The Life of Harriet Tubman

by Anne Schraff

  About this Book

  Harriet Tubman’s Tale of Courage

  “I grew up like a neglected weed—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Now I've been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is.” Harriet Tubman ran away from slavery in 1849, walking more than one hundred miles to freedom in the North. For the next sixteen years, Tubman risked her newfound freedom—and her life—to help about three hundred other slaves escape.

  Sorting myth from truth in this remarkable tale of courage and heroism, author Anne Schraff breathes new life into the story of the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a nurse and a scout for the Union Army. In her later years she joined the struggles for the education of her people and for women’s rights.

  “…this text flows as swiftly as a novel.”

  —School Library Journal

  “This book shimmers with authenticity…”

  —Children's Literature

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anne Schraff is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction for young people. She maintains a keen interest in United States and world history.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About this Book

  Title Page

  * * *

  Chapter 1: The Next Time Moses Comes

  Chapter 2: Like a Weed

  Chapter 3: Liberty or Death

  MAP: Harriet Tubman’s Route to Freedom

  Chapter 4: The Conductor

  Chapter 5: Let My People Go

  Chapter 6: You Will Be Free or Die

  Chapter 7: The Last Days of the Railroad

  MAP: Major Routes on the Underground Railroad

  Chapter 8: Scout, Spy, Nurse, Soldier

  Chapter 9: A New Beginning

  Chapter 10: I Can Hear the Angels Singing

  * * *

  Chronology

  Chapter Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  Note to Our Readers

  Copyright

  More Books from Enslow

  Chapter 1

  THE NEXT TIME MOSES COMES

  Image Credit: Library of Congress

  For sixteen years, Harriet Tubman risked her freedom and her life to help almost three hundred slaves escape the shackles of forced labor.

  Josiah Bailey was a handsome, muscular Maryland slave, valued as much for his intelligence as for his strength. He was a skilled farmer entrusted with helping to manage the plantation where he worked. A quiet man, Bailey probably would have spent his whole life in slavery except for an incident in November 1856. That incident made him seek out Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave known to thousands as Moses. Their meeting changed Bailey’s life.

  Bailey had been hired out by his master to another plantation owner, William Hughlett, for many years. It was common for masters to rent out their slaves to others when they were not needed on the home plantation. This brought extra income to the masters who owned the slaves.

  Hughlett decided he wanted to buy Bailey and train him to be an overseer on his plantation. Hughlett paid $2,000 at a time when good field hands were selling for about $1,500. But on the fall morning when he arrived to take possession of Josiah Bailey, his newly purchased slave, Hughlett made a serious mistake.

  Bailey was in his small cabin eating breakfast when Hughlett shouted for him to come out. Bailey left his meal and dutifully presented himself to his new master.

  “Now Joe,” Hughlett demanded, “strip, and take a licking.”1

  During the times Hughlett had rented Bailey, the slave had always done excellent work. Hughlett had never found reason to criticize Bailey. What had Bailey done to deserve this? When he asked Hughlett why he was getting a beating, the white man replied, “You always worked well, but you belong to me now. I always begin by giving them [new slaves] a good licking. . . . Now strip and take it.”2

  Bailey obeyed. He stripped and took a terrible beating. But the injustice and humiliation of the flogging made Bailey decide that this would be his final beating. As soon as he could, he sought out Harriet Tubman’s father. “Next time Moses comes,” Bailey told him, “let me know.”3

  “Moses” was Harriet Tubman, a small, ordinary-looking Maryland woman, a runaway slave herself. She secretly met with escaping slaves and led them northward to freedom along a route she knew by heart. She was familiar with every mile of land between Maryland and Canada.4 She used one of the many trails leading northward toward freedom. These routes were known as the Underground Railroad, and Tubman was one of its most effective and fearless conductors.

  Bailey continued to work for Hughlett until one night when word spread through the plantation that Tubman was in the area to shepherd another group of fugitive slaves to freedom. Josiah Bailey joined the group of runaways.

  Because Bailey was so valuable, rewards of $1,000 and then $2,000 were offered for his capture and return. But Tubman was extremely clever.5 She led Bailey and the others as she always led the runaways, in groups of four or five. They rested by day and traveled by night, passing out of Cambridge, Maryland, over the Choptank River bridge, through the Delaware towns of Camden, Dover, Smyrna, and Odessa. Tubman and her charges always found a warm welcome at the home of Thomas Garrett in Wilmington.6 Garrett was a friend of Tubman’s who actively opposed slavery.

  After resting at Garrett’s home, Tubman led Bailey and the others to a wagon carrying some bricklayers. She had hired them as a decoy for her runaway slaves. Tubman always planned well ahead, using a wide variety of imaginative covers to disguise her caravans of slaves. The bricklayers made room for the slaves among them, and then the bricklayers began singing and shouting merrily as the wagon rolled over a bridge where the local sheriffs frequently searched passing wagons for slaves. The runaways huddled in the bottom of the wagon by the feet of the raucous bricklayers, and the wagon was waved through without a close inspection. Once again, one of Tubman’s ruses had worked.

