Abolition Movement, 8: Three Influential Women: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Ross Tubman
She was born Isabella Baumfree to slave parents in New York in 1797. Emancipation was coming to slaves in the state of New York in the late 1820s, but when Isabella’s owner turned back on a promise to release her on July 4, 1826, she decided to walk (not run) to her freedom, and she did, taking her infant daughter, but having to leave other children behind, still bound up in slave ownership. Black parents bound in slavery were denied rights of marriage and family and suffered under a complex of family restrictions dictated by the whims of owners. They did not enjoy freedom in the issue of whom they could or could not marry - in many cases not allowed to marry at all, and who owned any children that were born to them. When emancipation took effect in New York in 1827, Isabella was relieved of any obligation to her previous owner by means of a payment made on her behalf by her employer.
Isabella Baumfree developed a strong faith under the influence of several employers in her young adulthood, and became a preacher. In a ministry calling that became the driving force of her life, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843. She was well prepared to testify from the trenches of slave abuse, physical, emotional, legal. She had experienced the violence of an abusive master. She had experienced the loss of not being able to marry in love, but compelled to marry within the confines of ownership. She had experienced the trauma of losing children that were moved about and traded as property. Her courage to speak in behalf of her own cause and her passion to advocate for rights was demonstrated in her young adulthood when she had to fight in court to regain her five-year-old son who had been sold illegally after emancipation.
Sojourner Truth is most well known as a passionate preacher and advocate for abolition and women’s rights. In 1851-52, Truth was a lecturer / agent with William Lloyd Garrison's American Antislavery Society, part of an extensive and aggressive campaign organized in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law. Garrison biographer Henry Mayer described her work as "armed with an indomitable spirit, an arsenal of "homemade" freedom songs, and a voice that matched Kelley's (abolitionist / feminist Abby Kelly Foster) in both volume and passion." (Mayer, 424) Truth bravely stood up for equality and confronted discrimination wherever she went, even on the streets of Washington, D.C. in 1864. The message that she delivered before the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1854 became known for the refrain “Ain’t I A Woman?,” posing the rhetorical question in confronting both the inhuman treatment of blacks and the inequity faced by women in the light of her own strength, intelligence, and resilience as a mother and laborer, preacher and orator, and survivor of abuse.
It is perhaps apocryphal, but is reported that when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he said “So you’re the little woman that wrote the book that started this great war.” (Wineapple, 47). From a well-to-do family, daughter of the famous Christian preacher Lyman Beecher, and surrounded by siblings who were themselves preachers, activists, and educators, Harriet wrote the best-selling novel of the 19th century in the midst of great personal grief over the loss of a young child in the cholera epidemic.
In the complex web of pro and anti-slavery political and legal webs north and south, and in the aftermath of the controversial Fugitive Slave Law of the Compromise of 1850, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had the opposing effects of energizing widespread defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law provisions in the north while inflaming the adamant protection of slavery in the south as the supporters of the institution felt the increasing pressure of abolition as a national sentiment. (Note 2)
It is noteworthy to point out that, whereas the number of individuals held in slavery continued to grow into the 1860s (approximately 4 million), with its legal status firmly entrenched in the southern states, also the number of free blacks was gradually increasing, both in the north and in the south, with approximately 500,000 free blacks divided evenly between north and south by 1860. (Note 3) Likewise, and a fact which created no little growing alarm in the south, the number of slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad increased year by year to reach a level of approximately 100,000 by the beginning of the Civil War.
On the question of who started the Civil War, Harriet Ross Tubman may also lay some claim to that title. While the pro and anti-slavery interests seemed to be almost at a south-north stand-off, it could be said that to an extent the national political and financial interests, including northern interests, were willing to tolerate the status quo, the constant prodding of the abolitionists and the southern efforts at slave state expansion notwithstanding. But the growing flow of escaping slaves, inspired and assisted by the real as well as mythical Underground Railroad, created the need for the various efforts of slave owners to reclaim their slaves, ultimately leading to the wide-reaching Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The logic is as follows. The Underground Railroad, with Harriet Tubman being the most famous “conductor,” created an increasing flow of fugitive slaves. Slave owners, not wishing to relinquish their property nor allow the notion of slave liberation to take hold, created an army of slave catchers who traversed the eastern and northern states, in their mission armed and with little legal accountability. The Fugitive Slave Act compelled northern cooperation in the capture, trial, and return of slaves, thus compelling cooperation in an inherently unjust judicial procedure, with the accused slaves having virtually no judicial rights in the matter. Many abolitionist northerners resisted the law, resulting in widespread armed conflict between slave hunters and vigilance groups protecting fugitive slaves. (Along with armed conflict, there was effective nonviolent protest as well as crowd or “mob” action to assist fugitives without violence.)(Note 4) Thus, according to this logic, what may have otherwise stood as a tense but relatively stable status quo was driven ever closer to national conflict by the growing armed conflict, in the territories as well as in the free northern states, over the fugitive slave issue. (Note 5)
Who can thus argue that the Underground Railroad, in facilitating the flow of men, women, and children from slavery to freedom, did not help leverage the nation into war? The diminutive Tubman, armed for protection and employing an array of creative tactics to complete her missions, became a symbol of the effort. As far as meeting Lincoln, however, Tubman and Lincoln never met, and in fact, Tubman expresses that, at that time in her life, she did not wish to meet President Lincoln, being disappointed by the racism that she observed, including, for example, the disparity of pay between black and white Union soldiers. Lincoln was in fact one of the more complex if not conflicted political actors in American History. It is entirely appropriate for sensitive observers such as Tubman to have recognized the racism that they saw all around them, even in the most ardent advocates for their cause. In an interview conducted in 1896, Tubman confesses that she later regretted not having met Lincoln and that conversations with Sojourner Truth helped change her mind on Lincoln’s role as “a friend” of the black community. (Note 6) History recognizes that “the great emancipator” was not without his faults.
