Harriet Tubman was fortunate to have both of her parents in her life as well as her siblings since each of her parents’ owners had married. Harriet Tubman was hired out to work on other plantations because the economic factors in the north had changed. Where once the crops grown in the Maryland area were highly labour intensive, such as harvesting tobacco, by the nineteenth century the focus shifted to grain and timber for the growing ship-building industry in Baltimore for both local consumption and export. Neither of these products required the ongoing labour of a full complement of slaves.
This economic reality, coupled with the religious imperative to free enslaved people, facilitated a rise in the free black population — formerly enslaved Africans who were manumitted, or given ownership of themselves. They were free to hire themselves out to those planters who had need of temporary assistance. It also made the sale of one’s property, one’s slaves, to the demanding needs of the south in the sugar and cotton plantations, very lucrative. Following the War of 1812, European products increased competition, further pressuring the American economy and making the lure of selling one’s slaves seem even more appealing.
“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”
— Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
The experience of being a slave was different for men and women. Initially, most enslaved Africans were male in order for them to carry out the extremely hard work that required great strength. Over time, African women were included to provide both company for the male slaves and for the potential to have an ongoing supply of slaves. Until 1808, the reliance on American-born enslaved people was small, since up until that time it was possible to obtain robust young slaves directly from a slave auction. Female slaves were sold at a reduced rate, so they were favoured for their ability to do agricultural work in order to make up for the male labour assigned to building and carpentry, blacksmithing, and clearing fields.
Both male and female slaves might be given the same work on a very large plantation, which created another layer of loss for the enslaved person. Traditionally in Africa women would hoe a field. A woman’s work in the field would be for the benefit of her children and her community. What did it mean for a man to hoe a field? How would he have felt in doing this? What did it mean for a woman to assume some of the more demanding work, such as when Tubman would later work with her male relatives cutting and preparing timber? How were the traditional roles of men and women changed during enslavement?
In addition to being subject to the needs of their enslavers in relation to the type of work they had to perform, enslaved African women were subject to having their bodies made available to their owners. It did not matter if the female was only a young girl or a married woman, her body was owned by the enslaver. Enslaved women were forced into premature sexual knowledge due to the advances and rapes made against them by their owners and then subject to abuse by the owner’s wife who would blame the enslaved woman for the advances made on the slave. Marriage was no protection. So common was the rape of married women that many enslaved African men hoped to find a mate on another plantation lest they have to witness the humiliation, harm, or violence perpetuated against their partners should they be fancied by the owner or the object of persecution of the slave owner’s wife.
Enslaved women might be enticed by the promise of freedom for themselves or their children. They also could have threats made against them or their family members if they refused to be willing participants in an emotionless physical relationship. Should the enslaved woman wish to marry someone she did love, it may not be granted by the owner. If an offer came in from a free black to buy her freedom so that she could leave, it might also be refused. In Missouri, one enslaved African teenaged woman’s story centred on her final decision to kill her owner, Robert Newsome. Celia (also known as Margaret Garner) had been sexually abused to the point where she hit her owner in the head, then kept a fire going all night to consume his body. At the time, it was decided that she had “no reason” for killing her master. She was pregnant with her third child by him.
Pregnancy might provide the enslaved woman with additional food or potentially lighter work, but did not free her from being punished should she displease the overseer. Special pits were dug so that the full belly of the pregnant slave would fit into the hole while she lay down with her back exposed so that she could be whipped without harming her growing child. Where motherhood was a positive community event in African societies, during enslavement it was a bit different. The mother might be removed from her child early on, or at some point see her child sold off, perhaps never to be seen again, or might see her own daughter raped. Enslaved women bore a child almost every two years, with lengthy nursing preventing more frequent conception. The mother may have seen several of her children die in infancy due often to poor nutrition, infection, or disease.
From first contact, where African women were captured, examined, and sold, any number of men might rape the potential slave. It was felt to be their right, part of their entitlement in assessing the potential productivity of their purchase. Once sold, forced encounters and/or alliances grew between owners and enslaved women, women who hoped to gain certain advantages for themselves, their families, and, more importantly, for their children. Pregnancy, whether due to rape, marriage, or consensual union had the same result for the children in most of the United States. Laws were passed that made the child of an enslaved mother a slave no matter if the father was a free black or a white person. Some children born of these circumstances would be sent north to live as free people or to Europe to be highly educated as other children of the same white father. However, it was more common for the owner’s children to become house servants in his own home, or willed to a close family member.
