American History Tellers - The Underground Railroad | Harriet Tubman’s Goodbye Song | 5

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped her enslaver in Maryland and freed herself. Over the next several years she took great personal risks, traveling back below the Mason-Dixon line at least a dozen times to free family and friends as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Today, Lindsay is joined by Angela Crenshaw, Director of the Maryland State Park Service, who helped lead the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. Crenshaw shares her deep admiration for Tubman and provides insights into her life – from trapping muskrats in the swamps as a child to leading a raid behind Confederate lines during the Civil War.Listen to American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's late at night in May 1863 in Beaufort County, South Carolina. You're sitting in your one-room cabin on the rice plantation where you've been enslaved since you were a little boy. A burning candle stub casts dim light over the cold leftover stew you're eating right out of the pot. A sudden rustling outside sends a shiver down your spine. You put down your supper and crack open the door to peer through the darkness. A small, middle-aged black woman is standing on the threshold.

Who are you? Name's Harriet. I need your help. You eye her warily. Help with what? Are you going to let me in, or would you rather wake up the whole plantation? You take a step back and motion for her to sit down. You perch on the foot of your bed to face her. What's this about?

I heard you helped place mines in the Combee River a few months back. Barrels full of gunpowder. The rebels called them torpedoes. I might have done. Who told you so and what's it to you? A riverboat pilot named Henry sent me. He said folks from the plantation did the work. He thought you might be one of them. Henry ran away from the Middleton plantation a while back. Did you run away from there too?

The corner of her mouth twitches. No. I'm with the Union Army at Port Royal. We're planning something. But we need to know where the torpedoes are. Or there's going to be Yankee ships at the bottom of the Cumbie. You frown, your suspicion growing. Forgive me, ma'am, but you don't exactly look like a soldier.

Appearances can be deceiving. Just because a river looks calm on the surface doesn't mean there ain't danger lurking beneath. I bet you know something about that, don't you? She gives you a wry smile. You sigh, thinking back to the day Confederate soldiers put you to work on the river. Yes, the rebels made us do their dirty work. They sure as hell weren't going to do it themselves. That water is full of gators. Harriet reaches into the satchel slung across her shoulder and withdraws a piece of paper. She unfolds it and shows you a small, hand-drawn sketch of the river.

Show me where you put the torpedoes. You hesitate, your mind racing. I don't know. I'm not looking for any trouble. If someone finds out... Her expression hardens. This ain't about trouble. You give me these locations, I'll give you your freedom. What are you talking about?

I'll tell you where to go, and one of the Yankee ships will pick you up. Just me? What about my folks, my little sister? They live upriver. Bring them. Bring everyone you know. You just give me those locations. You stare at her in disbelief. You ever done something like this before? Never something this big. And never without help. Will you help me? You're surprised to find yourself nodding.

She pulls a piece of charcoal out of her satchel and hands it to you, her eyes blazing. Mark the spots on the map. You squint at the sketch and think back to the day you helped place the torpedoes. Harriet watches you closely as you trace the river's bends and curves with your fingers. Something stirs within you as you realize that you're staring at the path to your own freedom. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate.

Available now wherever you get your books. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. On the night of June 1, 1863, Harriet Tubman and Union Army Colonel James Montgomery led three gunboats carrying black soldiers up the Cumbee River in South Carolina. Their mission was to rescue enslaved people, recruit black men into the Union Army, and destroy nearby plantations. During the 1850s, Tubman led at

least 70 people out of slavery as a conductor for the Underground Railroad, and when the Civil War broke out, she served the Union Army as a cook, nurse, and a spy. In the lead-up to the Combie River Raid, she discovered the locations of Confederate mines installed beneath the river by offering freedom to the enslaved people who placed them. Thanks to this crucial intelligence, Tubman was able to guide the ships away from danger, and the raid was a success. The Union ships carried more than 700 enslaved people to freedom. Here with me now to discuss the legacy of Harriet Tubman and her work on the Underground Railroad is Angela Crenshaw, director of the Maryland State Park Service. Ranger Crenshaw helped lead the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park

