Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton

Author:Catherine Clinton [Clinton, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2019-11-17T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Ten

Arise, Brethren

She must be regarded as the first heroine of the conflict.

— Samuel J. May

ONE OF TUBMAN’S FAVORITE PARABLES was the tale of a man who sowed onions and garlic on his pasture to increase the output of his dairy cows. The butter came out too strong and would not sell. He then decided to sow clover instead—but the wind had already distributed the garlic and onions throughout all his fields. Tubman suggested that “just so, the white people had got the Negroes here to do their drudgery, and now they were trying to root them out and ship them to Africa, but they can’t do it. We’re rooted here and they can’t pull us up.” 1

Harriet Tubman always felt the depth of her American roots. She knew that no matter how hard white southerners tried to sweep aside black rights, African Americans and their antislavery allies would never give up the fight against slavery. She had been in the trenches and had entrusted her life to scores of men and women connected with the UGRR. She believed in the ideas set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Although deprived of any formal education, she had learned from experience to cherish her liberty, and to extend this newfound sense of entitlement to all American blacks.

When John Brown raised the abolitionist stakes, North and South proceeded even more quickly down a collision course. Frederick Douglass explained that the time for compromise was over:

Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon slaveholders. It is vain to reason with them. One might as well hunt bears with ethics. . . . Slavery is a system of brute force. . . . It must be met with its own weapons. 2

Harriet was confident she would see jubilee (the slaves’ term for general emancipation) within her own lifetime. She wanted to bring her family back to the United States, and other American-born blacks out of Canadian exile. She decided it was time to step up the pace, to promote a more direct opposition to slavery. During her treks south, she had repeatedly faced down the slave power and her own fears. But she did fear indifference and resignation in the face of the increasing influence of white supremacists, who would stop at nothing to get their way. After all, slavery was war.

After the Nalle rescue in Troy, in late May 1860 Tubman arrived in Boston as a celebrity guest at the New England Anti-Slavery Society Conference. She also attended a special session on women’s suffrage on June 1, where she gave a speech. The Liberator reported that “Moses” spoke; her “quaint and amusing style won much applause.” 3

She addressed her audience from the same platform as other distinguished speakers—among them Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Tubman alone was compelled to use a pseudonym. Following John Brown’s insurrection, slavecatchers had become more emboldened.

By the summer of 1860, slaveowners felt even more under siege when a Black Republican and damned abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln, was nominated for president.



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