American History Hit - Harriet Tubman

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most famous African American woman in the world, but she’s usually remembered in two-dimensions - the hero of the underground railroad rescuing slaves from the misery of the plantation system.The real Tubman did far more than this in her remarkable life, not least by being the first woman to lead a military raid in US history.Helping Don understand the truth behind the legend is Janell Hobson, who edited a wonderful collection of work for Ms Magazine celebrating the bicentenary of Harriet Tubman’s birth: https://msmagazine.com/tubman200/Edited and produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongFor more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is September 1849. In the deep woods of northern Maryland, a woman flees enslavement,

moving stealthily through the cover of a pitched black night, alert for patrols dispatched to hunt her down. Try and put yourself into this woman's shoes. Intermittable marshes slow her progress. Everywhere are frightening and decipherable sounds. Wild animals in the brush. Dangers she doesn't even know. But the refrain of a familiar song repeats in her head.

One, she'd sung surreptitiously for days before she fled, letting friends and family know her secret intention to escape. Tonight, in her loneliness, the words bring some comfort at least. I am bound for the promise land. I am bound for the promise land. Oh, who will come and go with me? I am bound for the promise land. In the years ahead, this world.

woman will bravely return and lead others again and again along these trails to liberty. But tonight, it is only her, here in a night, drawing ever closer, her only guide through the wilderness hanging overhead in the firmament, the northern star, her beacon of freedom. American history is crammed with countless stories of brave individuals, accomplishing feats of courage and daring, pitting themselves against the fiercest opposition. throwing caution to the winds determined to complete their mission. And then there's Harriet Tubman. Enslaved since birth, she broke free of bondage and escaped north to freedom.

Bravery, courage, determination. And then she went back for her family. Then again, for others. Then again and again and again. risking the seeming inevitability of discovery and re-enslavement and possibly worse to lead her brothers and sisters to a promising, if uncertain future. Harriet Tubman stands with the greatest, with Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln,

those Americans fighting for the freedom of enslaved millions in pre-Civil War America. If freedom is the ultimate destiny of the American journey, its foremost ideal, then Harriet Tubman and her passengers on the Underground Railroad are the quintessential Americans. And we all need to embrace this story, her story, if we are to appreciate our own good fortune and privilege. And to help us understand the events of this remarkable woman's life is a remarkable woman in her own right. Janelle Hobson is a writer, speaker, and teacher, professor of women's gender and sexuality studies. at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Welcome to American History Hit, Janelle.

My fellow New Yorker, hello. Yes, hello. Thank you for having me. We're glad to have you. Janelle, Harriet Tubman's story begins in 1822, as she is born into enslavement, which was the sadness of her times. So many generations had gone on hundreds of years of enslavement.

In a way, she wouldn't have known any other reality, and yet somehow she did. How would she have conceived of, escape. How did she hear the stories? That's a great question. I think what's interesting about where Harriet Tubman was born, which is Maryland. Maryland, it's a slave state, but it's also at the border of Pennsylvania, which is a free state. So we have someone like Harriet Tubman, who is part of a community of enslaved African Americans, but some of those African Americans are also freeborn. And so there was a mixing of both enslaved

and free people. They're also on the eastern shore of Maryland. So they're in a harbor state. There are boatmen and seafarers and those kinds of people who were doing the kind of trade that happens along that eastern shore. So they're making those trips back and forth between the north and the south. And out of that, we actually have the roots that are created for what would become the Underground Railroad. Because of that, enslaved people will learn about those particular routes. And specifically for someone like Harriet Tubman, when she reaches adulthood and starts working, both in terms of lumbering, as well as engaging in the trade of lumber on those boats, she did come into contact with different people who were working on the Underground Railroad. So that's how she would find out about it.

Early in her life as a youth, she suffers a grave injury, which has much to do with, much of what we know about Harry Tubman comes from her biography later on. And these stories are famous ones, but most people don't know them. As I mentioned in the opener, the injury she suffers has much to do with her visions. Is that right? At the early start of puberty, either age 12 or 13, she is injured while she's on an errand to a neighborhood store in Bucktown. And people who are interested in visiting Harriet Tubman country on the eastern shore, that store still stands.

So people can actually visit that particular part of the national state park and actually find actual evidence of where Harriet Tubman was when she was injured. And when she was injured, I should also mention she wasn't called Harriet Tubman. Then she was Araminta Ross and people called her Minty. So Minty was very young when she was injured going to that store. She was not the target, actually. It was an overseer who was in pursuit of a fugitive slave, a freedom seeker. And in trying to throw a two-pound lead weight to stop this enslaved person, Harry Tumman actually got in the way.