and served as the lead ranger on the Park Service's Interpreting Difficult Histories team. Angela Crenshaw, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you so much for having me. In Church Creek, Maryland, at the intersection of Rout Route 16 and 335, just down the road a bit, is the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. Tell us about that location and the significance of Route 16 and 335 and the state park that was developed there. Sure. That location is significant because it's between where Harriet Tubman was born and between where she spent her early years. It is located in beautiful and historic Church Creek, and Harriet Tubman was born

in Madison, and then she was moved the next town over when she was about four or five years old. So you are smack dab in the middle of what we call Tubman country. Routes 16 and Route 335 are in the same location as they would have been in Tubman's time. There were old Native American trading routes, but they were also used by anyone that lived in South Dorchester County to get from the interior to the town of Cambridge, which was the center of commerce in Dorchester. And what does Tubman country look like? Give us an idea. South Dorchester County is swampy.

The way I usually describe it is it's the place where land and water meet, and it is absolutely not a beach. We have a number of highland and upland forests, but then there's a lot of swampland as well. It's exceedingly flat, and that makes the sunrises and the sunsets absolutely beautiful. And it's remote, and the landscape is very similar to what it would have looked like in Harriet Tubman's time. South Dorchester County has a very rich feeling to me. You can smell it, you can feel it, you can hear it. In some ways you can taste it. The marsh has its own feeling.

But during Tubman's time they said the woods were so thick that if you looked into them you thought that there were walls. That's how thick the trees were. The marshes are thick and green, and birds are singing. Depending on the season, you can smell the flowers. You can smell things that are being grown there. There's corn and wheat and sorghum being grown. But there's also a lot of churches that dot that landscape. And as a woman of faith, that moves me, and I know it probably moved Tubman as well. During her time, there was usually a church and a burial ground or a cemetery and then a community center with that church. So there

were a number of smaller houses, churches, forests, and swampy lands all in that area all together. But there was a lot of space in between, and I think that space in between is what spoke to Tubman and what speaks to me. So I guess that might be one of the reasons why this location was chosen as well. If you were to visit, you get an idea of what it was like back then. Exactly. We want you to have what I call Tubman feels. As soon as you get down there, we want you to feel what Tubman would have felt then. The quiet, the flat, the serenity, and see the beauty of the land that shaped her. Now, Harriet Tubman is likely the most famous person associated with the Underground Railroad.

While we all know her name and we've all been taught a little bit about her in school, if you could step back for a moment, what were you taught about the Underground Railroad in school or otherwise? What do you remember? I remember seeing that iconic picture of Harriet Tubman and she's standing and slightly leaning on a piece of furniture. She looks very stern and she looks very serious. She's wearing a dress and she is not smiling. And I remember bringing that up in class. Why isn't she smiling? I understood that the Underground Railroad was a way to move enslaved people towards freedom. And that was about as much as I understood about Tubman. I didn't know she

was born in Maryland on the eastern shore. And I didn't know that she came back multiple times to rescue family and friends and people she couldn't do without. And I also didn't know that she fought in the Civil War. So I guess I was given the absolute basics. And working at Tubman for as long as I did really changed my life and it allowed me to connect to her. As a park ranger, I think I'm an outdoorsy person, but then you learn about Harriet Tubman, and I realized that she is the ultimate outdoors woman. People fleeing slavery got more help in the North with the rise of abolitionism and the more formalized networks of safe houses that the Underground Railroad brought. But, of course, people fled slavery whenever they could, even before these networks happened.

Going back to the years just before even the American Revolution, this impulse to escape was there, what are some of the ways you think we should think about how long this thing we now call the Underground Railroad was around? In my opinion, the Underground Railroad has been around as long as American slavery has been around. Africans were taken from Africa and forced into servitude. They weren't given the proper food and clothing or any rights. So they fled as soon as they possibly could. The escape from American slavery was almost immediate as soon as Africans were brought over. These escapes all across the United States throughout its entire history, they certainly differed regionally. I wonder if you can give us a sense of how the Underground Railroad

might have varied from state to state. It didn't operate very deep into the South. So what was the general direction you might head in if you were escaping from South Carolina versus Maryland? You took any direction that you could. It was very risky. You were being tracked, you were being followed, and you could be murdered for just trying to attain your freedom. So any direction, north, south, east, or west, that you could take were the ways that people took. I know on Maryland's eastern shore, a lot of the creeks and the rivers run north to south naturally. So

