serve the black communities, North and South.1 The independent black churches played key roles as multipurpose community institutions during a time when white religious and social institutions, with a few notable exceptions, abdicated responsibility for helping to serve the needy within the emancipated black population.2 Harriet Tubman also came to rely on an African American church organization for spiritual and sociopolitical needs as the racial social divide widened in Auburn, as it was doing in the rest of the industrial North. In the early days of her family’s residence in Auburn, Tubman and her parents (though raised as Methodists) had attended the (antislavery) Central Presbyterian Church along with many of her white political allies.3 She was married there in 1869. Sometime in the 1870s she also began to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.4 Her new husband, Nelson Davis, was elected a trustee of the church on August 6, 1870, and she may have decided to attend church with him. Tubman was an active member of the A.M.E. Zion congregation at the end of the decade, according to Rev. James E. Mason of Livingstone College, South Carolina. He remembered being impressed with her religious fervor when he first met her at a service in “the long one-aisled frame Zion A.M.E. Church on Washington Street,” in around 1878 or 1879.5 “At the close of a thrilling selection she arose and commenced to speak in a hesitating voice. . . . In a shrill voice, she commenced to give testimony to God’s goodness and long suffering. Soon she was shouting, and so were others also. She possessed such endurance, vitality, and magnetism that I inquired and was informed it was Harriet Tubman—the ‘Underground Railroad Moses.’ . . . Service ended, I greeted her. She said, ‘Are you saved?’ I gave an affirmative reply. She remarked: ‘Glory to God,’ and shouted again”(“Pays Tribute to Harriet Tubman,” June 6, 1914). Another rare glimpse of Tubman’s ecstatic spirituality in the postwar 92 The Life period occurs in an Auburn newspaper story in 1884. She was reported as overpowered by religious feeling when praying for Moses Stewart, a kinsman who had been arrested.6 “A considerable amount...