Although the story can be told differently. Some people say that she deliberately got in the way to help that person escape. But she is injured. She struck in the head. And she nearly died from that experience. Right. This is a major brain, a traumatic brain injury is what it really is. Yes, absolutely. And it brings on visions, hallucinations, perhaps, whatever the source of these things that she sees in her head,

she attributes to a mission of hers, a larger mission, right? Yes, absolutely. Historians would call what she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. and associated with that particular kind of epileptic seizures are her hallucinations, a sense of, you know, having an out-of-body experience. So she would talk about dreaming about floating in the sky. And also there's the experience of being very religious, hyper-religious. So she interpreted many of her visions as visions from God. So all of those experiences suggest that.

that she was suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. And I say that not to dismiss that she did have spiritual visions because there are many who are empowered by the idea that she had this sense and this belief in God and in a higher power to help her on her journey. I do not discount that at all as somebody who is also spiritually minded myself. I take that seriously. But I also recognize that we can look at her. sense of spirituality and her visions as also being impacted by this disability.

Yeah. What prompted her desire to escape? I mean, what was the inciting event? The inciting event was when her slave owner died, Edward Brodus, died. And there was a rumor that circulated among those that were enslaved that the widow was going to sell off some of the enslaved to pay off debts that she accrued as a widow. I should backtrack though and say that Harriet Tubman was already working towards buying her freedom. When she was married to John Tubman, she actually negotiated with her enslaver that the labor that she did when he was renting her out to other farmers that she'd be able to actually earn some of those wages. The goal was so that she would eventually be able to buy her freedom because she marries a free man, but she doesn't inherit his

status through marriage because she's still owned. So we know that because of what she was doing to negotiate wages for herself, that she had a vision of freedom for herself, that she would eventually buy her way out. Now, the sudden death of her owner basically speeded that desire. And so she actually did try to escape her husband was not in support of her running away. People have kind of beaten up poor John Tumman over that. It's like, see, he's not really in support of her and, you know, he's part of the problem. It's like maybe, maybe because they had this plan in place that she would, they would work towards buying her freedom. He didn't want her to jeopardize that by running away where that, that plan goes out the window. Then you're penalized.

you're punished and perhaps sold further south. But Harriet Tubman felt that she needed to strike because she would have been sold south anyway, according to the rumors that they were planning to be sold. So she struck out and actually ran away the first time with two of her brothers. But then they end up turning back because they didn't feel confident on the route they took. So Harry Tubbin, on her own, a couple days or a couple weeks later, I think, just struck out on her own. And she actually made the journey all the way to Philadelphia. It's interesting, you know, when you consider the horror of slavery and the experience that must have been going through that, we think of it, I purely look at the, in the sympathetic fashion, you know, how horrible this must have been.

The other aspect of it for these very smart people was that they were being exploited, that there was an economic use of them in various ways, not just as free labor, but they were being sold as property, rented out. That whole reality rarely must have bugged them. I mean, to use a silly term. I mean, that sensibility of hold on here, you know, on so many levels, I am being abused. That's got to be an engine for somebody as brilliant as this woman. Absolutely. She had talked about, I mean, in one of the interviews, and there were quite a number of people who interviewed Harry Tubman, she flat out said, slavery is the next thing to hell. So I think that covers, you know, what that experience was like for enslaved people. She herself, especially when she was a young child and was rented out to

various farmers, she was severely beaten and bruised. Look, she was severely injured, you know, by an overseer, which is why she had her disability. And many enslaved people were disabled in different ways. So they bore those wounds, they bore those scars, and somehow found a way to heal and to find empowerment through those healing processes. How long has the underground railroad been in existence at this point? So since the time African captors were captured, you know, and brought over to the Americas, African captives have been resisting. They resisted in their villages.

They resisted when they were on the slave ships. You know, since the time that they were in chain, they were resisting. And of course, by the time they came to the plantations and to places where they were enslaved, they've always found ways to run away or, you know, to do it the legal way, like Harry Tumman tried to legally try. So given you that history, just to let you know, there is no actual origin of the Underground Railroad. What we can say is that when it was called the Underground Railroad, we would have to imagine that that happened sometime when the literal railroad came into existence.

