okay so when we talked about the Civil War we briefly mentioned Harriet Tubman um and so as a really important figure in the Civil War period will focus on her now and her life story um as an illustration of some of the experiences of black women during this period so Harriet Tubman is originally named aramenti araminta or minty Ross and she was born into slavery so again her parents are enslaved therefore she is her mother is enslaved therefore she is enslaved at Birth eventually her parents are freed um and her mother writ and Ritz children were supposed to be freed according to the will of the will it last will and testament of their enslaver um but the the the descendants of that man refused to do that right so they are separated so this is a very common experience for black families under slavery the children are set away to other other homes right um so minty had to care for other children she's doing weaving so sort of domestic work but then also um work in the fields right as a as a fields field slave as they were known at the time and she um suffers greatly from ill from measles right so some really hugely impactful moments in her early life some somewhere between she was like early teens or pre-teen to teens she has this moment this turning point in her life where she is sent to a store to go pick up some items um and so an overseer so a man who runs a plantation or a farm and oversees the laborers the enslaved laborers the overseer chases an enslaved man into the store and he the overseers Tells minty to help him capture the man and she refuses and the man is escaping the overseer throws a two pound weight at the man and it accidentally hits minty in the head instead and she fractures her skull and she had through the rest of her life seizures and headaches and and sleeping spells where she just couldn't wake up and we can we can guess that she probably had epilepsy as a result of this injury um and she also had dreams and visions and we could interpret those as being part of her medical issues from this head injury so this is becomes important later because she has these Visions um she meets John Tubman who's a free black man and they marry and she decides to change her name and take her mother's first name Harriet and so that is where we know her as Harriet Tubman and she you can get a sense that she had some sense of Freedom at this point she can take on additional jobs to earn money and is able to hire a lawyer to find out whether her mother was ever freed or what had happened to her mother so somewhat unusual among enslaved people the man who had enslaved her dies in 1849 uh and this is um where another turning point right so her relatives are being sold away right so again families being separated um uh her brothers run away before Harriet can be sold so one of her brothers Ben leaves behind two children and so they decide to come back and get the children and um Harriet is forced to come with them so they all three of them had escaped and then they come back to rescue the children um they're caught and are going to be sold again right um Harriet runs away again but by herself this time and you can see in this image on the right uh and a runaway and an ad for uh uh reward for helping return these runaway enslaved people for minty and her two brothers right um so this was a very common thing even President Washington uh put ads in the paper like this for escaped slaves so Harriet runs away alone and we don't know a whole lot about what happened at this point but she is helped by a woman who briefly gives her shelter and um has her husband transport her in a wagon to the next safe house or station on the Underground Railroad so this is her first experience with this Underground Railroad and she eventually arrives in Philadelphia Pennsylvania where slavery had been abolished so she is physically moving out of this states where slavery is legal but then the next year in 1850 Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act which requires all U.S citizens all Americans to help return fugitive fugitives to slavery so you're in the north you're in Philadelphia you're in New York any all these northern states and you know that there is a person who has escaped slavery you are required by law to help anyone who comes to get that person back you're required to help them even if you don't agree with slavery even if in your state slavery is abolished this is required by the federal government so now Harriet is back in danger right Philadelphia is not necessarily a safe place and so this is the moment that we know a lot about Harriet Tubman from that she comes back she returns to rescue her family and friends um so now this is the second time she's returned right she hears that her niece and her niece's children are going to be sold and so she sort of hatches this plan with her brother-in-law and her niece's free husband to rescue them and there this involves very small children a six-year-old and a newborn right so this is very difficult um you can imagine traveling in these conditions with this fear with a newborn child right um but they succeed Tubman is able to bring them to Baltimore Maryland and then eventually Philadelphia in 1851 she goes back and does the same for her other brother Moses and two other men and then later in 1851 she returns to Maryland to get her husband who sad to say had remarried and did not want to be with her anymore and leave with her so she comes back again and saves or helps free 11 enslaved men and women right and this time she goes all the way to Canada because the free the Fugitive Slave Act has forced this that this is the only way that formerly enslaved people self-emancipated people could truly be free is to get out of the country entirely right so the Underground Railroad is helping with this at that point so by 1854 Tubman has rescued nearly 30 people including her three brothers and she's really I mean this is unbelievably Brave right it is extremely physically dangerous not only because it required um avoiding roads moving through swamps crossing rivers moving in the dark it was very um physically dangerous also because of the slave catchers right so these are people who made it their job to return um fugitive fugitives to slavery um it's it's unusual for infants and small children to be involved in these Escape efforts but Tubman did this right she wasn't about to separate mothers from their babies and fathers from their babies so she would give the the babies basically opium so an opiate that would make sure they kept us asleep and not make noise because you know babies cry right and you can't force them to stop or explain to them that they need to stop so she would help them by drugging them um she finds out by 1857 that her own parents are in danger she knows that her father who was free had bought his wife's freedom but people were suspecting he was involved in these escapes by fugitives and at this point her parents are in their 70s right so she helps them Escape and we know that she helped at least 70 people about 70 people the vast majority of her immediate family and then many many others and so she became known as Moses in reference to the biblical story of Moses leading his the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land right and this became her code name to keep her identity safe right and she becomes more and more famous and Infamous among enslavers so she becomes a