| Araminta (Ross) Tubman is a part of US Black history. Join: US Black Heritage Project Discuss: black_heritage |
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Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in the history of U.S. civil rights. Harriet was a renowned abolitionist, and a conductor of the famed Underground Railroad.[1]
Harriet Tubman, born as Araminta "Minty" Ross, was born into slavery around 1822 on Anthony Thompson's plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland.She was the fifth of nine children of Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Greene[2][3][4] Her parents had married around 1808 after their respective enslavers had married, bringing them into the same household. At the time her father was enslaved by Thompson and her mother was enslaved by Mary (Pattison) Brodess. Around 1810, Mary had passed away, leaving Rit and her children enslaved by Mary's minor son, Edward Brodess but under Anthony Thompson's guardianship. This allowed the family to stay together for a while. However, around the time of Harriet's birth, Edward reached adulthood and moved Rit and many of her children to a nearby property, separating them from Harriet's father. Brodess began to hire out Rit and her children, including Harriet, and they were often treated very harshly.[3][5] At one point, Harriet was struck in the head with a heavy weight or stone and the affects of this injury, including headaches and seizures, plagued her for the rest of her life.[6][7] Eventually, several of Harriet's sisters were sold.[8]
Harriet Tubman around 1868. |
Around 1836, Anthony Thompson, Harriet's father's enslaver, died. This ushered in a new phase in the life of the family. Thompson's will provided for Ben Ross, Harriet's father, to be freed around 1840 and left him 10 acres of land.[9] Ben seems able to have paid Brodess to allow Harriet's mother Rit and some of the children to live with him on this land.[10] Around 1844, Harriet married a local free Black man, John Tubman. Around the time of her marriage, she began using the name Harriet instead of her childhood name Araminta, or "Minty" for short.[11] In 1849, Edward Brodess died and his wife Eliza began selling a number of enslaved persons to pay off his debts and provide for herself and her children. Several of Harriet's nieces were sold. In September 1849, Harriet and several of her brothers first tried to escape in order to avoid being sold. Harriet's brothers eventually decided to return and took Harriet with them. But Harriet would not stay for long.[12]
Soon after, likely in 1849, Harriet escaped enslavement,[3] and went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She worked there, saving her money and repeatedly returning to Maryland to rescue others from slavery. The actual number of trips and people she led to freedom is unknown, but it's believed that she made about thirteen trips over an eleven-year period, leading about 70 to 80 people[13] to safety in the free northern U.S. states, as well as Canada.[14][15] After Harriet escaped slavery, her first husband John Tubman remarried to another woman, sometime before 1851.[13] After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, Harriet lived in St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada for roughly 8 years and brought many of the people she helped escape slavery to St. Catharines. This included her parents and several siblings.[3][16]
During the American Civil War, Harriet served with the Union Army in various roles: a scout, nurse, cook, and spy.[17][18] On 1 and 2 June 1863, she led the raid on the Combahee River Ferry which rescued more than 750 former enslaved people.[19][20] After the war, she eventually received a pension for serving as a nurse in the U.S. Army,[21] and also as the widow of Union veteran Nelson Davis.[22]
Around the time of the Civil War, Harriet moved to Fleming, New York, right outside of Auburn. She purchased a home on seven acres of land there from Sen. William Henry Seward.[15] Around 1869, she married Nelson Charles Davis, a Union Civil War veteran who Harriet met when he became a boarder at her home. They later adopted a daughter, Gertie Davis.[3][23][24][25] Her second husband died in 1888.
In her later life, Harriet continued to live in her home outside of Auburn. Her parents and other relatives lived with her at various points in her life. She later used her property as a home for indigent African Americans.[15][26]
Harriet Tubman died in her nineties on March 10th, 1913. Her funeral, which was attended by "hundreds of admirers," was held at Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church.[27][28] She was buried next to her brother at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York,[3][29] with military honors. A three-foot granite gravestone with her name, Harriet Tubman Davis, marks the place she rests.[28]
Harriet Tubman, about 1911. |
Harriet Tubman
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Archaeologist Julie Schablitsky found the coin with her metal detector along an old, abandoned road in an isolated area of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She dug it out of the ground and scraped off the mud.
She hadn’t been finding much as she and her team probed the swampy terrain of Dorchester County last fall searching for the lost site where the famous Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman lived with her family in the early 1800s.
She’d been frustrated that there had been no hint that she was anywhere near the home of Tubman’s father, Ben Ross. But as she cleaned the coin, the profile of a woman with flowing hair, and wearing a cap that said, “Liberty,” emerged. At the bottom was the date: 1808.
Tuesday morning state and federal officials announced that Schablitsky, guided in part by the coin, believes she has found the site where Tubman lived with her parents and several siblings during formative teenage years before she escaped enslavement.
It was the spot, experts said, where a long-vanished cabin stood, which had served for a time as Tubman’s family home. The structure, of unknown form, was owned by her father. A timber foreman and lumberjack who had been enslaved, he had been given his freedom, the house where he lived, and a piece of land near the Blackwater River by his enslaver.
Officials said bricks, datable pieces of 19th-century pottery, a button, a drawer pull, a pipe stem, old records, and the location all pointed to the spot being the likely site of the Ben Ross cabin.
The announcement was made at 10 a.m. at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center, in Church Creek, Md.
