Book Review
Harriet Tubman's fearlessness, intelligence come through in new book

By John C. Walter
Special to The Seattle Times

	GAIL OSKIN / AP American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, known for her courage and activism of behalf of black freedom and dignity, is the subject of a statue in Massachusetts (detail above) and a new book by Kate Clifford Larson.
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People usually think of Harriet Tubman as the woman who brought hundreds of people out of slavery and served as a spy during the Civil War. For Kate Clifford Larson, professor at Simmons College and author of "Bound for the Promised Land," too much myth has been attached to Tubman's life, since "The reality of Harriet Tubman's life is far more compelling than the partly fictionalized biography familiar to school children."

A marvel of impressive scholarship and lucid prose, the book appropriately reads like fiction, for Tubman's exploits required such intelligence, physical stamina and pure fearlessness that only a very few would have even contemplated the feats she actually undertook.

She was born in 1822 in Dorchester County, Md., and named Araminta "Minty" Ross. At age 10, Minty was accidentally hit in the head with an "iron weight" thrown by an enraged master, causing seizures, headaches and intermittent sleepiness all her life. In her old age, after head surgery with no anesthesia, she gained some relief.

At 22, she married John Tubman, a free man, and changed her name to Harriet Tubman. Five years later, however, fearful of being sold farther south, she ran away with her two brothers. Her brothers aborted the journey. But Tubman later struck out on her own, following the north star. With the assistance of Quakers, she reached Pennsylvania.

"Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero" by Kate Clifford Larson Ballantine, $26.95

"There was such a glory over everything," Tubman recalled. "The sun came like gold through the trees ... and I felt like I was in heaven."

Reaching Philadelphia, she was inducted into the Underground Railroad. In her first raid in 1851, Tubman returned to her former plantation to free her niece, Kessiah, and her two children who were to be sold. With Kessiah's runaway-slave husband, Tubman managed in a near-miraculous maneuver to rescue them. From this initial foray, other raids followed, continuing until the Civil War.

Larson concludes Tubman rescued 70 people in 13 trips, which the author reconstructs in vivid detail. None were easy, for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law required that Northerners apprehend runaways and declared assisting runaways a crime.

Tubman's quick wit, iron will and ability to escape pursuers many times saved her. She carried a pistol to make certain that once the journey began, no one would abscond and endanger those that fled. When one man wanted to stop, despite slave catchers closing in, she ordered, "Go on or die." On another occasion, Tubman and her four charges had no choice but to hide in potato holes while slave catchers passed "within a few feet of them." Eventually, she rescued her mother and father, taking them to runaway relatives in Canada, as Pennsylvania was no longer safe.

By 1859, so great was Harriet Tubman's fame that John Brown tried hard (unsuccessfully) to recruit her for his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. That same year, Sen. William Seward, later to be President Lincoln's secretary of state, sold to her, "on very favorable terms," a house on seven acres in Fleming, N.Y. She deeded her home to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to become a home for aged and infirm Negroes (the term used at the time).

During the Civil War, Tubman worked tirelessly for the Union forces as a nurse and spy. Larson credits Tubman as the first woman to successfully lead an armed expedition. After the war, she busied herself with the rising movement of a friend, suffragette Susan B. Anthony, to give women the vote. She married Nelson Davis in 1869.

Tubman's home was always full. She took in all kinds of indigent people, while importuning her friends for money, not for herself but for others. Her fame in England as "the Moses of her people" prompted Queen Victoria to award her a silver medal and invite her to attend the Queen's Diamond Jubilee festivities in 1897. She had no money to go to England, but as late as 1905, at age 83, Tubman still traveled to Boston and Rochester, addressing temperance and suffragette gatherings. By 1910, she was in a wheelchair.

She died peacefully in 1913 in the Harriet Tubman Home, a refuge to indigent Negroes.

Larson captures Tubman's determination and seeming imperviousness to pain and suffering, coupled with an extraordinary selflessness and caring for others. Her last words were, as might be expected: "I go away to prepare for you that where I am you also may be."

Meticulously researched and written, this intriguing book promises to be one of the best of 2004.

John C. Walter is professor of history in the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Washington.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company