Who was Harriet Tubman? To John Brown, the leader of the Harpers Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For those slaves whom she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slavers who hunted her down, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists she was a prophet. As Catherine Clinton shows in this riveting biography, Harriet Tubman was, above all, a singular and complex woman, defeating simple categories. Illiterate but deeply religious, Harriet Tubman was raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1820s, not far from where Frederick Douglass was born. As an adolescent, she incurred a severe head injury when she stepped between a lead weight thrown by an irate master and the slave it was meant for. She recovered but suffered from visions and debilitating episodes for the rest of her life. While still in her early twenties she left her family and her husband, a free black, to make the journey north alone. Yet within a year of her arrival in Philadelphia, she found herself drawn back south, first to save family members slated for the auction block, then others. Soon she became one of the most infamous enemies of slaveholders. She established herself as the first and only woman, the only black, and one of the few fugitive slaves to work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Tubman made over a dozen trips south in raids that were so brazen and so successful that a steep price was offered as a bounty on her head. When the Civil War broke out, she became the only woman to officially lead men into battle, acting as a scout and a spy while serving with the Union Army in South Carolina. Long overdue, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom is the first major biography of this pivotal character in American history, written by an acclaimed historian of the antebellum and Civil War eras. With impeccable scholarship drawing on newly available sources and research into the daily lives of the slaves in the border states, Catherine Clinton brings Harriet Tubman to life as one of the most important and enduring figures in American history.
Reviews with the most likes.
Catherine Clinton had to don her detective gear to put together this biography. What do you do when the figure you are writing about has very few records extant? Enslaved people are often without official documentation of their dates of birth, family circumstances, marriages and relationships. Active participants in the Underground Railroad needed to not keep records, for obvious reasons. A Black woman acting as an “official” spy or nurse for the young United States is not going to have records kept of each spy mission. So the author had to do what she could with records that exist, and extrapolate or postulate about the rest. I do not begrudge her doing so. She did say “Harriet Tubman felt this way...” but instead “Harriet Tubman may have felt this way...” which is valid and nothing more than we as readers would do when given an ambiguous circumstance.
On the other hand, the author did fill in a great deal of the important context of Harriet Tubman's environment. Information about contemporaries and allies such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Seward, and John Brown bring useful insights into the challenges and disparate approaches to battling slavery.
She also pointed out controversies, challenges, and alternate points of view about many things. For example pointing out the dialect used on a plaque in Auburn, New York as problematic and undermining of the stature of such a heroic woman and an example of white-dominant culture's condescending view of an “illiterate fugitive slave.”
Throughout it all, Harriet Tubman's courage and faith shine through and is inspiring. Her sense of purpose, single-minded focus on justice, ingenuity, grace under pressure, and the circles within which she socialized belie any humble beginning as an unlettered enslaved woman. I have a better appreciation of her as a giant among heroes and found the book very enjoyable.