The roots of that railroad became a convenient nickname for the escape underground networks that were already in place. Of course. So she would have been well aware of a system at hand. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think that there were probably inorganic ways that enslaved people tried to escape before it became more formalized. So if I had to pinpoint the Underground Railroad, I would say sometime in the 1830s, when you started to see more organized abolitionist societies and those particular abolitionist organizations when they started to more formally organize themselves as a kind of secret society that can work to help enslave people escape the slave states. It has been going on long enough that in the year that she first established,

I believe it's 1849. That's a short while earlier than the slave fugitive law, the fugitive law, which is passed in September of 1850. That's in reaction to a great deal of aid that has been coming down and stations along this route. People, especially in that part of the world, I mean, Maryland being, I guess, a border state, not officially, but it's sort of in that zone. There's a lot of people passing through there on their way now to Canada. That's an interesting transition. I think many people don't realize this. When that law, that cruel law was passed, after decades of this phenomenon happening, suddenly this draconian law is passed that in the north these escaped and slave people have to be returned. If anyone doesn't return them, there are

penalties, et cetera, et cetera. The upshot of this is that anyone who's escaping really needs to go even further. You know, they need to go to Canada now and get across the border where where slavery was abolished some years before. This is the times that she's going, and it's incredibly dangerous. Not only where she is, you know, she can get caught down the road from her place, but even when she gets over to Philadelphia, she's still in danger, mortal danger. Absolutely. And I think it's interesting that the bulk of Harriet Tubman's underground real world work

is in the wake of the fugitive slave law, because, yes, you're right. She escapes just one year before this draconian law is put into place. And she was motivated, actually, due to loneliness. You know, she's in Philadelphia away from her family and friends. Her family means so much to her. And so she already set out wanting to go back to free others. So I believe the fugitive slave law set fire to that desire even more. Janelle, give me some sense of geography here.

How far does this woman need to go to escape her bondage? Oh, wow. So the story is she ran 100 miles to freedom. That's numerically what is usually said. I know for myself, when I actually did drive down and onto the eastern shore, visiting where Harriet Tubman was born and raised, I know myself, I was just odd that she actually made that journey on foot. I'm driving and had to connect through all these different bridges just to get over there.

So the terrain itself is impressive. It's marshy land. It's lots of waterways. So you can just imagine the kind of natural borders that she was having to cross. And also the ways in which she really had to rely on nature, we know from the narratives of freedom seekers as well as Harriet Tubman herself. that they often did the journey by night so that they can move around in secret and in the dark. She, like many others, followed the North Star of Freedom. So there's a certain kind of star navigation work that she's doing in terms of that knowledge.

There's also being able to recognize the sounds of nature, certain kinds of animal sounds that she herself would make when she would signal to other freedom seekers. So there is a real connection to the land that was needed to be able to make the journey. Another thing that's also interesting is that she makes the journey oftentimes in the wintertime because the nights are longer in the winter. So you can also imagine just how cold and frigid that kind of journey would have been and what it meant for them to actually go through that journey just to get away from slavery. Then she turns around and goes back, as you say, to get her family,

and then over and over again, she creates a real system. I want to know how she did this. What was her system? What were her roots? Were these different every time? How could this possibly be done? Well, first of all, I should ask you, how many times did she do it? Yeah, 13 times.

She went back 13 times. And oftentimes it would be to free, well, she freed her brother. She freed a niche. She freed friends or people would tell her somebody. needed to be freed. The last journey she made, which was in 1860, in December of 1860, she was hoping to try to free her sister, Rachel, but unfortunately found out that she had died. But in the interim, she was actually able to free a whole other family instead. So she kept doing this work, oftentimes driven by love for her family and love for her friends and anyone who

came in the way she also did. And yeah, she did develop a sister. to the point where there was one story of 48 freedom seekers who actually escaped together, not led by Harriet Tubman, but they were following instructions that she gave. So they were learning about that and they were learning that there were certain systems in place that they could follow. So there were known routes, there were trails and so forth? Secret trails, I'm sure. Because the secret trails in terms of the Underground Railroad Network, because remember, They're moving about at night time, but in the daytime, they would need to hide because they've got slave catchers on their trail. They would need to rely on allies who would help them.

