A Thousand Words a Battle: The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

The day in 1849, in Philadelphia, Araminta (Minty) discarded her slave name for the name “Harriet Tubman,” she put much more than alphabet letters behind her:

I grew up like a neglected weed,—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.[1]

She only looked back once in a while, although she returned to Maryland’s plantation area where she was born to get her family out of slavery and bring them North. Because it was dangerous to keep records of any kind, no one will ever know precisely how many enslaved people Tubman liberated. It was well over 70—some guesses are more like 200. The work made her famous, but not as Harriet Tubman. At first, the Wanted Posters called her by her slave name. Her success brought her a new name—Moses—but the compact little lady known as Harriet Tubman sought no personal fame. She watched her health, trusted in God, and delivered her cargoes:

I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.[2]

As she brought her passengers to the end of their road to freedom, she often looked at her hands, “to see if she was the same person”:[3]

I would fight for my liberty so long as my strength lasted, and if the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.[4]

When the war came, Tubman remained involved. By 1863, the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were an established part of the Army of the Potomac. At the urging of Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists, Tubman went to South Carolina to assist the Massachusetts and South Carolina troops. She tended to the sick and injured and worked with Union officers to scout and infiltrate the area. The Combahee Raid of June 2-3, 1863, was planned and executed by Tubman, resulting in the evacuation of at least 750 enslaved people from their lives on the nearby plantations. As she remembered:

We weakened the rebels somewhat on the Combahee River by taking and bringing away seven hundred and fifty-six head of their most valuable livestock, known up in your region as “contrabands,” and this, too, without the loss of a single life on our part, though we had good reasons to believe that a number of rebels bit the dust.”[5]

Tubman was there when the 54th Massachusetts tried to take Fort Wagner in July 1863.  As she narrated to historian Albert Bushnell Hart:

And then we saw the lightning, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling, and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men we reaped.[6]

At the end of the war, Tubman did not retire. She kept working to better the lives of the formerly enslaved and stood up proudly with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Women’s Suffrage. She also spent the last thirty years of her life trying to get some type of pension or other compensation from the U. S. Government for her war work. Finally, in 1899, President William McKinley signed into law the right of Harriet Tubman to receive $20.00 a month for the “special circumstances” of her work for the Union cause. Laboring in a lifetime of obscurity, Tubman lived out the meaning of the words below every day of her life:

If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom; keep going.[7]

She walked her road until her death, in 1913.

— Meg Groeling

Part of a series.

[1] Benjamin Drew, A North-side View of Slavery (New York: Negro Universities Press-reprint, 1968), 20.

[2] “Harriet Tubman Is Dead,” Auburn Citizen, March 11, 1913.

[3] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/297671?ref=underground-railroad

[4] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/297671?ref=underground-railroad

[5] C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers; The United States, 1859-1865, (USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 220.

[6] Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman, (USA: Associated Publishers, 1943), 181.

[7] Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004), 221.