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It is a bye-week for the regular podcast, but this is a bonus from the newsletter On This Day in Women’s History. If you sign up for it on Patreon or on Substack, every Monday you will get a small story about what historical women did on that day. If today were Monday, it might say something like this:
In September of 1849, an enslaved woman named Harriet Tubman received bad news. Her enslaver had died. I’m assuming this was no great cause of personal grief to Harriet, except that a change in ownership was always frightening. Things might be different, and not necessarily for the better. Harriet was now legally the property of the dead man’s widow. Like many widows, this woman found herself in tight financial circumstances. She needed ready cash, and one easy way to raise it was to sell someone south. That someone might be Harriet. On September 17, 1849, Harriet decided it was time to run.
Harriet’s break for freedom was helped along by the practice of hiring out. It sometimes happened that a slaveowner held more human chattel that he or she personally needed. If so, the enslaved person could be “rented” by someone else. In Harriet’s case, it went even further. Harriet was in charge of finding jobs for herself and collecting the payment. She paid a regular fee to her enslaver, but otherwise she was free to keep the rest, however small it might be.
In practical terms, this meant that no one had too close an eye on her. She had a window of time in which every one of the people who might raise the alarm could reasonably assume that she was appropriately and obediently working elsewhere.
That is why it was not until two weeks later that an ad appeared, looking for Harriet (known as Minty at the time) and the two younger brothers she took with her. The ad described Minty as about 27 years, of a chestnut color, fine looking, and about 5 feet high. It offered a $100 reward if she was taken out of state and $50 if taken in Maryland (Larsen, 78).
Even so, the first escape attempt failed. Her brothers were scared and worried about leaving their families.
But in October, Harriet tried again, this time on her own. She made it to a safe house, and a Quaker man loaded his wagon, with her in the bottom, and drove her to the next safe house. With the help of the Underground Railroad, and the guidance of the North Star, she eventually crossed the Pennsylvania border.
“When I found I had crossed that line,” she later said, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven” (Lawson, 84).
Later on, Harriet would return across that line in the other direction many, many times. She was coming back, putting herself at risk, to help her family and others follow her lead into the free North. Many of them she led up into Canada because after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even the free North wasn’t very free. Her code name during all of this was Moses, after the Moses of the Bible who led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.
That is why the spiritual “Go Down Moses” is sometimes thought to be about her or even by her. There’s no hard evidence of that, unfortunately, but if you’d like to hear it anyway, press play above. It’s the last few minutes of the audio version.
My major source for today is a book by Kate Clifford Lawson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. If you’d like to hear more about Harriet Tubman’s story, check out episode 4.10 on her. If you would like to hear what happened to other women on other days in history, please sign up for the newsletter on Patreon or on Substack. The basic newsletter is free. But if you can spring for the paid version, you get far more and the satisfaction of knowing that you, like powerful women throughout history, are supporting scholarship and the arts. Plus, I really appreciate you.