So that might mean knowing that this house belongs to a particular abolitionist or, you know, this enslaved person or this free black person can give you shelter until you go to your next stop, your next station. And that was basically how that worked. I'll be back with more from Janelle after this quick break. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused? Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a new podcast from history hit, where I, Kate Lister, asked the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons, or sex ed. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods,

from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages to Renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheet now, wherever you get your podcasts. Finally in the end, before emancipation and the Civil War is over, she has guided how many people out of bondage? The estimates are roughly 70 people that she guides out of the Underground Railroad. And we haven't even talked about the hundreds more she freed during. in the Civil War. Yeah, exactly. Well, we're getting to that. I'm right around the corner, you know, here we come. Okay. I'm just trying to get nailed down the fact that this is an incredibly

bold endeavor. I mean, there aren't a lot of stories you hear about this. I imagine other people must have gone back for their loved ones. But Harriet Tubman is an icon of this idea. Yes, yes. I believe the reason why she becomes an icon is because of the number of times she went back. Also, So she's doing this work in the 1850s at a time when the country is escalating in its divisions over the issue of slavery. So more and more people are writing, well, they weren't writing about her while she's doing this work because of the secrecy. But more and more abolitionists are becoming aware of her and helping her out in the networks and hiding, you know, freedom seekers that she's able to bring over to the north and helping them get to Canada. I believe that's one of the reasons why we know of Harriet Tubman more than the others because of the ways that others were willing to write about her after the fact when documenting this history.

Well, it doesn't hurt that she goes on to become a war hero as well. I mean, this woman's story is insane. How does this happen that she joins the war? She's a wealth of knowledge of this whole area, first of all. A great source of intelligence, obviously. So very interesting to the military what she knows. But it goes further than that. She actually begins to lead a force.

Yes. She's actually sent to the Civil War in Beaufort, South Carolina, precisely because of her knowledge and her expertise as an underground railroad conductor. As a black woman, she's able to blend in with the enslaved community there, which is how she's able to be a spy and how she's able to work with scouts. And so she would just look very unassuming like, you know, this little washerwoman over there or somebody who's cooking food. But while she's doing all these tasks when she's helping out the soldiers in the Civil War, she's gathering information. She's collecting intelligence.

And that's how she's able to do this work. And that's how she was also able to work with Colonel Montgomery, specifically in 1863, when she leads him and those soldiers. soldiers in the Kumbahi River raid and becomes the very first woman in U.S. history to actually lead a military raid. And that's the raid where she's able to help free around 750 enslaved people in South Carolina. Amazing. Amazing. I mean, it really is, it's gobsmacking what this woman is capable of doing. And then life goes on for her after the Civil War. I mean, it's only the beginning of what she does. I want to talk about where she lands. in life afterwards. Fascinating. We're two New Yorkers talking about this. This is a very proud

moment for us. She buys land from William Seward. William Seward was Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. Am I right? Yes. Yes, he was. And he was a senator, I think, governor too, state governor, right? Yeah. Sure. He was a very big deal in New York and was very glad to help out this hero. She was very famous at that time, wasn't she? She, become written about. She was a big story in the newspapers after the war. So he sells her a piece of land from his property and she moves into Auburn, New York, which is where his home still stands. And you can visit her home as well. Tell me about her life after the war. Yes. And I should mention that she buys her house in 1859. So this is even before the war. Wow. Okay. Yes. And she was interested

in buying that property, I should mention because her parents that she eventually helped escape from Maryland and settles them in Canada, found Canada to be much too cold. So she wanted to bring them back. And so she was able to purchase this property from William Seward and was able to settle her family there. But briefly, they did have to escape again because she purchased this the home in 1859. But you'll remember John Brown had his raid on Harper's Ferry later that year. and she flees in New York to go back to Canada because it is believed that she also was conspiring with John Brown with that raid on Harper's Ferry. So she needed to elude, you know, state officials who were looking for co-conspirators. You don't sound like you buy that, that she was really involved in that.

Oh, I do believe that. No, I was just saying that it is believed because, you know, the way that these kinds of conspiracies work, you don't really have absolute concrete evidence. We do know that John Brown visited her home in Canada. We know that. So that's why I'm just saying it is believed. Not that I don't believe it because I actually think she was working with him. They were both like righteous allies. And later on, when she opens up an infirmary on her property, she names it after John Brown.

So that suggests that they had a close relationship. I'm sorry. I sound like I'm just so stunned by this woman every single time I talk about her. It's just ridiculous. how broadly she saw the world in her life and her place in it, especially given her origins. How she could have projected herself out into the world is just insane. She would have been president in the modern day. I mean, this is that kind of person who was capable of doing what no one else can do.