Due to the way that enslaved African women were forcibly taken, the children the women bore could not just be their child, but could also be their sibling, their grandchild, or their cousin. It was about violence against the body, control, and incest. As long as the child was at least one sixteenth black, the child was considered to be black, and therefore subject to enslavement.
Since early African arrivals were initially considered indentured servants, they were allowed to serve their terms of indenture and then petition to be free just like the English, Scottish, and Germans were allowed. Should there be any children, they could be free as well. The laws quickly changed so that indenture did not end and enslavement was formally established.
Following a notable case in Virginia, a woman born of a free white father and an African mother claimed her freedom through her status as the daughter of a wealthy white man, and did not serve her term. By 1662, the concept of Partus sequitur ventrum, a legal doctrine, was applied so that any child born of an enslaved woman would be a slave. This set the tone for this type of relationship and made it possible for white men to avoid having any responsibility for the children they sired with African women. Not only was this a financial savings for the owners, it reduced the potential for scandal and relegated their promiscuity to the plantation, not “refined” society.
Because enslaved African women were subject to the confinement and control of their enslavers and their sexuality was fantasized and “available,” black women were seen as being more willing to be sexual in relation to white women, who were seen to be “pure.” Many wealthy slave owners alienated their white wives in their pursuit of and involvement with enslaved African women. The children born of these unions were sometimes treated with special care by the male owner who might not be able to bear selling them. However, should the wife remain in the picture, her treatment of the “other woman,” the enslaved African and her “mulatto” child, was not so charitable.
Having the lighter skinned slaves in the house to do the lighter work and the darker skinned slaves in the fields was due to the fa
ct that the lighter ones were the owner’s children. It also had the effect of further colourizing class. In trying to find ways to further care for one’s own children, white plantation owners supported the establishment of the “black” universities where their offspring could be educated.
Having children bound the enslaved woman to the place where her children were. It made it more difficult for her to contemplate escape since her children might not be easy to spirit away from the home of the owner, the care of the older slave women, or the glare of the mistress of the plantation. Similarly, having the enslaved male marry was seen as means of tying him to the plantation, although it made it difficult for him to attempt to protect his wife from violent threats to her — both physically and sexually — as he could not betray his master. What did this do to his sense of self as a protector when he could not intervene in the treatment of his wife?
Part of slave resistance included enslaved people’s finding ways to worship, celebrate, or socialize with each other. Using remote locations, invited through secret communications, they could have services or “parties” that would serve as an opportunity to either practice traditional spirituality or to have some fun, dance, and sing. These brief times away allowed for some courting and friendships to be extended. It provided fleeting moments of freedom. It informed those who would be able to choose a partner.
Harriet chose free black man John Tubman to be her partner. She may have become acquainted with him as he travelled or through one of the secret meetings in the woods. After their union, it would appear that no children were born to them. It is possible that a head injury may well have affected Harriet Tubman’s ability to adequately produce the hormones necessary for reproduction. Without having children to worry about leaving behind, and with her small frame built up through hard work as well as her knowledge of how to determine directions and survive outdoors, Harriet was as well positioned to run away as any man.
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Unearthing the Truth
During fall evenings, field slaves would work in a group to clean up the wheat and husk the corn. One fall evening in 1835, Harriet saw a slave named Jim, from the neighbouring Barret plantation, make a run for his freedom. Curious, Harriet as well as his overseer, McCracken, chased him. Jim went into the Bucktown general store and was cornered by McCracken, who demanded that Harriet tie Jim up. While Harriet refused, Jim bounded out the door and Harriet blocked the doorway. McCracken responded to this act of defiance by picking up a two pound weight and throwing it, perhaps intending to get Jim, but it got Harriet, hitting her in the forehead and nearly killing her.
For months, Rit did everything she could to help Harriet as she fell in and out of consciousness. Brodess wanted to sell her, but no one wanted the slave who had recurring bouts of sleeping attacks, sometimes as many as four per day. After she “recovered,” Harriet went back to work in the fields for her temporary master John Stewart, and continued to be hired out to Dr. Thompson. Harriet commanded fifty to sixty dollars a week, while a male slave could expect one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars a week for the same type of work.
Harriet Tubman U.S. postage stamp, thirteen cents. First issued in 1978. Photo courtesy Milton S. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press), 2007.
Because Edward Brodess was not yet old enough or experienced enough to assume the responsibilities of plantation administration, John Stewart, a builder, had been brought in to take over for a time. Dr. Thompson’s father owned Benjamin Ross, Harriet’s father, and was Edward’s guardian. Harriet drove oxen, carted, and plowed when working at home, and she sometimes worked with her father, who also worked for Stewart. Stewart liked to brag about Harriet’s strength because he claimed that she could lift a barrel filled with produce, or pull a plow just like an ox could.
