Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter

Author:Nell Irvin Painter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

21

Presidents

S OJOURNER T RUTH saw the dawning of a new era in American history in Abraham Lincoln’s signing the District of Columbia Emancipation Act in 1862, and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Thrilled, she determined to make her first trip to the nation’s capital in 1864. Fifty miles south of Baltimore, Washington was thoroughly southern, but it was now in the land of freedom–the capital of a nation waging war on southern institutions.

Truth announced her intentions in one of her open letters to the National Anti-Slavery Standard in February 1864: “I believe the Lord means me to do what I want to do, viz; to go east in the Spring. . . to see the freedmen of my own race.” She also intended to see the “first Antislavery President.” 1 Truth’s fervent and unstinting commitment to Lincoln led her to embroider her account of their meeting. Setting out, she had no inkling of the retouching that would become necessary in this–and other presidential cases.

Truth’s friends had raised enough money to send her and her grandson Samuel Banks on their journey through the East. She and Banks left Battle Creek in the middle of 1864. They stopped often to visit friends and let Truth make campaign speeches for Lincoln’s reelection.

In Boston she talked with Harriet Tubman, already well known among abolitionists for escaping from slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and returning some nineteen times to rescue her enslaved family, friends, and neighbors. 2 Tubman had earned the appellation “Moses” by bringing more than two hundred people out of bondage.

Truth and Tubman, now so often confounded in the popular mind, did have a lot common–in adventurous pasts, intimate connection with God, singing, and ways of knowing independent of literacy. Both had been hardworking farmers as enslaved girls; doing men’s work made them strong and dauntless. The circumstances that made each woman free had also cost each her marriage. 3 As adults, they had made their living like the majority of American women of all races who were not in the field: as household workers. Truth had lived with wealthy people who employed her, often–as in the case of the Latourettes and Elijah Pierson in New York City–as a near equal. Tubman had found employment in hotels where a shifting clientele did not encourage interaction between workers and guests. 4

The antislavery movement had of course engaged both Truth and Tubman, though in the mid- to late 1850s, Truth was more likely to be found on the platform, and Tubman in the crowd. Both were among the many friends, houseguests, and beneficiaries of a wealthy upstate New York abolitionist, Gerrit Smith (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin). Truth was a generation older than Tubman, who was born in about 1821; we are uncertain about Tubman’s birthdate in Maryland, just as we are uncertain of precisely when Truth was born in New York.

Truth was solidly built and nearly six feet tall–reporters called her gaunt, but not slender. Tubman was short, around five feet, and slight. Although Truth

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