So when we talked about the Civil War, we briefly mentioned Harriet Tubman. And so as a really important figure in the Civil War period, we'll focus on her now and her life story as an illustration of some of the experiences of Black women during this period. So Harriet Tubman is originally named 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 and her mother, Rit, and Rit's children were supposed to according to the will of the last will and testament of their enslaver. But 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 sent away to other homes, right? So Minty had to... care for other children. She's doing weaving, so some sort of domestic work, but then also work in the fields, right, as a field slave, as they were known at the time. And she suffers greatly from measles, right?
So some really hugely impactful moments in her early life. Somewhere between she was like... early teens or preteen 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. And so an overseer, so a man who runs a plantation or a farm and oversees the laborers, the enslaved laborers, the overseer chases the an enslaved man into the store.
And the overseer 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 sleeping spells where she just couldn't wake up.
And we can guess that she probably had epilepsy as a result of this injury. 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 becomes important later because she has these visions. 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 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. And this is where another turning point. 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 you And Harriet is forced to come with them.
So they all three of them had escaped and then they come back to rescue the children. They're caught and are going to be sold again, right? Harriet runs away again, but by herself this time. And you can see in this image on the right, an ad for a reward for helping return these runaway enslaved people for Minty and her two brothers, right?
And so this was a very common thing. Even President Washington 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 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 the 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 fugitives to slavery. So you're in the North, you're in Philadelphia, you're in New York, 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. 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 this involves very small children, a six-year-old and a newborn, right? So this is very difficult. You can imagine traveling in these conditions with this fear with a newborn child, right?
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 you? 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 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 avoiding roads, moving through swamps, crossing rivers, moving in the dark.
It was very physically dangerous also because of the slave catchers, right? So these are people who made it their job to return fugitives to slavery. 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 babies basically opium so an opiate that would make sure they kept 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 she finds out by 1857 that her own parents are in danger she knows that her father who was free had bought you 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 the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, right? And this became her codename to keep her identity safe, right? As she becomes more and more famous and infamous among enslavers.
So she becomes a really important abolitionist. She is the 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 are less sympathetic to slavery, excuse me, to join in this effort, right? So Tubman becomes a recruiter for him and raises money for him. John Brown eventually leads this famous raid on the Harper's Ferry, Virginia. a 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, 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 she's very famous as this 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 sent to spy on the Confederacy in South Carolina. And she can't really start this work immediately.
Once she gets there, she has to. get people to trust her and fit in with the society there. And so she takes over this commission that distributes assistance to soldiers, Confederate soldiers. And she works with the U.S. 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 escape 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. So in Beaufort, I misspoke earlier, she's helping the U.S. Army soldiers, not the Confederate soldiers.
So she's infiltrating the South at this point as a spy. She actually goes and recruits free Black men to scout the Combahee River, which is nearby where she was located in South Carolina. And she learns that the river is loaded with mines, Confederate mines.
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 mines are as well, because they have this local knowledge. And so she sails up the river. This is in 1863, knowing where the mines are and avoiding them, right?
And she leads 300 men to the Confederates, the Confederate military in that area, who flee. They're the... The Combahee River Raid volunteers from South Carolina, from the U.S.
Army that she's leading, burn plantations, flooding rice fields. 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 previously enslaved Black woman, right? So this is huge. This is very exceptional, right? And so after this, this Combahee River raid, she goes back to nursing.
in Beaufort. And then she's on a furlough. 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 hospital's there. And she does that. And she's lobbying for better care for Black soldiers who we know were dying 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 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? 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 that beautiful photograph of them here. 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 turned to women's suffrage, fights for... women's right to vote. 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. She finally gets a widow's pension, so not her own pension, but 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. 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...
retirees for 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 U.S. Army in their efforts. She's nursing. She's working as a spy against the Confederacy.
And she's working directly as a leader in the Combahee River Raid. And then her later work shows us 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, endearing her home to become an old age home, this is 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, lots of different efforts.
So this is moving into what we'll later call the progressive era of reform work for women. So Harriet Tubman is a beautiful example of all of these efforts.