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Books on Harriet Tubman
Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait
of an American Hero /
In
Their Own Words: Harriet Tubman
The Story of Harriet Tubman : Conductor of the
Underground Railroad /
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom
Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life
Stories /
Home, Miss Moses A Novel in the Time of Harriet Tubman
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HARRIET
TUBMAN REMEMBRANCE DAY
Harriet Tubman Remembrance Day was
passed by the Maryland General Assembly in March 2000.
Harriet
Tubman
(1822?-1913)
Harriet
Tubman's life was a monument to courage and determination that
continues to stand out in American history. Born into slavery in
Maryland, Harriet Tubman freed herself, and played a major role in
freeing the remaining millions of enslaved blacks. After the Civil
War, she joined her family in Auburn, NY, where she founded the
Harriet Tubman Home.
Harriet Tubman's Life in Slavery
Harriet Ross was born into slavery in 1822? in Dorchester County,
Maryland. Given the names of her two parents, both held in
slavery, she was of purely African ancestry. She was raised under
harsh conditions, and subjected to whippings even as a small
child.
At the age of 12 she was seriously injured by a blow to the head,
inflicted by a white overseer for refusing to assist in tying up a
man who had attempted escape.
In 1844, at the age of 25, she married John Tubman, a free African
American. Five years later, (1849) fearing she would be sold
South, she made her escape.
Her Escape to Freedom in Canada
Tubman was given a piece of paper by a white neighbor with two
names, and told how to find the first house on her path to
freedom. At the first house she was put into a wagon, covered with
a sack, and driven to her next destination. Following the route to
Pennsylvania, she initially settled in Philadelphia, where she met
William Still, the Philadelphia Stationmaster on the Underground
Railroad.
With the assistance of Still, and other members of the
Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, she learned about the workings
of the UGRR.
In 1850, she returned to Maryland and successfully rescued her
niece from the auction block. In 1851 she began relocating
members of her family to St. Catharines, (Ontario) Canada West.
North Street in St. Catharines remained her base of operations
until 1857.
While there she worked at various activities to save to finance
her activities as a Conductor on the UGRR, and attended the Salem
Chapel BME Church on Geneva Street.
Her Role in the Underground Railroad
After freeing herself from slavery, Harriet Tubman returned to
Maryland to rescue other members of her family. In all she is
believed to have conducted over 100 persons to freedom in
the North. The tales of her exploits reveal her highly spiritual
nature, as well as a grim determination to protect her charges and
those who aided them. She always expressed confidence that God
would aid her efforts, and threatened to shoot any of her charges
who thought to turn back.
When William Still published The Underground Railroad in 1871, he
included a description of Harriet Tubman and her work. The section
of Still's book captioned below begins with a letter from Thomas
Garrett, the Stationmaster of Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington and
Philadelphia were on the major route followed by Tubman, and by
hundreds of others who escaped from slavery in Maryland. For this
reason, Still was in a position to speak from his own firsthand
knowledge of Tubman's work:
Harriet Tubman has long been associated with her extraordinary
work with abolitionist causes and as the Underground Railroad's
most famous conductor. Her heroic efforts in personally leading
persons out of slavery to freedom in the North defined her as the
"Moses of her People." After the Civil War, she
continued her humanitarian activities to aid the poor and aged,
and to establish schools for freed blacks in the South.
This house now serves as a home for the resident manager of the
Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. With the help of the AME
Zion Church, Tubman established the Home for the Aged, located at
180 South Street, in 1908 on the property that she had purchased
at public auction from William H. Seward. Tubman spent the last
few years of her life at this house and died there on March 10,
1913 at the age of 93.
Harriet Tubman played a significant role in the formation and
progress of the Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church. Harriet
Tubman was laid to rest with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery
Auburn New York, just under 50 miles from where Frederick
Douglass, another great Marylander is buried.
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Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life
Stories
By
Jean McMahon Humez
Reviews
Conductor of the
Underground Railroad for eight years, Harriet Tubman famously
boasted that she could say what most conductors couldn't: "I
never run my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
The quote fits with the popular image of Tubman as the
courageous, inspired "Moses of Her People," yet Humez, a
professor of women's studies and scholar of African-American
spiritual autobiography, argues that the edifice of Tubman
iconography has concealed the woman herself. Humez has assembled
a trove of primary source documents-letters, diaries, memorials,
speeches, articles, meeting minutes and testimonies-that create
a more intimate portrait of Tubman. But instead of interpreting
the rich materials she has collected, Humez offers a biography
of Tubman and then includes a scholarly article asserting that
since Tubman was illiterate, and her stories and correspondence
have been recorded by others, "such texts cannot be read at face
value" and must be understood to have undergone at least minimal
changes from the author's original statements.
Although Humez's prose
lacks narrative flair, she aptly places Tubman in a broad
historical context, documenting her relations to John Brown,
Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Douglass, Northern
abolitionists and the nascent women's movement. The book is at
its best in the last two primary-source sections. Through
Tubman's documented words and the observations of others, "Aunt
Harriet" emerges as an even more charismatic figure than
American history has allowed: profoundly spiritual, irreverent,
witty, wise, impoverished and ultimately neglected by the Union
she defended. —Publishers
Weekly
"I see Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories as the
most important book on Tubman in the last fifty years."—William
L. Andrews
"Imagine Harriet Tubman, whose spirit is so large, without the
means to tell her story as autobiography in the usual sense. She
sings or prays or speaks in public, but what about the silent
articulation of pain and struggle that becomes available through
this source. . . . In bringing together the many voices that
serve as Tubman's surrogate, Humez does something for Tubman
that Tubman was never in a position to do for herself."—Joanne
Braxton, College of William and Mary
"Humez has compiled what she calls Tubman's "core stories,"
accounts of her life Tubman told regularly in her public
appearances, and descriptions written by those who interacted
with her. Presented as a chronology of her life, these materials
paint a far more vivid portrait than any biographer's account.
The reader gains not just glimpses of Tubman, but sees how she
confounded even those admirers who still could not comprehend a
black woman who behaved like the bravest of men. Read with the
care Humez's introduction to the documentary section of her book
prescribes, the collection of Tubman sources she has assembled
provide the basis for a far fuller and more complex portrait
than has hitherto been available"—New
York Times Book Review
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Other Books on Tubman
Kate
Larson.
Bound For The Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait
of an American Hero.
George Sullivan.
In Their Own Words: Harriet Tubman.
Kate McMullan.
The Story of Harriet Tubman : Conductor of the
Underground Railroad
Catherine Clinton.
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom
Ann Petry.
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground
Railroad
Ann McGovern.
Wanted Dead or Alive: The True Story of Harriet
Tubman
Earl Conrad. General Tubman.
There's a national campaign for March 10 as a national holiday
in honor of Harriet Tubman. |