if you start in the south at the base of the river, you can head north and that will get you towards freedom. And so Harriet Tubman made sure that she trusted anyone that she took, and she made sure that she trusted everyone that she listened to as well. So trust was a big part of that, and so was communication. And how did these travelers on the railroad, how did they find out about the underground? How did Harriet Tubman send information south? Usually through word of mouth and communicating through family and friends and other trusted people. But Harriet Tubman worked with blackjacks, and those were free African Americans. And they were the hub of communication

back then because they could travel freely and openly. So they would exchange information in the north and the south and various other ports where they called home, Baltimore, Cambridge, Annapolis, and all the way north. So they were the key to communication, as well as other agents who could have been free or enslaved African-Americans or also sympathetic white individuals that helped them. Tomlin also sent, I guess, a coded letter south when she wanted to get her brothers. What was the code? And the letter, I guess, wasn't written by her. She was illiterate. That's correct. She was illiterate. So she employed a literate friend in Philadelphia to compose the letter on her behalf.

And she wrote it to Jacob Jackson. And he was a landowner in Dorchester County, and he was a free man, African American, and he was literate. So that would have also made him a main hub of communication. And in the letter, she said, give my regards to the old folks and tell them to always be watching unto prayer. And when the good old ship of Zion comes along, be ready to step aboard. And so the Good Old Ship of Zion is a very Maryland, very Chesapeake Bay-based song. And Tubman and Jacob Jackson would have communicated ahead of time. So he knew as soon as he saw those lyrics to go let her brothers know that she was heading

back. So that was some amazing coding that Harriet Tubman and Jacob Jackson had planned ahead of time so that he knew to tell her brothers to be listening and to be waiting for her. And I guess where was the end of the line for the railroad? What was the destination? Where was freedom finally found? Before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, freedom was just north of the Mason-Dixon line, which is the northern border of Maryland. And after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, you had to go all the way north, all the way up to Canada. So before 1850, it was Philadelphia, and that was very close for most

people in Maryland and Delaware. But after 1850, you had to go to Canada, so you had to travel much farther, and it made it much more difficult, and you actually had to leave your nation, which was a very difficult choice for a lot of people. Now, you mentioned the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which fundamentally changed the game for the Underground Railroad, making it illegal to help an escaped slave anywhere in the country. Who would take the risk of being fined, being sent to jail, or even worse in the South, to help enslaved people get to freedom? Abolitionists and people that had heard Tubman's story firsthand, I think

a lot of people were changed hearing her accounts of being enslaved as a young child and being separated from your parents and from your mother. And so I think that drive in Harriet Tubman to be with her parents from a very, very young age really influenced the way that she lived her life and the way she told her story. Most of those who worked on the railroad had a conviction, a great conviction of the immorality of slavery. And this is an example of one of the great acts of civil disobedience in American history. It takes great courage to stand up, not just for your beliefs, but stand up in the face of the law and disobey it. Where did these abolitionists come from? Was it a singular

group or how disparate were they? I think it just depended on the way they were raised. So Thomas Garrett, who was a station master in Wilmington, Delaware, was a Quaker. And in that time, they believed that everyone had a spark of life inside of them. And I believe it was the leader of the Nicolite Quakers went down south of Maryland to South Carolina, North Carolina, and they saw what slavery looked like firsthand. And they decided that if you are a Quaker, you cannot own other human beings. And so Thomas Garrett heard that loud and clear, and then he went beyond that. I think he was one of the most amazing station masters on the Underground Railroad. He was actually beat up and told to stop what he was doing and thrown from a moving train. And he just stood up and dusted himself off and went back to

his station in Wilmington, Delaware, and continued to help people on their journeys. So I think it was a conviction within people's hearts that they knew that American slavery was wrong. And like you said, they disobeyed the best way they knew how, by helping other people on their journey to freedom. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941.

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of The Real History of Dracula exclusively with Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Let's talk about the world of enslavement into which Harriet Tubman was born in 1822. What did slavery look like on the eastern shore of Maryland where Tubman, she was born as Araminta Ross. Was she on a plantation like in the Deep South, as the popular imagination goes, or something

else? So in late February or early March of 1822, Ben and Harriet, who went by Ritt Ross, welcomed their fifth of nine daughters. And they gave her the name Araminta, and she went by Minty. American slavery on the eastern shore of Maryland was slightly different than I think is what is portrayed in TV. I think most people think of Gone with the Wind, a huge plantation house with winding stairs and hundreds of people working in the house and numerous people working in the back. But on the eastern shore of Maryland, it was much smaller. You would have a one and a half story house, and it would be a family farm. Harriet Tubman and her family were enslaved by Edward Brodus and Anthony Thompson. They were small farmers.