  Tubman then led her little group through Chester, Pennsylvania, into Philadelphia, then to upstate New York. But Bailey began to worry that in spite of Tubman’s skill they would all be caught and returned to slavery. He could not quite believe Moses could pull this off. Later, Tubman recalled Bailey’s depression this way: “Joe was silent; he talked no more; he sang no more.”7

  They were almost to Canada and freedom, but there was one final hurdle. Tubman led them onto a train that would cross a bridge into Canada. As they crossed over into Canada, Tubman ran to Josiah Bailey, grabbed his shoulder and cried, “You shook the lion’s paw, Joe. You’re free!”8 Tubman called entering Canada, where slavery had been abolished, “shaking the lion’s paw.”

  Now, at last, Josiah Bailey was a free man. Everyone gathered around him. Tubman could not see Joe during the wild celebration, but she could hear his joyous singing. After that, Tubman saw Bailey several times when he was living in Canada—happy, industrious, and free.9

  Josiah Bailey was just one of about three hundred slaves Harriet Tubman would lead to freedom.10

  Chapter 2

  LIKE A WEED

  When Harriet Tubman was a grown-up, she looked back on her childhood and recalled, “I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.”1

  Harriet’s mother, Harriet Greene, was nicknamed Rit. When Rit was ten years old, she and her mother arrived at the Edward Brodas plantation. Later Rit married Benjamin Ross, a skilled lumberman. Ross supervised a crew of slaves cutting oak, cypress, and poplar trees and then hauling them to the shipyards of Baltimore. Ross was said to have strange powers. Harriet Tubman later said that her father could “predict the weather” and that he “foretold
the Mexican War.”2 Harriet’s parents were respected as clever, honest, and religious people with a strong sense of family loyalty.3

  Harriet was born around 1820—nobody knows for sure because her birth was not recorded. Her parents could neither read nor write. They did not even know what month it was. They told time by the seasons: summer, winter, planting time, and harvest time. When slave children were born, friends and relatives came to visit the mother, and their memories served as birth notices.

  Harriet and Benjamin Ross named their daughter Araminta, and as a small child she was called Minty. Sometime during her later childhood she decided to use her mother’s name—Harriet.4 Little Harriet was the middle child of eleven children born to the Rosses. There are no dependable records revealing all their names or how many survived to adulthood.

  Harriet was born in the tiny community of Bucktown, in Dorchester County, Maryland, about sixty miles south of Baltimore. The so-called Mason-Dixon line that separated the slave-owning state of Maryland from free Pennsylvania was one hundred miles to the north.

  The Rosses lived in one of the slave cabins set back from the Brodas house. The cabins had one room and no windows. Chinks in the logs of the cabins were packed with mud to keep out the cold and the rain. A clay-daubed chimney kept the cabin warmed in winter, but there was always a smoky smell in the room.

  Harriet and her family lived on slaves’ rations of food, such as cornmeal, smoked herring, and pork. The slave cabin did not have an oven, so cornmeal was mixed with flour and placed between two leaves to cook outside in an open fire. The result was called ashcake. Little children usually ate cornmeal mush.

  For young Harriet, as for all slave children, childhood lasted only about five years. During her early years she slept on a straw pallet and ran barefoot after rabbits in the woods. Children played together under the supervision of an elderly slave woman. But when Harriet was about six, her childhood ended.

  The fortunes of the Brodas family had been in decline since about 1824, when Edward Brodas took over the plantation from his parents. Most of the tobacco plantations in Maryland had worn out the soil by planting the same crop year after year. Now they needed other sources of income. Brodas grew apples, wheat, rye, and corn. He cut and sold timber from the woodland on his 442 acres.

  With nine children to support, the Brodas family was eager to raise cash. One way to make quick money was to sell off or hire out the slaves. Even a slave as young as Harriet could be a source of income. Prospective employers began to arrive at the Brodas plantation to look over the slaves, including Harriet.

  One day a white couple came to the Brodas plantation in search of a cheap young slave to help the wife with her weaving business. The husband, James Cook, chose Harriet, so off went the little girl in the white couple’s wagon. Harriet had never been away from home before. Now she was being separated from all she knew and loved, going into an uncertain future.

  At the Cook house, Harriet slept on the kitchen floor, and she often ate the table scraps with the family dogs. Harriet was put to work helping to wind yarn, but the work made her sneeze and cough so much she could not continue. Harriet was then given a new task—helping Mr. Cook watch his muskrat traps. Harriet spent long days wading in the icy river, checking the traplines for animals. Soon she came down with a severe cough and high fever. Harriet had to be sent home to the Brodas plantation, where her mother nursed her back to health.

  Edward Brodas was eager to rent Harriet out again as soon as she was well. Harriet’s two older sisters, Linah and Sophia, had already been sold to work on huge cotton and rice plantations in what was called the New South—Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Slave conditions were much harsher there than in Maryland. Harriet was too young to be sold, so Brodas rented her out again, this time to a couple with a small baby. They needed a nursemaid and a housekeeper and they did not want to pay very much. Once again Harriet went off with a white couple to a strange house.