You know, it's just amazing. Tell me about those later years of her life. Yeah, so Auburn, New York is another interesting place for people to visit if they're ever interested in going out to Western New York. The property there is, it's a lovely piece of land. And again, there's something about being in the same place where somebody historic has been that just makes you really appreciate what they were trying to do. So Harriet Tubbin, I mentioned, bought her property. After the war, she's able to go back and settle and have a life where she's taking care of her family. She opens up her home to people who need a place to live or a place.

to stay. That's how she meets her second husband, Nelson Davis, who was a boarder in her home. She also took an orphan, she also sheltered women who were fleeing abusive families. So she really was being a real community leader and transforming her home into a safe space. And I think that's a very interesting legacy of her that continues the kind of work she was doing on the Underground Railroad. So yes, the work that she did later on to develop this home for the age was her way of making sure that elderly, especially elderly, black people were able to be taken care of. And those who were sick and needed help, disabled. She wanted to make sure that they had a place that they could be taken care of. The bicentennial overbirth just passed 2002.

You wrote some important things about this. Tell me what this meant to you, this celebration, 200 years. Yeah. So I'm a contributing writer to Ms. Magazine, and I work with the editors to do a special project. So I guess edited the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project with Ms. That's still up and running, actually, Ms.magine.com backslash Tubman 200. I reached out to different scholars, experts, artists, to contribute their own perspectives on Harriet Tubman and what her legacy is. And that was great. It was wonderful to be able to feature, for example, an astronomer like Chanda Prescott Weinstein, who wrote a piece about Harriet Tubbin as an astronomer or a musicologist like Maya Cunningham who talks about her music history and the kind of music that shaped her sense of freedom.

So that was really fascinating. So it was very interdisciplinary in our approach to highlighting Harriet Tubman as this important historical figure. And it was important to recognize that last year was an important milestone for her bicentennial birthday. And I was able to interview some of the descendants of Harriet Tubman to talk about the experience of that. So all of those are part of that project. We've also included poetry. So I invited the public to submit Haiku tributes. I have a calculator for folks who want to figure out, well, just how much do we owe Harriet Tubman for her enslaved labor?

So there's so many different ways that you could be interactive with that project. So it was great to be able to mount that up in honor, in honor of her legacy. What happened to the Tubman bill, the $20 bill? So from what we understand, it's taken a while to come out. The projected date is like 2030. So we got some time to work towards it. It hasn't been abandoned. But from what was said in terms of what's going.

on with the Treasury Department. It looks like they want to have a few things in place. So it's not just, hey, we're going to put her on the 20ville and here it is next year. It looks like they're actually taking their time putting all kinds of new pieces together. All right. Well, okay. I just want to see it happen. Me too.

And I can't wait to pay for something with that woman. There we go. Absolutely. Anything about her legacy that's missing in your experience? I mean, as we look back on this incredible life, is the story being told? the right way in your mind, or is she being consigned to the shelf of history? I believe that there is an idea about Harriet Tubman that is larger in the national imagination than her actual life story. Sometimes it looks like we've frozen her 91 years of life to those 10 years

that she was on the Underground Railroad, which is fine because it really was a huge part of her life. It is part of what made her heroic. But I'm always surprised when I talk to people. So what do you know about Harriet Tubbitt? Oh, she freed enslaved people on the Underground Row Road. And that's usually as far as they go. They don't even know about the work she did during the Civil War, much less the work that she did for her community

when she was living in Auburn, New York all those years. Sure. It was a full life. I mean, that is the happy end. to this story is that not only was she able to escape bondage, but she went on to live a really accomplished full emotional life. Full life. And we have all these new works that are coming out about her. Like Douglas Armstrong, for example, has a book. He's an archaeologist in Syracuse University that gets into the findings, the excavations they did around the property in Auburn,

New York. And we're finding things like, oh, she held ice cream socials. And she loves to eat strawberries, you know, things like that. I mean, there are minuscule little details, but it helps to flesh out who she was beyond just this steely woman, you know, carrying her gun on the Underground Railroad. Right, sloshing through the swamps of Maryland. And there were no, well, the swamps really weren't really in Maryland and it's more marching ground. Man, there is, I mean, there are important lessons from this woman's life and an ever-awakening understanding of what this period was really about. So thank you very much for taking us through this story.

Janelle Hobson. I'm going to send everybody to that Ms. Magazine to check out the Harry Tubman stuff that you were a part of. But anything going on? You're going to write a book about this someday? Yes. That is definitely a plan. And hopefully I will be able to get it out before we see Harry Tubman on the 20.

So that's a goal. Thanks for joining us, Janelle. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you again for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode. of American History hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.