They didn't have mansions with staircases and chandeliers. And so slavery was much closer. The enslaved women would help raise your children. They would cook your food. And the men would be working in the timber fields, such as Ben Rosted, Harriet Tubman's father. So it was much smaller and it was a more intimate operation than what is usually portrayed in Hollywood. And in my mind, that makes it even more evil. Harriet Tubman or young Araminta would have known intimately her enslavers and they would have known her family. And so Tubman can recall three sisters being sold to slavery and basically ripping her family apart. And her enslaver would

have known her mother and her father and known that those were their children. And not only was it, I guess, a closer relationship between enslaved and owner, but also there was a significant portion of free black people around her. How did that contribute to this particular form of slavery in Maryland? So during Tubman's time in Dorchester County, half of the African Americans were free and half of them were enslaved. So in Tubman's case, she could go to work and she

could work with people that were enslaved or people that were free and could go home and had way more agency over their lives than she did. And so to be that close to freedom in Maryland, which was a border state then, I think really influenced her and her decision to leave. It would have been much easier and a closer journey to head to Philadelphia from the eastern shore of Maryland as opposed to South Carolina. And I don't want folks to think it was easy by any means or it was a trivial decision, but 90 to 100 miles is how far it is from South Dorchester to Philadelphia, and that would double, triple if you headed further south.

So I think that made the decision to head north that much easier for Tubman and those around her, especially when you could see the difference in life by being an owned piece of property versus being your own human being and your own person. You mentioned that Tubman witnessed or had three of her sisters sold away. What was Tubman's childhood like? Did she live with her family? What kind of work did she do? Young Araminta was frequently separated from her family. She was forced to check muskrat traps on the Little Blackwater River

when she was about six years old. And muskrats are semi-aquatic animals that burrow and live in mounded homes along the riverbank. They feed on the vegetation that grows in the swamp, but they were brought to South Dorchester County for their pelts, and their pelts were strongest and thickest in winter. And so young Harriet would have been on the banks of a river, a muddy, murky river, checking for these foul-tempered creatures. And they were being trapped against their will. And that was a very difficult thing to do for anyone, let alone a child. And while she was checking these muskrat

traps, she actually got measles. And her mother convinced her owner to allow her to come home and to get rest. And then he forced her back, checking muskrat traps. She was also forced to take care of a colicky baby, and colicky babies are in a lot of pain, and so that baby cried out, as was natural to the child. And every time that colicky baby cried out, young Tubman got whipped by the mistress. So it was a very difficult, very stressful childhood. And she said she used to lay on the floor and cry and cry. If only she could get back to her mother and be in her mother's bed. And then she kind of chuckled and said, but her mother never had a bed in her life, just a board bed nailed up against the wall

with some straw in it. So it was a very difficult, very painful childhood. I wouldn't call it a childhood at all in a lot of ways. She was put to work immediately and not in the nicest conditions at all. You mentioned also that eventually Harriet grew into one of the greatest outdoorsmen you can imagine, and that was, I think, largely working at her father's side. What did she do with him? What skills did that experienced teacher that would later help her as a conductor? So her father was Ben Ross, and he was a trusted timber foreman. And she would have been one, if not the only, women working alongside of her father in the timber fields of South Dorchester County. And they would cut wood and haul wood. Sometimes they used canals, such as Stewards Canal, to float the timber from the heartland of Dorchester County out to the ports.

