oh, farewell!
But I’ll meet you in the mornin’,
Farewell! oh, farewell
I’ll meet you in the mornin’,
When you reach de promised land;
On the oder side of Jordan,
For I’m boun’ for de promised land.”
Mary Ann understood that Harriet was running, but as a worker being watched by the mistress in the big house she did not show any sign that she knew Harriet was leaving. As soon as she was able, Mary Ann alerted Harriet’s parents and brothers and sisters. John Tubman would have found out later because he lived off the plantation. Even married slaves, like Harriet, had to return to their master’s plantation during the night after being hired out all day — marriage meant that “spare” time (i.e. Saturday nights and Sundays, unless the master had other plans for your time) might be shared between husband and wife. When John did suspect Harriet had left, he advised her mistress of Harriet’s interest in finding freedom in the north.
Harriet may have carried a homemade quilt admired by a Quaker woman that she had chanced to meet on an errand for Brodess. This woman promised Harriet that if she ever needed help to contact her. Whether or not Harriet had such a quilt is immaterial — there were many Quakers in the area where Harriet found herself and they were as a group, by that time, resisting slavery. Harriet found this woman early in the days after her escape and traded the quilt for a piece of paper with two names on it, probably the names of other Quakers living further north. Harriet had been told to sweep the yard until her contact’s husband came home in the evening to avoid arousing the neighbours’ suspicions.
Both the Quaker couple and Harriet had put themselves at risk. Since slaves were considered property, running away was viewed as stealing valuable property from the owner. A slave in search of their freedom was committing a felony, stealing his or her desired labour and those who helped were assisting in theft. If caught, a slave could be maimed, disfigured, or killed as an example to others; those who helped could be harassed, isolated, fined or jailed and infrequently, severely beaten or killed. Running away was not the sort of thing that black women usually did to resist slavery. It tended to be a man’s form of resistance. Because of the stake that women had in the care of their children, or because they were working so closely supervised in the master’s house, the absence of enslaved women would be noticed quickly. To rebel against their enslavement, enslaved women might poison food, injure livestock, pretend to be ill, or even harm the children of the master. They resisted slavery utilizing the tools and opportunities that were possible in their situations.
Running away required knowledge of where to go, physical stamina, and outdoor survival skills that women slaves may not have developed. This made Harriet Tubman seem an unlikely figure to run since she was only 5 feet tall, she seemed to be unintelligent, she had sudden sleeping attacks, and she was a woman. But her physical condition, aside from her sleeping seizures, was good; she was a very strong individual. Her experiences working in the fields had equipped her with a knowledge of nature, a knowledge of survival skills, and the idea that she might succeed. Her strong religious convictions made her feel, like Joan of Arc, that she had God’s support for her plans.
Many members of the Society of Friends, the Quakers, lived in the Dorchester County area, and though they had held slaves previously, they had decided as a religious order not to hold slaves by 1776; they were among the early opponents of slavery. Later, the Methodists and the Baptists would free their slaves through manumission. The Underground Railroad was fully operational by the time Harriet got on board. When the Quaker husband got home, he drove Harriet, in a covered wagon, to the outskirts of another town. From there Harriet travelled on her own, following the Choptank River west to the Chesapeake, which ran north to Baltimore, then Delaware and finally freedom in Philadelphia!
Harriet Tubman may have heard from other slaves about which direction to travel, and she may have gotten a ride away from Bucktown, but she had to rely on her own courage and initiative to leave the plantation and her own wits and cunning to avoid recapture. She travelled by night and hid by day. She could not read or write so she had to determine which direction she was travelling by the North Star or by the moss growing on the north side of trees. She avoided obvious routes such as well travelled roads and tended to travel through swamps and rivers since running water, as she phrased it, “never tells no tales.”
Harriet was very intuitive. She had strong spiritual/religious convictions, and she always felt a divine presence that assisted her in anticipating danger, knowing whom she could approach for food and shelter, and in finding strength to continue despite feeling discouraged, hungry, tired, cold, and wet. She later said:
… there are two things I had a right to — liberty or death; If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty so long as my strength lasted and when the time comes for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.
Harriet would have been able to find many who would help her in the Camden, Maryland, area since it was the centre of Quaker abolitionist activity and there were many free black “conductors” to assist people along the Christiana River into Wilmington, Delaware. The Mason-Dixon Line, which separated the ideologies and geography of “north” and “south,” was just a short distance from Wilmington. Once over the “line” it was possible to meet with abolitionists who might provide assistance in reaching Philadelphia. When Harriet had finally crossed over the line, the political boundary that separated slave-holding state from free state, she was awestruck.
I looked at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory ober everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees, and ober the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
Philadelphia was a booming metropolis in the 1850s and was the centre of progressive social thought and social action. It was the capital of the United States and had the largest population of free blacks in the Union. While Harriet did not purchase or rent her own home, she did live with friends. The centre of the black community of Philadelphia included Pine, South, 6th (now known as Richard Allen), 7th, and Lombard Streets. It was likely within this area that Harriet met William Still, a staunch black abolitionist. By the 1850s Still was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society who aided “fugitive slaves” and freedom seekers to travel further north. So dedicated was he that he took the time to record as many details as he could about each of the possible sixty persons a month that passed through his hands in Philadelphia. In addition to their names and freedom names, he was interested in their biographies, their escape story, and their potential destination. He realized that his records, which he was forced to keep hidden, might assist in the next phase of freedom seeking: family reunification. His own family had been separated by the bid for freedom taken by his parents, two of his own brothers had to be left behind and were later sold into the deep south, so through his own knowledge of the distress, he proactively kept the practice up. The impact of his activity is startling. First, among the many persons he interviewed, he realized one day that he was speaking to his own long-lost brother Peter Still. Secondly, after years of burying his material to secure and hide it, he subsequently had it published, adding to our knowledge of the many whose stories were captured in his book, The Underground Railroad.
The area of Philadelphia that Harriet arrived in was, and still is, home to Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on the oldest plot of land continuously owned by African Americans in the United States. Harriet Tubman is known to have worshipped at Mother Bethel AME. The first church structure was actually a blacksmith’s establishment which was pulled by free black people to the corner of 6th and Lombard. This was followed by another structure, and a third building — Harriet’s church — before the fourth and final place of worship, which now exists. The tomb of its founder, Reverend Richard Allen, forms part of the museum
