Going against the wishes of her husband, Harriet Tubman decided in 1849 to make a run for freedom. The first time she attempted to escape, she did so with two of her brothers.
Her brothers got second thoughts as one of them had recently become a father and the thought of not seeing his child grow up was too much for him.
Harriet, who had seen her family totally torn apart by being sold, argued that as long as they were slaves there was no guarantee that he would ever watch his son grow up.
Her brother was unpersuaded and decided to return, which meant that she had to as well.
The next time she ran, Harriet decided to go at it alone.
Harriet made it to Pennsylvania with the assistance of several Quakers who were known at the time for their strong opposition to slavery. Harriet always travelled by night and often acted as a slave during the day to avoid suspicion.
Interestingly, prior to the American Revolution and the Great Awakening Quakers owned slaves just like everyone else in the British colonies. But by the time of the American Revolution, Quakers had done a complete about face and were no longer slave owners and had developed an uncompromising opposition to slavery mostly due to their belief that it was ideologically incompatible to be a follower of Christ and to also own a human being as a slave.
In fact, the Quakers, (who were also known as The Religious Society of Friends) were the first organized group in American History to petition Congress to end slavery back in 1790. Since then they had opened schools specifically for young black children in places like Philadelphia, which had a growing community of free Blacks after the State of Pennsylvania abolished slavery.
This is how Harriet recalls feeling when she finally crossed into Pennsylvania, “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; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
If it were only that easy.
The very next year the Federal government passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
This piece of legislation was a game changer.
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 stated that even in FREE states like Pennsylvania, if a fugitive slave were found, the free people of those states had a legal obligation to apprehend and turn that slave over to authorities OR face a fine or jail time themselves.
Whoa.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made virtually all Quakers potential criminals.
For the first time in American History pro-slavery conservatives in the government had passed a law that essentially criminalized NOT helping Southern Slave masters get their slaves back. This pissed off many northerners, many of whom were kinda, sorta indifferent to the whole idea of slavery before.
Slavery wasn’t their problem. Their lives were largely untouched by slavery. While some might’ve thought that slave owners were morally wrong, they saw slavery as between them and God. The passage of this law, for the first time in American history, made slavery a part of everyone’s life and pushed many of those who had been more or less apathetic towards slavery before, closer towards the abolitionists on the political spectrum.
Senator Jefferson Davis and other pro-slavery conservatives were pissed that California joined the union as a free state because it gave Free states veto power in the Senate for the first time. Pro-slavery conservatives had a lock on both houses of congress since the founding fathers had established the Republic. Jefferson called the admission of California an “aggression upon the people of the South.” And he predicted that the North’s “relentless encroachments upon the rights of the slave states threatened to continue until the South finally responded with ‘forcible resistance’”.
Jefferson Davis and hyperbole went together like Michael Jackson and the moonwalk.
So while Harriet was free when she stepped into the state of Pennsylvania in 1849, less than a year later this was no longer the case.
If you truly wanted to be free, you would have to make it all the way to Canada.
In 1850 Harriet began returning to Maryland to rescue her other family members. First she rescued her niece and her two children. Then she returned and rescued her brother Moses and two other men. She even went back to rescue her husband only to find that he had remarried another woman and had started a family.
He was already free. His marriage to Harriet was not a legally recognized marriage because Harriet was a slave.
Slave marriages were largely a symbolic gesture.
Marriage didn’t stop slave masters from selling your husband or wife as he or she saw fit. So when Harriet decided to run for freedom against John’s wishes he took this as a personal rejection of him and their marriage, remarried, and started that family that he always wanted.
Harriet had also found out that all wasn’t rosy and heavenly in Pennsylvania after all. Racial tensions were particularly bad in the city of brotherly love as newly arrived Irish immigrant groups and free blacks were at each other’s throats. The Irish deeply resented free blacks as well as fugitive slaves escaping north because these blacks were competing with them for jobs.
So understandably the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was immensely popular among Irish Americans because it gave them all the incentive they needed to actively participate in handing fugitive slaves over to slave catchers so that they would have less competition for work.
Citing how dangerous America was becoming, Harriet took 11 fugitive slaves north to Canada. On the way, Harriet actually stayed with Fredrick Douglass who wrote about the experience in his autobiography:
“On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter….”
You can’t call Harriet amazing because amazing is not big enough a word.
