Force and Freedom by Kellie Carter Jackson

Author:Kellie Carter Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Brown and Leading Ladies

One of Brown’s strongest allies, he believed, was Harriet Tubman. Having made more than a dozen undetected trips back and forth to the South to free the enslaved, Tubman was no stranger to danger. Moving along the Eastern shore, Tubman successfully rescued some three hundred men, women, and children from bondage. She was known to have kept a pistol on her at all times and would not have hesitated to use it. Tubman would threaten to shoot not only any pursing person or dog but also any enslaved runaway who contemplated returning to the plantation to potentially spoil her rescue efforts. Story after story, witnesses testified to Tubman’s belief in the utility of force. During one rescue, a man protested among the fleeing group that he was going to return to his plantation when success for their escape looked bleak. Tubman pointed her gun at the man’s head and said, “You go on or die.” Given these options, the man endured, and just several days later the group arrived in Canada.17

For this and so much more, Tubman was just the kind of woman Brown wanted. He eagerly sought out Tubman to enlist her talents to aid his plans. While it is unclear how Tubman and Brown initially met, Brown acknowledged his desire to have her as a possible recruiter and as a guide to help runaway slaves get to freedom in Canada. In April 1858, the two met at least twice while in St. Catherine’s to discuss recruiting former slaves for the Harpers Ferry plot. He contended that her crucial knowledge of terrain in Maryland and Pennsylvania would be necessary to conducting a successful attack.18 Brown admired Tubman’s bravery so much that he gave her the highest compliment he could at the time: he called her General Tubman, sometimes using the pronoun “he” when referring to her.19 As backhanded as it sounds, equating Tubman to a man was Brown’s way of acknowledging her unwavering fearlessness. Tubman agreed to support Brown and his efforts, but fortunately, given the outcome of the raid, she was not in attendance. Some historians speculate that she likely fell ill just prior to the raid.20 The historian Kate Clifford Larson contends that Tubman might have also been unavailable due to recruiting for the raid; she also ventures that she may have begun to see the plan as unwinnable. Given her head trauma from youth and poor planning, a combination of the two probably held her back. Nevertheless, Larson claims that perhaps the one white person Tubman really admired was Brown, and she was not the only woman to feel this way.21

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