Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 31–35. Rosemary Sadlier
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Running away was not the sort of thing that black women usually did to resist slavery. It tended to be a man’s form of resistance. Because of the stake that women had in the care of their children, or because they were working so closely supervised in the master’s house, the absence of enslaved women would be noticed quickly. To rebel against their enslavement, enslaved women might poison food, injure livestock, pretend to be ill, or even harm the children of the master. They resisted slavery utilizing the tools and opportunities that were possible in their situations.
Running away required knowledge of where to go, physical stamina, and outdoor survival skills that women slaves may not have developed. This made Harriet Tubman seem an unlikely figure to run since she was only 5 feet tall, she seemed to be unintelligent, she had sudden sleeping attacks, and she was a woman. But her physical condition, aside from her sleeping seizures, was good; she was a very strong individual. Her experiences working in the fields had equipped her with a knowledge of nature, a knowledge of survival skills, and the idea that she might succeed. Her strong religious convictions made her feel, like Joan of Arc, that she had God’s support for her plans.
Many members of the Society of Friends, the Quakers, lived in the Dorchester County area, and though they had held slaves previously, they had decided as a religious order not to hold slaves by 1776; they were among the early opponents of slavery. Later, the Methodists and the Baptists would free their slaves through manumission. The Underground Railroad was fully operational by the time Harriet got on board. When the Quaker husband got home, he drove Harriet, in a covered wagon, to the outskirts of another town. From there Harriet travelled on her own, following the Choptank River west to the Chesapeake, which ran north to Baltimore, then Delaware and finally freedom in Philadelphia!
Harriet Tubman may have heard from other slaves about which direction to travel, and she may have gotten a ride away from Bucktown, but she had to rely on her own courage and initiative to leave the plantation and her own wits and cunning to avoid recapture. She travelled by night and hid by day. She could not read or write so she had to determine which direction she was travelling by the North Star or by the moss growing on the north side of trees. She avoided obvious routes such as well travelled roads and tended to travel through swamps and rivers since running water, as she phrased it, “never tells no tales.”
Harriet was very intuitive. She had strong spiritual/religious convictions, and she always felt a divine presence that assisted her in anticipating danger, knowing whom she could approach for food and shelter, and in finding strength to continue despite feeling discouraged, hungry, tired, cold, and wet. She later said:
… there are two things I had a right to — liberty or death; If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty so long as my strength lasted and when the time comes for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.
Harriet would have been able to find many who would help her in the Camden, Maryland, area since it was the centre of Quaker abolitionist activity and there were many free black “conductors” to assist people along the Christiana River into Wilmington, Delaware. The Mason-Dixon Line, which separated the ideologies and geography of “north” and “south,” was just a short distance from Wilmington. Once over the “line” it was possible to meet with abolitionists who might provide assistance in reaching Philadelphia. When Harriet had finally crossed over the line, the political boundary that separated slave-holding state from free state, she was awestruck.
I looked at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory ober everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees, and ober the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
Philadelphia was a booming metropolis in the 1850s and was the centre of progressive social thought and social action. It was the capital of the United States and had the largest population of free blacks in the Union. While Harriet did not purchase or rent her own home, she did live with friends. The centre of the black community of Philadelphia included Pine, South, 6th (now known as Richard Allen), 7th, and Lombard Streets. It was likely within this area that Harriet met William Still, a staunch black abolitionist. By the 1850s Still was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society who aided “fugitive slaves” and freedom seekers to travel further north. So dedicated was he that he took the time to record as many details as he could about each of the possible sixty persons a month that passed through his hands in Philadelphia. In addition to their names and freedom names, he was interested in their biographies, their escape story, and their potential destination. He realized that his records, which he was forced to keep hidden, might assist in the next phase of freedom seeking: family reunification. His own family had been separated by the bid for freedom taken by his parents, two of his own brothers had to be left behind and were later sold into the deep south, so through his own knowledge of the distress, he proactively kept the practice up. The impact of his activity is startling. First, among the many persons he interviewed, he realized one day that he was speaking to his own long-lost brother Peter Still. Secondly, after years of burying his material to secure and hide it, he subsequently had it published, adding to our knowledge of the many whose stories were captured in his book, The Underground Railroad.
The area of Philadelphia that Harriet arrived in was, and still is, home to Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on the oldest plot of land continuously owned by African Americans in the United States. Harriet Tubman is known to have worshipped at Mother Bethel AME. The first church structure was actually a blacksmith’s establishment which was pulled by free black people to the corner of 6th and Lombard. This was followed by another structure, and a third building — Harriet’s church — before the fourth and final place of worship, which now exists. The tomb of its founder, Reverend Richard Allen, forms part of the museum in the lower level, and his great-great-great-granddaughter, Catherine Dawkins, is among his descendants in the congregation currently.
The 1800s were a time when Christianity was the religion practised by most of the non-Native peoples of North America, although attempts were also made to convert the Natives. Going to church was an activity that just about everyone would do. Even the slaves were encouraged to worship in their own way, often without too much interference from slave owners. Laws and social practices strongly reflected the importance of Christianity to the people in positions of power. No one worked on Sundays, for example, because it was viewed as a holy day and it was assumed that members of the community would be attending church services, which could last most of the day.
The AME Zion Church on Parker Street in Auburn, New York. Tubman worshipped there during the last few decades of her life.
Photo courtesy the Cayuga Historical Society.
The Church dictated the spiritual and moral conduct of the era. Leaders in the various denominations of Protestant churches were often influential in the broader social, political, and cultural life of the community. Richard Allen was motivated to form a separate, black church because of his treatment in the “integrated” Philadelphia church he attended. Blacks were to remain in the balconies of the church, while whites could sit on the main floor. Enraged by this lack of true Christian spirit and a lack of being treated as an equal child of God, he decided to test this point by sitting on the main floor, but he was dragged from the church for this breach of conduct. By 1794, he formed the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which expanded and provided an example for others. In 1830 he led the first African-American convention, which was dedicated to anti-slavery. Later, freedom-seeking Africans arriving in Canada, especially in Ontario, would form AME churches that were familiar to them after their religious experiences during captivity.
For some American communities, blacks were only allowed to congregate for religious purposes, so many black community leaders were people who had received some religious instruction or were people, usually men, who had assumed a role in spiritual guidance. Sometimes a black minister was the only person in an area who could read so that he could read the Bible to others or keep people apprised of developments affecting the black community from his reading of the newspapers. In some parts of Ontario, African-American ministers of the AME convention served as itinerant ministers, having a circuit of several small congregations if a minister was sent