Bound for Canaan (50 page)

Emboldened by her success in rescuing Kessiah Bowley and her children, she returned to Baltimore a few months later, and brought north her brother Moses and two other men. In the fall of 1851, she returned to Dorchester County to bring out her husband, John. Tubman was a free man and could have left on his own. That he did not might have given Harriet pause. With her customary single-mindedness, however, she saved money from her kitchen work in Philadelphia to finance another trip south, and to buy a new suit of clothes for John. She had not seen him for two years, and she had much to tell him. But bitter disappointment awaited her. From a hiding place somewhere near her old home, she sent John word that she had come. He replied, through an intermediary, that he had taken another wife, a free woman, and had no intention of leaving. In her fury, Harriet's first instinct was to invade John's house and make as much trouble for him as she could. Perhaps it was at this moment, amid rage, hurt, and betrayal, that the indomitable, iron-willed Harriet Tubman of legend was born. If the rescue of family was at the heart of her quest, John Tubman was perhaps its crux, the only person whom she believed had belonged to her alone. How she must now have hated the sight of the clothes that she had brought for him! But a cold instinct for self-preservation, and her growing sense of a greater mission ordained for her by God, won out. If Tubman had ever been a sentimentalist (an almost
unimaginable luxury for a slave), she certainly no longer was now. She collected a group of willing fugitives from the neighborhood, gave one of them John's new clothes, and led them north.

Before the year was out, she had brought out eleven additional slaves, including another of her brothers and his wife. These she accompanied all the way to Canada, traveling from Philadelphia to New York City, Albany, and Rochester, where they stayed in Frederick Douglass's barn, the largest number that he ever had in his home at one time. “I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter, but, as may well be imagined, they were not very fastidious in either direction,” Douglass remarked, a little snobbishly. In all, in the course of thirteen journeys back to the Eastern Shore, Tubman would lead at least seventy African Americans out of slavery in Maryland, and indirectly enable perhaps fifty others to escape to freedom on their own. (Her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, inflated these numbers for dramatic effect to nineteen trips and three hundred passengers.)

In legend, Tubman typically appears as a solitary figure trekking with her parties of fugitives through dense forests of oak and pine, and across its marshes in lonely isolation. As Kate Clifford Larson has shown in a recent, groundbreaking biography of Tubman,
Bound for the Promised Land,
she was in fact able to draw for assistance not only on the Levertons' small circle of Quakers, but also on a much larger web of African Americans, including both slaves and free men and women linked by marriage, friendship, and work from the Eastern Shore as far north as Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Networks that could efficiently transmit family news, Tubman correctly surmised, could also facilitate the furtive movement of human beings. She most often conducted her passengers on foot by one of two routes across eastern Maryland, either directly east from the Cambridge area or adjoining Caroline County to Seaford, Delaware, and then due north along the line of present-day U.S. Route 13, or else northeast via Denton and Sandtown to join the main New Castle road around Camden, and then north through Wilmington to Philadelphia.

She preferred to do her underground work in the winter, when the long nights provided more hours for travel. She usually collected her passengers somewhere far from their homes, to lessen the chance of someone recognizing her, and often in a cemetery, where groups of apparent “mourners” would go unnoticed. To move around as widely as she did in Maryland and Delaware, Tubman must have carried convincing docu
mentation. She may have acquired forged free papers from certain black market women in Baltimore, who were linked to the Philadelphia underground, and kept a stock of forged free papers that they circulated and renewed at regular intervals. She paid for shelter and transportation for her passengers when it was available; once, when she had no money to give, she paid a helpful family with her underclothing. Thanks to her years of work in lumber camps, she could find her way through the woods as skillfully as any of the old Nanticokes who had once roamed the land. When circumstances called for it, she could also slither through tall grass like a snake, flat on her stomach, using only her arms and the serpentine motion of her body to propel herself forward.

