It is the Distinguished Company at the Bijou Planks!
Today we see Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman worked as a slave, spy and eventually as an abolitionist. Tubman's belief in God helped her remain fearless, despite the overwhelming challenges she faced.
Tubman was born Araminta Ross in 1822 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When interviewed later in life, Tubman said she started working when she was five as a house maid.
She recalled that she endured whippings, starvation and hard work even before she got to her teenage years.She labored in Maryland’s tobacco fields, but things started to change when farmers switched their main crop to wheat. Grain required less labor, so slave owners began to sell their enslaved people to plantation owners in the the Deep South. Two of Tubman’s sisters were sold to a slave trader. One had to leave her child behind. Tubman too lived in fear of being sold.
When she was 22, Tubman married a free black man named John Tubman. For reasons that are unclear, she changed her name, taking her mother’s first name and her husband’s last name. Her marriage did not change her status as an enslaved person. Five years later, rumors circulated in the slave community that slave traders were once again prowling through the Eastern Shore. Tubman decided to seize her freedom rather than face the terror of being chained with other slaves to be carried away, often referred to as the “chain gang.” Tubman stole into the woods and, with the help of some members of the Underground Railroad, walked the 90 miles to Philadelphia where slavery was illegal. The Underground Railroad was a loose network of African Americans and whites who helped fugitive slaves escape to a free state or to Canada.
Tubman led many rescue missions that freed many grateful people. She normally rescued people in the winter, when the long dark nights provided cover, and she often adopted some type of disguise.
Even though she was the only “conductor” on rescue missions, she depended on a few houses connected with the Underground Railroad for shelter. She never lost a person escaping with her and won the nickname of Moses for leading so many people to “the promised land,” or freedom.
After the Civil War began, Tubman volunteered to serve as a spy and scout for the Union Army. She ended up in South Carolina, where she helped lead a military mission up the Combahee River. Located about halfway between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, the river was lined with a number of valuable plantations that the Union Army wanted to destroy. Tubman helped guide three Union steamboats around Confederate mines and then helped about 750 enslaved people escape with the Federal troops.
Tubman’s Christian faith tied all of these remarkable achievements together. She grew up during the Second Great Awakening, which was a Christian revival in the United States. Preachers took the gospel of evangelical Christianity from place to place, and church membership flourished.
A horrific accident is believed to have brought Tubman closer to God and reinforced her Christian worldview. Sarah Bradford, a 19th-century writer who conducted interviews with Tubman and several of her associates, found the deep role faith played in her life. When she was a teenager, Tubman happened to be at a dry goods store when an overseer was trying to capture an enslaved person who had left his slave labor camp without permission. The angry man threw a two-pound weight at the runaway but hit Tubman instead, crushing part of her skull. For two days she lingered between life and death. The injury almost certainly gave her temporal lobe epilepsy. As a result, she would have splitting headaches, fall asleep without notice, even during conversations.
This drove Tubman closer to God. Bradford wrote that Harriet "Talked with God every day of her life." This confidence in providential guidance and protection helped make Tubman fearless. Standing only five feet tall, she had an air of authority that demanded respect.
In 1831 a Kentucky slave named Tice Davids made a break for the free state of Ohio by swimming across the Ohio River. His master trailed close behind and watched Davids wade ashore. When he looked again, Davids was nowhere to be found. Davids's master returned to Kentucky in a rage, exclaiming to his friends that Davids "must have gone off on an underground road." The name stuck, and the legend of the underground railroad was born. It was another two decades before the underground railroad became a part of the national consciousness, mostly because of the heroic exploits of the underground railroad's most celebrated "conductor."
"Moses" Harriet Tubman was raised in slavery in eastern Maryland but escaped in 1849. When she first reached the North, she said later, "I looked at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory ober eberything, de sun came like gold through de trees and ober de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven." Tubman was not satisfied with her own freedom, however. She made 19 return trips to the South and helped deliver at least 300 fellow slaves, boasting "I never lost a passenger." Her guidance of so many to freedom earned her the nickname "Moses."
Tubman's friends and fellow abolitionists claimed that the source of her strength came from her faith in God as deliverer and protector of the weak. "I always tole God," she said, "'I'm gwine [going] to hole stiddy on you, an' you've got to see me through.'"
Though infuriated slaveholders posted a $40,000 reward for her capture, she was never apprehended. "I can't die but once" became her motto, and with that philosophy she went about her mission of deliverance. She always made her rescue attempts in winter but avoided actually going into plantations. Instead she waited for escaping slaves (to whom she had sent messages) to meet her eight or ten miles away. Slaves would leave plantations on Saturday nights so they wouldn't be missed until Monday morning, after the Sabbath. It would thus often be late on Monday afternoon before their owners would discover them missing. Only then did they post their reward signs, which men hired by Tubman would take down.
Because her rescue missions were fraught with danger, Tubman demanded strict obedience from her fugitives. A slave who returned to his master would likely be forced to reveal information that would compromise her mission. If a slave wanted to quit in the midst of a rescue, Tubman would hold a revolver to his head and ask him to reconsider. Asked whether she would actually kill a reluctant escapee, she replied, "Yes, if he was weak enough to give out, he'd be weak enough to betray us all and all who had helped us, and do you think I'd let so many die just for one coward man?" She never had to shoot any slave she helped, but she did come close with one: "I told the boys to get their guns ready, and shoot him. They'd have done it in a minute; but when he heard that, he jumped right up and went on as well as anybody."
Tubman said she would listen carefully to the voice of God as she led slaves north, and she would only go where she felt God was leading her. Fellow abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her, "I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God."
Tubman became a friend of many of the best-known abolitionists and their sympathizers. John Brown referred to her in his letters as "one of the best and bravest persons on this continent—General Tubman as we call her."
During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse, laundress, and spy with Union forces along the coast of South Carolina. After the war, she made her home in Auburn, New York, and, despite numerous honors, spent her last years in poverty. Not until 30 years after the war was she granted a government pension in recognition of her work for the Federal Army. Harriet Tubman died at the age of 90.
Millions of people voted in an online poll in 2015 to have the face of Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill.
Harriet Tubman, a distinguished individual!
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