Harriet Tubman was born Arminta Ross around 1820 in Maryland. She later changed her name to Harriet in honor of her mother, Harriet Green. From her youngest years she worked in a variety of slave roles in the house and in the field, and suffered abuse that was typical with many owners. Notably, in her youth, she was struck in the head with a heavy weight when she stepped in front of another slave that was being attacked by an overseer. She recounts how the weight fractured her skull and she was virtually left for dead, but survived, though scarred and burdened with headaches and narcolepsy the rest of her life.
As was the case with Sojourner Truth, Harriet should have been granted emancipation in 1840, but it was not given. In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free black man, but the marriage did not work out well for her, and in the face of continued slavery in Maryland or even possibly being sold further south by her husband, she escaped to Pennsylvania via the underground railroad.
Apparently, she was a natural activist, for almost immediately she began to return south to bring others to freedom. She was conservative in her own account of how many slaves she liberated, but the estimates range from 70 to 300, with her work ultimately reaching to Canada as the Fugitive Slave Act made the effort increasingly dangerous.(Note 7) She led her own aging parents to freedom and is said to have stated “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” But her career as an agent of liberty was not limited to the role of conductor on the Underground Railroad. She worked as a nurse, cook and even a Union Spy, providing valuable information about Confederate supply routes and liberating slaves in the midst of the war, many of whom served in black Union regiments. Tubman later became a noted activist for women’s suffrage.
Through the distance of history, we cannot know if southern slaves may have envisioned meeting Tubman herself on a journey to freedom, or if rather the mere existence of the hidden and unnamed railroad networks was enough both to inspire the freedom seeking slaves and stir unease in the minds of the slave owners in fear of losing their laborers. But the courage and selflessness of Arminta Harriet Ross Tubman made her a legend of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War effort.
To be continued.
Endnotes
(1) Mayer provides additional statistics including total sale of 3 million during the U.S. commercial lifetime and approximately equal that total overseas as the work was translated into every European language. (Mayer, 420)
(2) Mayer offers insightful commentary: "Stowe's Genius was to seize the hour of crisis and make palpable in concentrated fictional form the human problem that underlay the antislavery struggle. Her appeal lay principally with those people, like herself, who had bitten their lips and belittled the agitators rather than challenge received opinion." (420) Further .. "Her novel had drawn upon the factual groundwork of a generation of radical pamphleteers - including Garrison, Weld, Grimke, and Douglass - and she had harvested an audience, as Wendell Phillips always emphasized, that the abolitionists had planted and cultivated." (422) Further .. "Stowe refrained from taking political positions and exerted very little influence within the movement (e.g. she refused to take sides between the Garrison and Tappan camps (422)). Her greatest contribution remained Uncle Tom's Cabin, and its overall effect was more one of consolidation than trail-blazing. Coming as it did from the great font of clerical orthodoxy, the novel finally took the sting of fanaticism out of abolitionism, and its popularity gave incalculable weight to the idea of emancipation as a moral and historical inevitability." (423)
(3) Citing a historical U.S. Census chart originally retrieved from the University of Virginia Library Collection. Leading states in free black population included, in order of population: Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, all having over 25,000 free blacks in 1860. (Bradford, Free Black Population in the U.S.: 1790-1860)
(4) The literature is filled with famous examples of the rescue of fugitive slaves by various groups. One of the more famous but unsuccessful attempts was the case of Anthony Burns in 1854 in which tens of thousands of citizens protested in the streets of Boston, and then hundreds of boats in the Boston Harbor, in an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to prevent the return of Burns to Virginia. He was later ransomed from slavery by a group of the Boston sympathizers.
(5) This line of thinking, perhaps obvious and perhaps well known to historians, was expressed in a brief article in HuffPost by William Duggan in April of 2016.
(6) Interview in The Chautauquan magazine, cited in CivilWarSaga.com, 2/22/12.
(7) A PBS source reports “During a 10 year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom.” PBS Africans in America: Harriet Tubman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Africans in America: Harriet Tubman. (n.d.). Retrieved from PBS Resource Bank: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html
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Bradford, E. (Ed.). (n.d.). Free African American Population in the U.S.: 1790 - 1860. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://www.ncpedia.org/sites/default/files/census_stats_1790-1860.pdf
Brooks, R. B. (2012, February 22). Harriet Tubman Didn't Like Abraham Lincoln. Retrieved from CivilWarSaga: http://civilwarsaga.com/harriet-tubman-didnt-like-abraham-lincoln/
Duggan, W. (2016, April 21). Harriet Tubman VS Abraham Lincoln. Retrieved from HuffPost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harriet-tubman-vs-abraham_b_9751722
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Mayer, H. (1998). All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
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Wineapple, B. (2013). Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. New York: Harper Collins.