Other times, you just drag that timber. That was back-breaking, hard, difficult work. So in that community, she learned different forms of communication. She learned who she could trust and who she couldn't. And once that timber was cut and dragged or floated, it was taken to Madison, Wolford, or the port of Church Creek. And it would have been there that she would have met blackjacks, those free African-American sailors, and they would have taught her how to read the stars and how to navigate using only the night sky. And they needed that for their livelihood. And then Harriet Tubman especially used the skills that she learned while working

in the timber fields with her father to help her and to guide her to emancipate over 70 family and friends during her time in the Underground Railroad. And also the timber fields in the interior of Dorchester County is very rough. It is swampy and murky and wet and full of bugs in the summertime, and it is frozen and cold and inhospitable in the wintertime. And so Harriet Tubman grew up in a place that is normally very, very uncomfortable, and she learned to be comfortable in spaces that were uncomfortable. And I think those skills of foraging and reading the night sky served her well during her journeys of mercy on the Underground Railroad. Other than imparting these lessons to Harriet, did Ben Ross, Harriet's father, play any other part in the Underground Railroad? Yes, he himself was an agent on the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman actually came back to rescue her elderly parents because she heard that her father was going to get in trouble for assisting runaways on the Underground Railroad.

And so he had a very close-knit community around him that involved religion, the people he worked with, his church, and Harriet Tubman's close family and friends. So yes, Harriet Tubman would have seen the Underground Railroad up close via her father, Ben Ross. So then we get to the point where Harriet herself is old enough, confident enough, and perhaps desperate enough to attempt her own emancipation. Tell us the story of these events. I know that she made one attempt and then came back before she finally made it to Philadelphia. That's correct. She made an attempt to freedom with her two brothers, Ben and Harry, and they disagreed on which way to go. And so they came back. But it's from that attempt that we have the runaway notice that says that Minty is chestnut

color, fine looking and about five feet tall, and that Eliza Brodess in Bucktown, Maryland was looking for her and her brothers. She offered a sum of $50 or $100 if either of them were brought back. And then her owner liked to live beyond his means, and he was running low on money. And the slave people were property back then, so Tubman did not want to be sold south, as I had mentioned her sisters had been previously, and she didn't want that fate for herself. So she decided to steal away in fall and September of 1849. And as she was leaving, she wanted to let her mother and father and her family and friends know that she was leaving. But her timing was a little rough,

because her owner was coming back from the end of his day. He was on horseback and she walked right up and she opened the gate and he rode his horse through and she sang the goodbye song to let her family and friends know that she was leaving. And from then she would have most likely received help from Quakers in Caroline County and she would have forged for food and followed the stars until she made her way to freedom up in Philadelphia. And she said, when I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything, and the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields. And so when I tell people about Tubman's

self-emancipation, of course, I was born free in the United States, so I can't imagine that. But whenever someone asks me what freedom is, I tell them that quote because I think it sums up perfectly what freedom was directly in her words. Now, so much of this era of enslaved Black culture is passed along in oral tradition and in song. You just mentioned the goodbye song. What was that? How did it sound? So Tubman sang a lovely song to let her family and friends know she was leaving. Of course, she couldn't send a text or anything like that. So she sang the goodbye song and it goes, I'm sorry I've got to leave you. Farewell, oh, farewell. I'll meet you in the morning. Farewell, oh, farewell.

I'll meet you in the morning. I'm bound for the promised land on the other side of Jordan. Farewell, oh, farewell. Farewell, oh, farewell. And that was the goodbye song. And I can tell its obvious meaning, but was this well-known to anyone hearing it that this person is contemplating an escape? I think to the people close to her it would have been clear.

Escape, of course, was very risky. You risk your life, you risk the lives of anyone that knew, anyone that was paying attention, and so I'm sure the people around her would have known what it meant, especially her mother and her father and her siblings. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn

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You know, I can only imagine that every rescue she conducted would have been different. What can we say about this experience? Was there a system that she developed? Were there certain days of the week or specific times she preferred for a rescue? How did she accumulate success? She preferred to travel at night and in the wintertime when the days were the shortest and the nights were the longest and the ground was frozen. And, of course, there was no leaf fill in the wintertime, so you could actually look up in the forest and see the stars above you and be guided by the stars. Her final journey, she came back for her sister Rachel and her sister Rachel's two children, Ben and Angerine. By the time Tubman came back, Rachel had passed away, and she wasn't able to get her niece and her nephew. I'm sure she was heartbroken. So instead of wasting a trip, she emancipated the Endells family, Stephen and Maria, and their three

children. They had to do a stream crossing, which was very difficult back in the day. Of course, it would have been December, so you don't want to be soaking wet and walking around in the winter. And a lot of enslaved people were not taught how to swim. So they were very apprehensive when they got to this stream. And Tubman said, if I can make it, so can you. And so she started walking, and the water got higher and higher, past her knees to her hips. And it reached her neck, and she kept her face above water. And as she kept walking, the water got lower and lower, and she made it across. And so then Stephen and Maria came with her.