She was a consummate actress. A friend later wrote of her that “she seems to have command over her face, and can banish all expression from her features, and look so stupid that nobody would suspect her of knowing enough to be dangerous.” She often disguised herself as an elderly woman or man, or carried a book that, although she was illiterate, she used to deflect the attention of pursuers who were looking for a fugitive field hand. Well aware that blacks were liable at any time to be stopped and questioned by whites, she sometimes carried a pair of chickens as a deliberate ruse, which at least once she was obliged to put into effect. Coming face to face with her own master on a street in Cambridge, she pinched the chickens so that they ran loose, and in the confusion of chasing them, she went unnoticed. She also used familiar hymns to communicate with her passengers in a kind of simple code. She would, for example, pass along the road to see if the coast was clear. If it was, she would sing, in a powerful, full-throated voice

And if there was danger, she would sing, in warning

Tubman expected her passengers to have nerves as steely as her own. She permitted no “whimpering,” and made it clear that she was willing to
kill anyone who faltered. “That several who were rather week-kneed and faint-hearted were greatly invigorated by Harriet's blunt and positive manner and threat of extreme measures, there could be no doubt,” wrote one of her close collaborators. During one trip, when she was compelled to keep her party hidden in a swamp for a day and a night without food, one of the men declared in disgust that he was going home. Tubman stepped up to him and aimed a revolver at his head, saying, “Move or die.” He went on with the rest to Canada. A live runaway could do great harm by going back, she knew, but a dead one could tell no secrets. When there were babies to be carried, she dosed them with paregoric to prevent them from crying, and put them in a bag that she slung around her waist.

Although Tubman must have become aware that there was an abolitionist underground as soon as she reached Philadelphia in 1849, if not before, her first rescue missions appear to have been independent operations. Sometime in 1851 or 1852, however, she met two men who would draw her into the inner mechanism of the Underground Railroad, providing her with money, new connections, and introductions to many of the most influential abolitionists in the country. One of these men was Thomas Garrett, one of the grand old Quakers of the underground, who rivaled Levi Coffin in both the length of his service and the number of fugitives who passed through his brick home on Shipley Street, in Wilmington. A thickset, sandy-haired man with slightly unbalanced blue eyes set in a broad, genial face, which gave “an impression of repose, kindness and strength,” Garrett began his underground work in the 1820s, at a time when abolitionists were, he wrote, “like Virgil's ship-wrecked mariners, very few in number and scattered over a vast space.” He made no secret of his views. Sheer fearlessness may have disarmed some of his opponents. But good connections also helped: his wife, Rachel, was the daughter of a director of the National Bank of Wilmington, and he received financial contributions from the DuPont family, the wealthiest in the state.

In Delaware, as in Maryland, slavery was in decline, but the punishment for aiding fugitives was still severe, as Garrett found out in 1848. In that year he was tried and convicted of assisting the escape of six slaves, and required to pay a fine of fifteen hundred dollars, about fifty-three thousand dollars in present-day value. (Garbled reports inflated this to forty thousand dollars in 1850 by confusing the fine with business losses,
and erroneously asserting that the judgment had included the seizure of Garrett's property.) At his trial, Garrett shocked his listeners by admitting publicly that he had assisted over fourteen hundred slaves to freedom in twenty-five years, an average of fifty-six per year: “[H]ad I believed every one of them to be slaves, I should have done the same thing…I should have done violence to my convictions of duty, had I not made use of all the lawful means in my power to liberate those people.” He added, “I now consider the penalty imposed might be a license for the rest of my life: but be that as it may, if any of you know any poor slave who needs assistance, send him to me, as I now publicly pledge myself to double my diligence, and never neglect an opportunity to assist a slave to obtain freedom.”