Benjamin Ross, though still a slave, was now a timber inspector and supervised the cutting and hauling of timber for the Baltimore shipyards. If she was working with her father, Harriet would cut wood, split rails, and haul logs, producing half a cord of wood a day. Brodess permitted Harriet to keep a small portion of her earnings, and she used the money left over after giving Brodess his share to buy a pair of oxen, worth forty dollars, to help her in her work. It was unusual for an enslaved woman to be doing a man’s strenuous job and even more unusual for a slave to buy and own anything. The Bucktown community would have been aware of this unique slave.
Harriet’s narcolepsy, or sleeping seizures, as a result of her near fatal head injury, prevented her sale to southern plantation owners who might not have been tolerant of her sleep attacks. It also kept her from being paired off to breed while an adolescent, as did her plain appearance on her five foot tall frame. Harriet is reported to have looked like she could not understand anything at all at times, and this was very helpful to her since she could assume this “dull” stance around her master or overseers, while taking in everything that was going on around her. Sometimes she even pretended to be having a sleep attack to learn more about her master’s plans. In fact, many slaves came to know the plans of their owners, as they would listen and watch them intently while seeming not to be aware at all. “One mind for the white man to see, another mind I know is me.”
Harriet was a very spiritual person. Both Ben and Rit possessed a strong faith in God which Harriet shared. They, along with other plantation slaves, worshipped at open-air services at what is now the site of the Bazel Methodist Episcopal Church in Bucktown. By the time of her head injury, Harriet began having visions which guided her or which gave her encouragement. She prayed about everything and took the meaning of her visions to be the response of God to her prayers. She combined an African spirituality with her interpretation of Christianity.
Recuperating also provided her with time to think through the impact of slavery on her life and how she could change her status. Harriet replaced her work name of Araminta with her birth name of Harriet while she was a teenager — though some researchers feel that Harriet was known as Araminta until she was married. Her surname changed when she married John Tubman. John’s surname was from his great grandparents’ bondage experience with the wealthy Tubman family of Dorchester County. John’s parents had been manumitted, freed upon the last will and testament of Justice Richard Tubman. Harriet again was unconventional in marrying a free person.
Certainly Harriet did not wait until her 1844 marriage to consider how to become free. Harriet had been interested in her own freedom for a long time. She questioned John about his freedom and how his parents were manumitted. John’s mother had been manumitted so he was free through the freedom of his mother. Only children born of slaves were seen as slaves according to the law. John’s mother was granted ownership of herself, manumitted, as a reward for a lifetime of loyalty and hard work.
Slaves could also pay for their freedom by buying their own value as labourers, but this was more difficult to do since wages paid to hired workers were incredibly low. Harriet earned only forty dollars a year after giving Brodess his 98 percent share, and it would take her twenty-five years to buy her freedom if her value did not increase, or if her master did not raise her price. White people who owned slaves did so to benefit from the labour that they could provide. Black people who owned slaves were usually successful in raising the funds necessary to buy their still enslaved family members from their owners and consequently become black slave owners in the process.
Harriet decided to have a lawyer look into the will of Athon Pattison (sometimes written as Patterson), since the Pattisons owned Rit and her ancestors before the Pattisons married into the Brodess family and brought their “property” with them. One of Harriet’s ancestors on her mother’s side was her grandmother, Modesty. Modesty came to the United States on a slave ship from Guinea and was sold to the Pattisons. Athon’s will gave Modesty’s girl, Rittia, to his granddaughter, Mary Pattison, the wife of Joseph Brodess. For the five dollars she paid her lawyer, Harriet found out that her moth
er had wrongfully been kept in slavery and that she was also entitled to be free. “I give and bequeath unto my granddaughter, Mary Pattison one Negro girl called ‘Rittia’ and her increase until she and they arrive to 45 years of age.” Instead of being manumitted, Rit was passed down to Mary and Joseph’s son Edward. Instead of being free, “Rittia and her increase” were still enslaved. This made Harriet resolve to be free and to see her family live in freedom.
A “free” state was a state north of the Mason-Dixon line — the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the boundary between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States. In the free states, slave holding was not allowed by law. The free states came into being in 1777 and included Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania. As a compromise for allowing California entry as a free state, greater strength was given to the enforcement of slave laws to appease the slave states. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 meant that these free states were no longer safe for black people, and they could be captured, tried, and found to be runaway slaves, therefore sent back to slavery. As a result, Ontario and, to a lesser extent, Quebec and the Maritimes became magnets for freedom seekers.
Harriet Tubman Page 3