And then they had a small child with them, a baby. And so you don't want a baby screaming in the middle of the night. People will come running if they hear children screaming at night. So they had to drug the child so that it would sleep and not scream and give away their location. But they did end up making it to freedom, thanks to Harriet Tubman. If you stop to think and imagine yourself on these journeys, it becomes terrifying quite quickly. Just the solo journey south of walking alone in the middle of winter through Maryland swamps is frightening enough. But then I wonder, you know, that the moment, I guess the moment in

which it gets very perilous is the moment of first contact, is when you're trying to find the people you're there to rescue. How did they even communicate? How were these meetings set up? How was the escape planned? Harriet Tubman used the call of the hoot owl or the barred owl, and that sound is very ubiquitous if you're on the eastern shore of Maryland. It wouldn't be strange to hear that if you were sitting on the porch or doing some work. The sound sounds a lot like who cooks for you, who cooks for you, who cooks for you all. The escape and the meeting was planned through word of mouth. Harriet Tubman built her community around her father and her sisters and her mother and her church

relationships, and those were key. And so she would share with people that she trusted that she was coming back. Another aspect of that that I really appreciate is one of the few places where African Americans could meet and could congregate would be a cemetery, because onlookers would just assume that they were honoring those that had passed. So cemeteries were key places for people to meet and start their journeys of mercy on the Underground Railroad. Now, the Civil War, when it breaks out, is another one of these moments that changes the entire Underground Railroad. It brings it above ground. It's estimated that 400,000 people self-emancipated by heading towards Union lines.

This changes the nature of trying to aid escaping slaves from the South. What did Harriet Tubman do during the Civil War? So Harriet Tubman did some groundbreaking things during the Civil War. During the day, she was a nurse and a cook, and at night she was a spy and a scout. On June 1st, 1863, she became the first woman to lead and execute an armed raid, and it was Harriet Tubman, Colonel James Montgomery, the 2nd South Carolina Colored Troops, and a few members of the 3rd Rhode Island Battalion, and they took three steam-powered gunships, and they chugged up the Cumbahee River. Tubman used her connections with the folks down there, and she was able to find torpedoes that were laid and planted for the gunships

so that the ships could navigate upriver. And their whole point was guerrilla warfare. They wanted to break down the Cumbahee Ferry, flood rice fields, blow up plantations, blow up barns, and basically disturb the Confederate supply as much as they possibly could. And they emancipated and freed over 700 individuals, all during the Cumbahee Raid, and that's where she earned the name General Moses or General Tubman. She said that she saw the funniest thing when the gunboat sounded. It was a woman with a pot of rice still steaming on her head as if she had just taken it off the fire, and she was pulling some children behind her,

and she was running towards Lincoln's ships because she knew that what was on that other side was much better than what she was going through at the time. And I think personally I would have loved to see that raid because Harriet Tubman was sitting on the second deck of the steam-powered gunship, the Adams, and she was coordinating this raid and communicating with people and talking to people and just being the leader that we all know her to have been. And I would have loved to have seen that if I possibly could have back in the day.

I think it would have been a very moving sight to see. Now, this is all significant military work. Harriet Tubman tried to get a pension for this work during the Civil War, and deservedly so. How did that go? So Harriet Tubman tried to get a pension for the work that she did during the Civil War. She applied for $25, and she fought, and she had a congressperson speak on her behalf and write letters and petition. And she was eventually given only $20. And that broke down to $12 for her military service and $8 because she then married her second husband, Nelson Davis,

who was a veteran of the U.S. Colored Troops. So she requested $25 and got $20. And it took her quite some time to get the money she was owed, a significant amount of time. She was never truly compensated for the work that she did, a significant amount of time. She was never truly compensated for the work that she did, but she kept doing it. Well, I guess speaking about the decades after the Civil War, what did Tubman do? The landscape of the country had changed. It changed significantly. She eventually purchased a home up in Auburn, New York, and in that home, she took in anyone that needed aid, food, clothing, a place to stay. Her lifelong dream was to open up a home for indigent African Americans. For example, her parents, she emancipated them when they were

elderly. And what do you do with your mother and father who have been enslaved all of their life and probably didn't receive any health care or the proper food or the proper clothing? So you have to keep that in mind. She purchased five acres next to her home, and in 1896, she purchased that acreage, and then she finally opened the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged African Americans in the early 1900s, and that was her lifelong dream, and I thought it was beautiful that she was able to achieve that dream. Later in life, she had to use a wheelchair for mobility, and then she got quite sick. And she ended up passing away in the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged African Americans on March