The find is a crucial piece of Tubman’s story, experts said. And it illuminates the role that her father, and her family, played in her development into the fearless Underground Railroad conductor that she became.
The Underground Railroad was the clandestine network of guides, like Tubman, and safe houses mostly across the eastern United States that rescued thousands of enslaved people from bondage in the South in the years before the Civil War.
Between about 1850 and 1860, using stealth and disguise, Tubman made 13 trips home, spiriting 70 people out of enslavement, historians believe. Among those she saved were several brothers and her parents, who, while no longer enslaved, were still in danger in Maryland.
Her father was a devout patriarch who taught Tubman the ways of the marshy woodlands where they lived and struggled to keep his family together within the machinery of slavery, experts said.
Once free, Ben purchased his enslaved wife, Rit, and for a time sheltered Tubman and several of her siblings, all still enslaved, in his cabin in what is now the federal Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, south of Cambridge, Md.
“Think of it as a place where [Harriet] came of age in a loving household within a close knit community,” Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson said in an email.
“That landscape became her classroom,” Larson said. “Those years she lived with her father were absolutely crucial to the development of Harriet Tubman.”
Schablitsky, an archaeologist with Maryland’s State Highway Administration, said: “A lot of us think we know everything … about Harriet Tubman. This discovery tells us that we don’t, and that we have the opportunity to … understand her not just as an older woman who brought people to freedom, but … what her younger years were like.”
The project began last year when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought for $6 million a 2,600-acre tract adjacent to Blackwater to replace refuge areas lost to rising sea levels elsewhere, said refuge manager Marcia Pradines.
Pradines said she had heard that the Ben Ross cabin might have existed in the tract, and contacted Maryland experts to see if an archaeologist wanted to investigate. Schablitsky said she was interested.
But she recognized the challenge: How to narrow down where to look and how to tell if a site might be Ross’s.
Old records provided a rough starting point. Last fall Schablitsky and her team went to the area and dug over 1,000 test pits. She had been afraid that numerous unrelated artifacts would turn up. But as they dug, nothing turned up.
“We were coming up basically empty-handed,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Where is this place? Where is this place?’
In desperation, she started walking an old road with a metal detector. A knife sheath turned up, and a shotgun shell, and then something else.
“I dug it out of the ground thinking I was going to get, like, a shotgun shell,” she said.
It was the coin. “When I looked at the date, I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It was totally a eureka moment.”
The coin was found about a quarter-mile from where the cabin would eventually be located, she said. But it “told us that we were on the right path, that we were getting closer.”
A few other artifacts were found at the end of the dig and the team decided to return this March for a more thorough examination.
Last month, as they dug further, more artifacts began to appear — chunks of brick, rusty nails, bits of ceramics with designs patterns that could be dated, she said. Many patterns dated to the “1820s, 1830s, 1840s time period,” she said.
“That’s when we had our … moment,” she said. “That’s when we knew that this is it. Because it couldn’t be anywhere else. There was nothing else … that dated to that time period.”
The combination of records, location and artifacts finally added up, she said. “It’s not just one artifact that tells us we have something. It’s the assemblage. It’s the multiple pieces.” Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross about 1822 outside the hamlet of Tobacco Stick, modern-day Madison, in Dorchester County, according to Kate Clifford Larson’s biography, “Bound for the Promised Land.”
One of nine children, she slept in a cradle made of a hollowed-out sweetgum log, and was hired out to work by the time she was 6. Her parents, who were enslaved at the time, had been married about 1808, the year the coin was dated.
As a child, Tubman was beaten by a mistress who slept with a whip under her pillow, so she began to work outdoors.
There, in part under the tutelage of her father, she checked muskrat traps, broke flax and hauled logs with a team of oxen she was later permitted to purchase.
She was only 5 feet tall, but her work made her strong.
Her know-how gave her some freedom of movement and she was able to live in her father’s cabin roughly between 1839 and 1844, when she was ages 17 to 22, Larson said.
“She got to live with him, worked in the woods with him,” Larson said in an interview.
“He was an amazing figure, and a committed father,” she said. “He taught her how to survive. … She learned how to survive in those woods. She learned how to read the night sky. … He taught her things that helped her become the woman she was.”
He also told her about the Underground Railroad. “He was an Underground Railroad agent himself,” Larson said. In 1844, she married John Tubman. She moved out, changed her first name to Harriet, and became Harriet Tubman. In the fall of 1849, fearing that she was about to be sold, she fled, later returning to conduct others on the secret railway.
Over Christmas in 1854, she came back to rescue two of her brothers and some others. The meeting place was outside a home in Caroline County, Md., where her parents had moved a few years earlier.
The siblings couldn’t tell their mother, Rit, for fear she would create an “uproar,” Larson recounted.
But they did tell Ben, who brought them food. Ben made sure not to look at his children, so he could later tell slave catchers he had not “seen” them.
On Christmas night, he had himself blindfolded with a handkerchief. And with a son on each arm, he walked with his children on the start of their journey, Larson reported. After a few miles, he stopped and said goodbye. He stood in the dark until he couldn’t hear their footsteps.
Three years later, Harriet came back for her parents.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/02/08/harriet-tubman-spy-civil-war-union/
Thanks
Meltzer, Brad, Heroes for my son, pgs 26-27, Harper Collins Publishing
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