All in all, Harriet rescued 70 slaves in 13 missions over the course of 11 years. In addition to this, Harriet also consulted about 50 to 60 other enslaved Africans on how to escape to the north. And please don’t forget she did all of this while suffering from a condition where she could fall asleep at any time without warning.
You must understand that slave masters were pulling no stops to catch this woman. Slave owners were notoriously selfish, entirely unaccustomed to ever being told ‘No”, keenly individualistic and famous for placing their own wants and needs above the needs of everyone else, but when it came to this Harriet, they were ALL on the same page.
Harriet had to be killed and made an example of.
Harriet only worked in the winter because the nights are longer and they could travel greater distances under the shroud of darkness. Plus, it was cold in the winter so it wasn’t uncommon for slaves to sleep indoors at night. Whenever she would lead a group of slaves she would always leave on Saturday nights. Why? Because newspapers were closed on Sunday so slave owners wouldn’t be able to run an advertisement announcing that they had left until Monday morning at the earliest, giving them a full day head start.
On several occasions while returning to rescue slaves Harriet ran into former masters in close quarters who would’ve surely recognized her had she not been thinking quick on her feet. Once she was on the same train with a former master and she quickly grabbed a newspaper and pretended to be reading. Since it was well known that Harriet was illiterate, he ignored her.
Harriet had learned from her first attempt at running with her brothers that changing your mind or getting cold feet at any point during the journey could not only spell disaster but could compromise the entire underground network that they used to get to freedom.
What could be worse than a slave returning to his master and then, under a promise of freedom for him and his family, telling the slave master everything he knew about the underground railroad and all of the safe houses that they used?
So to dissuade getting cold feet Harriet was known to carry a handgun. And it was understood that once you agreed to leave with her it was almost like you were being kidnapped. She made it crystal clear that she would shoot anyone dead who tried to return. Once a fugitive slave grew discouraged and insisted that he was going to turn around and go back to his plantation Harriet put her gun to his head and said, “you go on or die.”
Harriet was so successful at rescuing slaves (sometimes at gunpoint) that rumors started circulating that there was a $40,000 bounty on her head, dead or alive. Although it was only a rumor, this rumor gained national attention because a man could purchase a small farm for only $400. Hell, when John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln there was only a $25,000 reward for him. But the reason why this bounty on Harriet was believable was because she was costing slave owners a lot of money.
Slaves were money. Pure and simple. They were an investment.
And a sizeable one at that.
Enslaved Africans provided free labor. Labor that was hard and time consuming and was the ONLY reason cash crops like tobacco and cotton could be profitable.
And profitable it was. So much so that nearly all the wealthiest men in America prior to 1860 were slave owners.
James Henry Hammond, former South Carolina Governor, former US Senator and arguably the most outspoken proponents of slavery prior to the American Civil War famously admitted in a speech, “Only slaves could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.”
He should know. He owned more than 300 of them.
Not one single fugitive slave that Harriet ever took under her wing was ever captured or failed to reach freedom. Not one. In other words, once you agreed to escape with Harriet you were guaranteed to be free. This is how she came to be known as “Moses”.
One of her last missions was to return to rescue her ailing parents.
They were very old by this time. During all of this time that Harriet was running slaves to the North, her father Ben had worked and saved enough money to purchase her mother Rit.
Remember Rit should’ve been freed decades earlier but her master simply ignored that part of his mother’s last will and testament.
Harriet returned and rescued them from slavery but had to take them to St. Catharines, Ontario after the community in the north where they relocated grew hostile towards her parents after their identities had become known. Which simply underlines the fact that while she was a hero to slaves there were still many in the North who were not supportive of what she was doing.
I say that she was “rescuing” slaves. Many at the time, even in the north, would’ve said she was “stealing” slaves. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that the people who were upset in the North were not upset because they gave two licks about some wealthy slave owner in the south losing a slave or two. They were upset because they too had mouths to feed and had made their way all the way to the States looking for a better life and they deeply resented having to compete for work with men and women who 1) legally shouldn’t even be there and 2) were accustomed to working for FREE so naturally were willing to work for wages that even an immigrant literally fresh off the boat wouldn’t take.
In 1858 Harriet Tubman was introduced to a man named John Brown. This man was unlike any white man in America. He was an abolitionist, but one who openly advocated using violence to end slavery in the United States. As far as white people went, John Brown was ready to take the fight against slavery to a place where very few ever considered.
Take a guess at what happens when the most successful rescuer of fugitive slaves in America teams up with the most radical Abolitionist in American History?