10th, 1913. And her final quote was, I go away to prepare a place for you so that where I am, you may be also. I think it's easy to look back or contemplate Harriet Tubman and all that she did. A hard woman, a furiously driven woman, a woman of immense passion and quite accomplished as an emancipator, a spy, a military leader, a philanthropist. You've largely answered this, but I'm wondering, you know, as someone who's been a park ranger at this particular national park or state park and been around Harriet Tubman and her legacy for so long. What does she mean to you personally? Oh, gosh. Harriet Tubman, I guess, means the world to me. She changed my life. She changed the way I looked at African-American history. She changed the way I look at my own history. I think a lot of people think it is difficult and painful and hard to talk about American slavery, which it is, but her story really allowed folks to connect to something that is hard to understand,

especially when you're born free. So Harriet Tubman and her life and her legacy and what she did truly means the world to me. I don't think I'd be here without her inspiration, without her guiding lights, without her quotes, without her connection to her family and her friends. I also love the fact that she was just five foot tall. In my boots, I'm about five foot four. So without my ranger boots, I'm about five feet tall. So it really moves me that a five foot tall African-American woman from Dorchester County could change the world. That means we all can. That's probably a fantastic place to end, but I have another question, though. When do you think you finally met her?

Wow. When did I meet Harriet Tubman? When I began working at Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center, I lived a few miles from the park, and I didn't have cable or internet, and my phone barely worked. So I spent a lot of time outside. I would sit on the front porch with my dog and watch the sun set. It was actually set over Madison, which was where Harriet Tubman was born. And at night, I'd take my dog on hikes so I could try to understand what Tubman went through. And I felt the difference between summer in Dorchester County and winter in Dorchester County. I attempted to look up at the stars through the thick atmospheric summer

haze and the summer trees, walking around at night with no flashlight. And of course, I wasn't being chased or followed, and there was no money on my head, but my connection to nature and Harriet Tubman's connection to nature really allowed me to meet her. So whenever I hike and walk in South Dorchester County, that is when I truly feel Harriet Tubman. When I hear a bird call that I recognize, I feel Harriet Tubman. When I can look down at a plant and decide if it's edible or not. That's when I truly feel Harriet Tubman. When I sing with guests, I feel Harriet Tubman. When I'm around the campfire at night

with other folks that love nature as much as I do, I feel Harriet Tubman. So I think I truly felt her living down there and walking in the places that she toiled and lived and worked and loved and where she was enslaved. And it's not lost on me that I moved to Church Creek, Maryland, and was able to share her life and legacy and succeed and get paid for doing that when she would not have had that opportunity. So I think I met Tubman during my years of living in South Dorchester County. And whenever I go back, I just start to smile as soon as I'm heading south on 335.

I just feel Tubman in the landscape down there. I feel her everywhere, truly. Well, Angela Crenshaw, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers. Thank you, Lindsay. That was my conversation with the director of the Maryland State Park Service, Angela Crenshaw. From Wondery, this is our fifth and final episode of the Underground Railroad from American History Tellers. In our next season, we're bringing you an encore presentation of our series on Lewis and Clark. In 1804, a team of explorers led by army captains named Meriwether

Lewis and William Clark set out up the Missouri River and headed west into the unknown. Their mission was to map America's newly acquired Louisiana territory and discover a river route to the Pacific. Their adventures would capture the American imagination, but for one of them, it would end in disappointment and tragedy. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship.

Audio editing and sound design by Molly Bach. Music by Lindsey Graham. Voice acting by Ace Anderson and Cat Peoples. Additional writing by Ellie Thompson. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alita Rozanski. Our senior interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Coordinating producer is Desi Blalock. Managing producer, Matt Kant. Senior managing producer, Ryan Lohr. Senior producer is Andy Herman. And executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy.

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