Garrett had cut back his underground work somewhat after his 1848 conviction, when he was fifty-nine years old. But by the early 1850s he had sufficiently recovered financially to recommit himself to his true vocation. He was the linchpin, if not the formal director, of a diverse network that reached south at least as far as Camden and Middletown, and included Quakers and Catholics, farmers, whites within the law enforcement establishment, black fishermen and watermen, and, as he called her, “that noble woman,” Harriet Tubman. She would appear at his door without warning, a party of fugitives stashed somewhere in the vicinity, asking for cash or some other kind of help that she took for granted would immediately be forthcoming. On one occasion she turned up suddenly and announced, “Mr. Garrett, I am here again, out of money, and with no shoes to my feet, and God has sent me to you for what I need.” The Quaker replied, “Harriet, art thou sure thou art not deceived? I cannot find money enough to supply all God's poor. I had five here last week and had to pay 8 dollars to clothe and forward them.” Tubman persisted that he must have enough to pay for a pair of shoes and passage for herself and a companion to Philadelphia. Then she added, “I must have 20 dollars more to enable me to go down to Maryland for a woman and three children.” That very morning, she told Garrett, she had paid “her last copper” to a driver who had brought her and “a delicate female” thirty miles in his carriage. Garrett thereupon handed her five British pounds that had been sent to him by Quaker donors, more than enough to meet her needs without having to solicit more from her friends in Philadelphia.

Although Garrett boasted at one point, for rhetorical effect, that he would have to build another story onto his three-story house to accom
modate more fugitives, most were probably in fact concealed in the homes of his black collaborators elsewhere in Wilmington. Although Garrett sometimes sent fugitives directly to Philadelphia by steamboat, more often they were guided across the Pennsylvania state line, the women and children in carriages and the men by foot, often in the company of a traveling African American grocer, who was able to make frequent journeys, day or night, between Wilmington and the underground stronghold of Chester County, without prompting suspicion. Garrett would sometimes present a fugitive with a scythe, rake, or hoe from his store to carry through town like a workman. Having reached a certain bridge, the man would conceal the tool under it and continue on his way. The tool would be retrieved by one of Garrett's allies, and reused for the same purpose. Other times, he would dress a fugitive in his wife's Quaker clothing, with a deep bonnet and veil, and personally walk her, or him, through the streets, arm in arm to a safer location. Although there were more direct routes from Wilmington to Philadelphia, Garrett usually preferred to send fugitives first northwest to Kennett, where he had close personal connections, preceding them with a tongue-in-cheek note announcing: “I send you three bales of black wool.”

2

Most of the fugitives sent north by Garrett were directed to the Anti-Slavery Office on North Fifth Street, in Philadelphia, where they met the other man who would shape Tubman's career in the Underground Railroad, William Still. Although, like Frederick Douglass, Still was embarrassed by Tubman's countrified ways, he was also in awe of her. “Her like it is probable was never known before or since,” he would write. “[A] woman of no pretensions, indeed, a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found among the most unfortunate farmhands of the South. Yet, in point of courage, shrewdness and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow-men, by making personal visits to Maryland among the slaves, she was without her equal.”

Still was born free in 1821, near Medford, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the youngest of eighteen children. His father, Levin, had purchased
his freedom and moved north from Maryland in 1807. His mother, Charity, later escaped to join him there, leaving behind their two oldest, enslaved sons. Largely self-taught, William moved to Philadelphia in 1844, where he worked at various menial jobs until, in 1847, he was hired as a clerk and janitor by the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, at a salary of three dollars and seventy-five cents per week. When the Vigilance Committee was reorganized after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Still was named its chairman. He coordinated escapes with underground activists as least as far away as Norfolk, Virginia and Washington, D.C., where the frugal Yankee lawyer Jacob Bigelow had rebuilt a clandestine network after William Chaplin's arrest. Still's Philadelphia office also served variously as a reception center, a kind of social services agency for needy fugitives, and a clearinghouse for information. He was usually the first person fugitives encountered when they arrived from underground stations in the Pennsylvania hinterland, from the Delaware line, or by sea from the South. Still had greeted William and Ellen Craft after their epic journey from Georgia, and he was on hand to help Henry “Box” Brown out of his packing crate. It was also Still who sent word to William Parker and his men at Christiana that the Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch and his party were on their trail.