really important abolitionist right she is this symbol but also actively freeing people and organizing networks of people to support this and she becomes friends with John Brown who's a white man and really the most radical abolitionist of this era John Brown advocated overthrowing slavery by any means including violence and he really wanted to invade the South and convince the South to the people who were less sympathetic to slavery excuse me to join in this effort right so Tubman becomes a recruiter for him and raises money for him um John Brown eventually uh uh leads this famous raid on the Harpers Ferry Virginia um uh Armory the military the government Armory Tubman is not directly involved in this she's not present at this event but he along with a group of black men um invade this Armory in order to arm black people for an Insurrection and it fails many people die and John Brown is captured and tried and executed for this and this is one of the things that really Spurs the Civil War this happens in 1859 so very close to the beginning of the Civil War and Harriet Tubman is directly involved in these sort of radical violent efforts to abolish slavery one of the most fascinating aspects of Tubman's history is her work as a spy so we she's very famous as this uh person who goes on the Underground Railroad and frees other enslaved people but she was actually a spy for the US Army she's recruited by someone who also was involved with John Brown and was set to spy on the Confederacy in South Carolina and she is you can't really start this work immediately once she gets there she has to get people to trust her and fit in with this Society there and so she she takes over this commission that distributes um assistance to soldiers Confederate soldiers um uh and she works with the US Army Physicians because she knows quite a bit about illness and is doing nursing work and she's getting information from black men who are freed by the army or who escaped to the Army and so she's learning about Confederate locations and what their supply situations are like and various strategic intelligence and she passes this on to the Army and she even begins scouting so she dresses as a field worker and goes into Confederate territory um so in Beaufort I misspoke earlier she's she's helping the U.S army soldiers not the Confederate soldiers but she's so she's infiltrating the south at this point as a spy and she actually goes and recruits free black men to scout the kambahi river which is nearby where she was located in South Carolina and she learns that the river is loaded with mines Confederate minds and she goes to plantations near there and gets enslaved people to help plan a secret attack and they also can help her know where the minds are as well because they have this local knowledge and so she sails up the river this is in 1863 knowing where the minds are and avoiding them right and she leads 300 men to the Confederates the Confederate military in that area um who flee um they're the the kambahi uh River raid the volunteers from South Carolina from the U.S army that she's leading burn plantations flooding rice fields they're they're trying to make life difficult for the Confederates and most importantly they free 750 people so these local enslaved people flee during this raid and reach these U.S army boats and are taken to Freedom and so this is the first armed military Expedition this maneuver planned and led by an American woman and that was Harriet Tubman a free previously enslaved black woman right so this is huge this is uh very exceptional right and so after this this kambahi River raid she becomes she goes back to nursing in Beaufort and then she's on a furlough she get she's able to take a break and go back to Philadelphia and nurses there and the Sanitary Commission ask her to help them in Virginia and the hospitals there and she does that and she's lobbying for better care for black soldiers who we know were dying at about two and a half times the rate of white soldiers so their care is inferior and again this is basic Medical Care and Disease Control is poorer for black soldiers so she's working to fix that situation so she returns to New York after the war so the war Civil War is Over slavery is abolished but she is in the section of the train for veterans of the war and she refuses to give up her seat you know she's a veteran of the war right she served the U.S military not just as a nurse but as a spy and as a leader of a raid right the conductor and other men force her out of that seat and break some of her bones in the process so this is very a violent thing right she so this gives you a picture of the issues about race are not over even though the Civil War is Over black women are still not treated appropriately right so she recovers from these illnesses these injuries and she meets a formerly enslaved man who was a veteran of the U.S army and they get married and they adopt a daughter Gertie and you can see the beautiful photograph of them here um and she was denied a pension for her military service right so they were very poor and her husband dies about gosh what is that maybe less than 20 years after they marry so hardship for her after the war but she didn't stop fighting right she's she turned to women's suffrage fights for women's right to vote um we know that and we'll talk about this another time but there was increasing racism in this women's suffrage movement and so black women created their own organizations and Tubman spoke at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 um she finally gets a Widow's pension so not her own pension but a pension from the government based on her husband having been a veteran finally in 1899 she gets her own service pension for her nursing service so a long long fight the war is over in the 1860s and she doesn't get these pensions until the 1890s 30 years later or more um and she finally as her last Act of service you could say deeded her home her own home in New York to a black church to create an old age home so a home for for retirees for pen old age pensioners and she dies in 1913. so she doesn't live to see women get the right to vote so to sum up Harriet Tubman is hugely important not only for her efforts in leading enslaved people to freedom but really to understand this entire period of the end of slavery and the Civil War right she works in the U.S army and this is another example of her efforts to permanently end slavery she's helping the US Army and their efforts she's nursing she's working as a spy against the Confederacy and she's working directly as a leader in the combahi river raid and then her later work shows us uh also not only her personal continuing work toward equality in all forms but the issues in the women's rights movements that we'll talk about later in the semester you know she really supported women's voting rights But ultimately she had to work separately with black women's groups and also you know we didn't talk a ton about this but in her support for the elderly people indeeding her home to become an old age home this is a another kind of Reform work that women engaged with in the late 19th and early 20th centuries working with how to support the elderly how to support the disabled um lots of different efforts so this is moving into what will later call the progressive era of reform work for women so Harriet Tubman is a beautiful example of all of these efforts