her relatives in the south. To do this she made contacts with free black and white abolitionists. Because they could read newspapers describing events or pending slave auction, and because they could write coded letters to individuals that Harriet identified, or to other abolitionists in the south, or through word of mouth, Harriet was able to keep tabs on her family. This is how Harriet was able to learn that her niece (some reports refer to her as a sister) was near Baltimore.
Harriet devised a plan to rescue her niece, Mary Ann Bowley. She asked someone to write a letter to Mary Ann’s husband, John Bowley, a free man. Harriet advised him that she would conduct Mary Ann to Philadelphia if he could get her to Baltimore. In December 1850, the rescue plan was almost thwarted by the sudden intent of Mary Ann’s master to sell her at an auction in Cambridge. Harriet quickly developed an alternative plan that involved hiding Mary Ann in Cambridge even while the bidding was taking place on her and later spiriting her out of the area to freedom in a six-horse wagon. Harriet’s first rescue was successful. Mary Ann was later reunited with her husband and children in Chatham, Ontario.
Harriet may have borrowed passports, called “freedoms,” from the free black residents of Philadelphia to assist her with Mary Ann’s rescue and other rescues. A freedom was like a passport that free blacks were required to carry at all times that verified their freedom to anyone who demanded to know their status. She may have identified government workers who were willing to look the other way and allow rescues to occur or who would accept bribes for their silence. Harriet extended her connection to William Still, who would have been able to assist her. William Still was the executive director of the General Vigilance Committee.
Clearly, Harriet’s desire to see her family free, her knowledge of who could help her and how, and her success in freeing Mary Ann, likely with the assistance of her brothers, prompted her to attempt another rescue. But with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Harriet said, “After that, I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam wid my people no longer, but I brought ’em all clar off to Canada.”
This time Harriet targeted her brother John Ross and his sons, Harriet’s nephews, who were in Talbot County, north of Dorchester County. John started out with two other slaves, but he had to leave his sons behind because they could not be isolated from their owner. Because John Bowley had authentic free-freedom papers, it was decided that he should return for John Ross’s sons. Bowley was able to kidnap the boys in 1851 and send them back to their self-emancipated father with the assistance of Harriet’s planning and contacts.
The third rescue that Harriet attempted was to bring her husband, John Tubman, to Philadelphia to join her in the home that she had made for them. Even though Tubman had not been supportive of Harriet’s dream of also being free, and even though he told her master that she had run away, Harriet still loved him. She was bitterly disappointed to find that he had taken another wife, Caroline, and was hurt when they laughed at her suggestion that she could conduct them north. Because of John’s rejection, she became even more determined to find happiness in helping others. She also had a large family that needed to be freed. She decided that she would not be content until all of her people in bondage were free.
Harriet found ten slaves who were interested in fleeing north and she conducted them on to freedom. So, in the fall of 1851, Harriet began her third rescue. Her experience and advice prompted her to start out from the south on a Friday, or, more commonly, Saturday night. Slaves did not have as stringent a routine on Sundays because their overseers had the day off, so their absence would not be immediately noticed or acted upon. Handbills and newspapers alerting the community that there were runaways could not be printed until Monday at the earliest because Christian printers closed their businesses on Sunday.
Harriet Tubman travelled by night and rested by day to further avoid detection. She was now a seasoned escape artist and motivator for freedom seekers. However dedicated to freedom Harriet may have been, there were times when “passengers” on her train doubted her ability to escort them north in safety, and who could believe this short, plain woman with sudden sleeping attacks could successfully get them to freedom? She often tried to motivate and assuage fears through singing songs familiar to her passengers, but when that was not enough she was known to pull out her lethal sharpened clam shells and threaten, “Live north or die here!” Harriet Tubman later said of a passenger who wanted to return to his plantation after joining Harriet’s rescue party, “If he was weak enough to give out, he’d be weak enough to betray us all, and all who had helped us, and do you think I’d let so many die just for one coward man?”
Harriet was the primary conductor on her freedom train, and she took her responsibility seriously.
6
Arriving in Canada
By 1850 the more powerful Fugitive Slave Act had been passed in the United States. It stipulated that any black person could be arrested as a suspected runaway slave if a white person accused them anywhere in the United States, and the charged black person could not testify on their own behalf or be represented by a lawyer. In other words, now there was no safe place in the United States for those who had been free because they had been manumitted or self-emancipated. In the eyes of the law, if you were black, you were likely an escaping slave who ought to be captured. If you had achieved some measure of wealth through hard work, your business, home, or assets might seem attractive to someone who would then accuse you of being an escaped slave. It also stated that any person aiding a runaway slave could be fined $1,000 or face six months in jail. To make matters worse, the special commissioners who chaired the hearings were paid on the basis of their verdicts. They received twice the amount of money for every black person they sent back to the south and perpetual slavery than for the ones who were freed. It was therefore more profitable for them to return someone to slavery. This made Canada seem to be the only viable refuge for American blacks because the legal and social system which had provided some measure of support for free black people now clearly was being used against them.
Harriet’s Escape Routes
A
This was probably Harriet’s favourite route: from Polar Neck in Caroline County to Denton and then into Delaware; from there up to Wilmington, home of Harriet’s friend, the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Garrett, and from there across the Pennsylvania state line to Philadelphia.
B
The daring route of James and Kessiah Bowley and their children, from the courthouse steps in Cambridge and into the Choptank River on a small boat, in which they rowed their way into the Chesapeake and up to Baltimore, where Harriet awaited their arrival in order to whisk them on to Philadelphia. Afterward they made their way across New York State and into Canada.
C
The route from Cambridge to Polar Neck, which Harriet used when facilitating rescues from Bucktown and other Dorchester communities.
D
From Philadelphia, Harriet travelled through the Delaware Canal and down the Chesapeake to Baltimore, where she gathered up Tilly. The two women then went by steamboat even farther south, beyond Cambridge to the southern Dorchester County line, where, after passing through the Hooper Strait, they steamed up the Nanticoke River to Seaford, Delaware, then took a land route north to Wilmington, and, finally, Philadelphia.
Many incidents of racial intolerance and riots also occurred during this period in the northern States as the competition for manual labour or any wage labour became more competitive since immigration from Europe was increasing. Harriet, her passengers, and her family were at terrible risk.
