Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman

Introduction
History provides present generations with glimpses of extraordinary character and
heroism of people who lived in the past generations. History provides people with an opportunity
to relive albeit imaginatively certain events of the past. History is kind to those who helped to
fashion or shape it and in most cases; those who are fondly remembered through history did not
know their actions would remain to be remembered for many generations after. Harriet Tubman
had no idea that her courage and determination to free herself as well as her people out of slavery
and bondage facing danger and death in the process will long be remembered by future
generations long after she had gone. Tubman was that humble leader who would lead her people
from the “land of bondage to the promised land of Liberty” prompting her to be nicknamed
“Moses” by her people just the Biblical “Moses” the deliverer of the Israelites 1 .
The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was born around 1820 by slave parents in Dorchester, Maryland and
spent the first twenty-five years of her life as a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland 2 .
According to her biographer Sarah Hopkins Bradford, she never presented her master as
unnecessarily cruel but as was the practice by many slaveholders, her master hired out his slaves

1 Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn: W.J. Moses, Printer, 1869), 1
2 Ibid, 9

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to other masters some who were tyrannical and brutal to their slaves. During her initial slave
years, she was engaged only as a field-hand where she followed the oxen, loaded and unloaded
wood, and also carried heavy burdens and in the process developed a remarkable power of
muscles associated with strong laboring men.
Tubman even in her adult life experienced the effects suffered at the age of thirteen years
where she was injured by master through a terrible fit of rage where he threw a heavy weight at
the young girl breaking her skull in the process 3 . This terrible incident had a long term effect on
Tubman’s health as it affected her brain to an extent of causing her hypersomnia during her adult
life and old age. However, this experience instead of bringing her down, it gave her a burning
desire to change things through freeing herself first and then coming back to free her people from
the oppression they were going through at the hands of their masters. She had gotten tired of
listening to shrieks and cries of women being flogged by their masters in the Negro quarters. She
listened with a heavy heart as helpless African American women groaned out that familiar prayer
“Oh, Lord, have mercy!” She had observed and seen the agony in the expressions on the faces of
her people as they lamented and wept uncontrollably praying for a deliverer to come to their
rescue. She could hardly remove from her mind the images of old mothers with hopeless grief
and aged fathers with silent despair.
At the age of twenty five years where she had spent a big proportion of it in slavery
where she had seen, heard, felt, and experienced high degree of oppression and suffering,
Tubman escaped from her bondage to a land in the North in the hope of getting liberty. She did
not know where she was going but the only guide she had was the North Star which she fervently
followed till she had crossed that imaginary magic line in Philadelphia that separated the land of
bondage and the land of liberty. She explains that experience to her biographer Bradford, as a
3 Sarah H Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Carlisle: Applewood Books, 1993), 15

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feeling only equal to a prisoner who had spent twenty years in jail only to return home and get
his old home is not there including his family and friends 4 . She had finally achieved her freedom
but just like that prisoner, there was no one to welcome her to the land of freedom. Nevertheless,
this was the beginning of a long journey of trials and tribulations to free her people from
bondage.
Once in Philadelphia, Tubman worked in hotels, club houses and later own at Cape May
where she saved her hard earned money to plan and execute her ambitious and dangerous plan of
freeing her people 5 . Philadelphia became her area of operation where she would go back to
Maryland and strike a notice to anybody who was willing to be freed from slavery and then
would leave normally on Saturday night since advertisements for their capture could not be sent
on a Sunday this giving them a day in advance to escape. Through these risky missions, Tubman
was able to free her parents, several of her siblings as well as about sixty other people in the
process earning her the nickname “Moses’ for leadership. Tubman’s later life was difficult and
painful as she struggled with the head injuries sustained at the age of thirteen and in 1913 died of
pneumonia surrounded by friends and family.

4 Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman,20
5 Ibid, 21

Bibliography

Bradford, Sarah H. Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. Carlisle: Applewood Books,
1993
Bradford, Sarah Hopkins. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn: W.J. Moses, Printer,
1869.