The Life of Harriet Tubman by Anne Schraff

Author:Anne Schraff [Schraff, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780766061392
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

SCOUT, SPY, NURSE, SOLDIER

As war broke out between the North and South in 1861, Harriet Tubman recalled a vision she had in 1857. She was visiting the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet in New York when she dreamed that all black people in the United States were free. She awoke singing, “My people are free!”1 Garnet, who was also black, scolded her. He warned her that they would never see freedom for black people in their lifetimes. But perhaps their grandchildren would see it, he thought. Tubman replied, “You’ll see it and you’ll see it soon.”2

Harriet Tubman hoped that President Abraham Lincoln would free the slaves at once, but that did not happen. She believed that God would not let Lincoln win the war until he had set the slaves free.3

With the war under way, the slaves had new problems. As plantations were overrun with Union troops, the slaves scattered. Without any means of support, they were a vast group of hungry, homeless, desperate people.

The displaced slaves who milled about the roads were called “contraband.” Tubman learned that the government needed help to deal with them. The slaves no longer had masters, but still they were not free. The contraband had no shelter or food. They were malnourished, cold, and wet, and many were sick. Thousands of men, women, and children clogged the roads. The very force of their numbers prevented some units of the Union Army from functioning.

A white soldier recalled a group of slaves who approached the Union lines after struggling for nine days through a swamp. He asked the people what sustained them during their terrible ordeal. One said, “I saw the lamp of life ahead and the lamp of death behind.”4

Harriet Tubman left her home in New York to offer her services. She traveled to Beaufort, South Carolina, which had one of the largest concentrations of contraband. She went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, too, where there was also a swelling contraband population. Tubman was promptly assigned to a contraband hospital where many people were suffering from dysentery—severe diarrhea—which could result in dehydration and death. Tubman worked under the command of General David Hunter at Hilton Head, the headquarters of the Union Army in the South.

Beaufort was a large town, and it was filled with Union soldiers, government agents, and homeless slaves. Tubman’s work with the slaves was made more difficult by the fact that they could not understand her well, and she could not understand them. They spoke the Gullah dialect common among blacks in South Carolina. But Tubman patiently made herself understood, and though she had no medical training, she did have a good working knowledge of medicinal herbs. She went to the nearby river and found water lilies, pulling them up root and all. Then she collected crane’s bill (geranium). She beat the plants into a powder and boiled the powder into a dark, bitter tea that helped the people suffering from dysentery. The only other medicine available to her at the makeshift hospitals was whisky, which was used as a sedative.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.