  Harriet was about seven by then, a sturdy little girl who did her best to keep the baby content and the rooms dusted. Still, she did not satisfy her new mistress. Harriet could not keep the house clean enough, and she was whipped for her failure. Harriet was often whipped by people who rented her. Her neck grew crisscrossed with scars that remained with her for the rest of her life.5

  Tubman later said she had “heard” that there were good masters and mistresses, but she had not come across any.6 Harriet learned to dress in as many pieces of clothing as she could find—the thicker the better—to protect her skin from the lash.7 Knowing that her angry mistress wanted to make sure she was inflicting pain, Harriet howled loudly, even when the padding protected her.8 Later on, when Harriet was invited to join the family in prayer, she always stood by herself on the landing of the stairs. “I prayed to God,” she remembered, “to make me strong and able to fight and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”9

  Harriet was a curious, adventurous child. She had never tasted sweets, so when she saw a lump of sugar one day on her mistress’s table, she could not resist the temptation to snatch it up. The woman saw the theft and chased Harriet as she fled outside. Harriet ran her fastest, finally taking refuge in a place she thought would not be searched—the pigpen. She hid there for days with nothing to eat but the potato peelings she grabbed from the pigs. Finally she had to come out, and that day she got the whipping she had dreaded. Then, once again, she was sent back to the Brodas plantation as an unsatisfactory slave.

  None of Harriet’s housekeeping and child care jobs had worked out well. She just did not take to those kinds of tasks. Harriet did much better at outdoor work, and she was becoming a very strong girl.

  In the summer of 1835, when Harriet was about fifteen, she was shucking corn for her master when an incident occurred that would change her life. A runaway slave, fleeing his master, ran right past Harriet as she worked. The overseer was hot on the boy’s trail. When the overseer saw Harriet, he shouted for her to grab the fleeing slave and hold him. The overseer wanted Harriet to seize the boy and then help bind his hands so he could be whipped for his escape attempt.

  Harriet not only refused to seize the boy—she deliberately blocked the path of the overseer. In a rage, the overseer picked up a heavy lead weight and hurled it at the runaway. The weight missed its mark and struck Harriet in the head. She fell to the ground unconscious. Harriet was carried back to her parents’ cabin, where she remained in a coma for many days. She had sustained a dent in her head that remained all her life. She also began to suffer from “sleeping fits” and severe headaches. Harriet could not remain quiet for more than fifteen minutes before seeming to fall asleep. Even in sleep she was restless, and when awake she felt continually tired. The way she finally counteracted this malady was to do strenuous physical work in the direct heat of the sun. She felt this helped circulate her blood and improved her condition.10

  After Harriet recovered somewhat from her head wound, she was directed to work for John Stewart, a shipbuilder. Harriet’s father, Benjamin Ross, was already working for Stewart. Ross was an inspector who supervised a large crew, making sure their work was of high quality. Harriet was supposed to help Mrs. Stewart in the house, but she wanted to do outdoor work instead.

  Soon Harriet was working alongside her father. She was about sixteen years old and she quickly grasped such tasks as cutting timber and driving oxen. It was said that Harriet was able to lift enormous barrels of produce and pull a heavily loaded boat.11

  Harriet enjoyed the freedom of outdoor work because she was not under as close supervision as the house servants were.12 When Harriet finished doing the work Stewart assigned, he allowed her to hire herself out for other logging jobs. She had to pay Stewart $50 from her wages, but anything over that was hers to keep. Harriet managed to save enough money to buy a team of oxen, and then she hired herself and the wagon out for hauling jobs. Harriet was only about five feet tall, but she was very muscular and could hold her own at men’s jobs.


  Harriet’s parents raised their children with a strong faith in God. Harriet especially always felt the nearness of God, and she later told a friend that she talked to God “as a man talks with his friend.”13 Harriet had many visionary experiences. Some would occur during her sleeping spells. She would remember in detail what had happened while she seemed to be asleep. Harriet appears to have had mystical experiences all through her life, beginning in her teenage years. These directed her path and even warned her of dangers.14

  While teenage Harriet was working alongside her father, dramatic events were shaking the region where she lived.

  Nat Turner, a young Virginia slave who believed he had been chosen by God to overturn slavery, started a rebellion in 1831. Before being captured and killed, Turner and his companions killed fifty-one white people. This incident sent shock waves throughout the white South. Slave owners became even stricter because they were frightened of similar uprisings among their own slaves. There were hundreds of plots, escape attempts, and other signs of unrest among the slave population.

  Harriet became aware of these incidents and also learned of the antislavery movement spreading in the United States. There were always white Americans disturbed by the institution of slavery, but now free blacks and sympathetic whites were joining forces to end slavery. This was called the abolition movement. Abolitionists spread the antislavery message by newspapers, speeches, pamphlets, and word of mouth.

  The little girl who described herself as being “ignorant of liberty” began to learn about it. Working with her father to send logs to Baltimore, hiring herself out in places beyond Bucktown, Harriet came in contact with many different kinds of people. She learned from them what was happening in the wider world.

  Harriet was unable to read or write because she had never been taught these skills, but she quickly grasped the idea of the human right of freedom. Although just a young girl, she sensed the justice in that runaway’s flight to freedom the day she helped him and suffered a head injury.