SoCallMeQ

Rochester, August 29, 1868

Dear Harriet: I am glad to know that the story of your eventful life has been written by a kind lady, and that the same is soon to be published. You ask for what you do not need when you call upon me for a word of commendation.

I need such words from you far more than you can need them from me, especially where your superior labors and devotion to the cause of the lately enslaved of our land are known as I know them.

The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day - you in the night.

I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, "God bless you," has been your only reward.

The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.

Excepting John Brown - of sacred memory - I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you. It is to me a great pleasure and a great privilege to bear testimony for your character and your works, and to say to those to whom you may come, that I regard you in every way truthful and trustworthy.

Your friend,

Frederick Douglass

•••

Rochester. 29 de agosto, 1868.

Querida Harriet,

Me alegra saber que la historia de tu vida llena de experiencias está siendo escrita por una dama de buen corazón y que esta misma pronto será publicada. Me has escrito para preguntarme qué es lo que no necesitas cuando has venido a mi para darte palabras de elogio.

Yo necesito dichas palabras viniendo de ti, más de las que tú las necesitas viniendo de mi. Especialmente cuando tus labores superiores y tu devoción a la causa de los esclavizados de nuestra tierra son conocidas como yo las conozco.

La diferencia entre nosotros está muy marcada. La mayoría de las cosas que he hecho y sufrido en el servicio a nuestra causa ha sido en público y me han animado a lo largo del camino. En cambio tú has tenido que trabajar de manera privada. Yo he forjado durante el día y tú durante la noche.

Yo he recibido los aplausos del público y la satisfacción que viene con ser aceptado por la multitud, mientras que la mayor parte de las cosas que has hecho han sido presenciadas por esclavos y esclavas descalzos, temblorosos y cicatrizados, esos mismos a los que has guiado fuera de la casa de la esclavitud y cuyo sincero "Dios te bendiga" ha sido tu única recompensa.

El cielo de la media noche y las estrellas silenciosas han sido los testigos de tu devoción a la libertad y de tu heroísmo.

A excepción de John Brown —de memoria sagrada— no conozco a nadie que se haya enfrentado a tantos peligros y dificultades para servir a nuestra gente esclavizada. Muchas de las cosas que has hecho parecen ser improbables para las personas que no te conocen como te conozco yo. Es para mí un gran placer y un gran privilegio dar testimonio de tu carácter y tus obras, y decir a aquellos a quienes vayas a ver que te considero en todos los sentidos honesta y digna de confianza.

Tu amigo,

Conductor on the Underground Railroad, military leader, suffragist, and descendant of the Ashanti ethnic group in Ghana, Harriet Tubman is an American hero. The sacrifices she made to save her family and friends from slavery continue to inspire others today.

Harriet confessed that during her youth she was described as being "one of those Ashantis." While she may have had ancestors from Ghana who were of Asante lineage, there is no evidence for this

Enslaved Families in Dorchester County

NPS Photo / Beth Parnicza

During her years in slavery, Harriet Tubman resisted. In the Bucktown Village Store, she refused to help an overseer stop a freedom seeker (runaway slave). The overseer threw a two pound weight at the enslaved man, but it hit Tubman in the head instead, almost killing her. This blow to the head caused Tubman to have sleeping spells (epilepsy) her entire life. Her mother did the best she could to nurse her daughter back to health, but again, Tubman was taken from her mother and forced back to work. Despite continuous separation, Harriet Tubman found ways to spend time with her family. Tubman hired herself out and worked in the timber fields with her father at Stewart’s Canal in Parson’s Creek, cutting and logging wood down the canal.

Harriet Tubman worked in the marshlands (swamps) on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as an enslaved child into adulthood which gave her the skills to navigate the marshlands and gain her freedom. Other skills Tubman gained to navigate the landscape came from African American mariners (sailors) working in the timber fields at Parson’s Creek. African American sailors had more mobility than free and enslaved people. They transported goods on their ships to Baltimore, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. These sailors provided a network of communication on the Underground Railroad for Tubman and other freedom seekers.

During her time working in the marshlands at Parson’s Creek she married her first husband, John Tubman, who was a free man. She changed her name from Araminta Ross to Harriet Tubman, perhaps in honor of her mother. In Dorchester County, free and enslaved African Americans lived and worked in the same community. Some enslaved men and women married free African Americans. Free African Americans provided freedom seekers information on the location of safe houses and routes on the Underground Railroad.

Escape from Slavery

In March of 1849, Tubman’s enslaver, Edward Brodess, died. Tubman knew that in order for Brodess’s wife to pay her husband’s debts, she needed to sell some of her slaves. Tubman did not want to be sold away from her family and into the even more brutal conditions of slavery in the deep South. In the fall of 1849, she escaped from slavery alone, and found freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Tubman made connections and found support among other black and white abolitionists. Although Harriet Tubman found her freedom, she was separated from her family. Between 1850 and 1860, Tubman returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland 13 times and freed more than 70 family and friends so that they could be free together.

Military Leader

Tubman’s work as a liberator continued into the Civil War (1861-1865). Before the war started, Tubman caught the attention of several white politicians because of her contacts with well-known black and white abolitionists in the North. Massachusetts Governor, John Andrew, heard of Tubman’s successes freeing slaves on the Underground Railroad out of Maryland, and taking them North into Philadelphia and St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Andrew believed the knowledge and skills that Tubman gained traveling the marshlands in Maryland’s Eastern Shore would be useful in the marshlands on the coastal region of South Carolina, since the two landscapes were similar. Tubman arrived in Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862 to help Union generals recruit black troops, serve as a Union spy, and nurse wounded soldiers. Perhaps her most dramatic effort to weaken the Confederacy came on June 1, 1863, when she planned and led an armed raid along the Combahee River, becoming the first woman to do so in U.S. military history. Tubman, Colonel James Montgomery, and the 2nd Carolina Colored Infantry burned several plantations, destroyed Confederate supply lines, and freed more than 750 people from slavery.

Life in Auburn, New York

Harriet Tubman (to the left) with adopted daughter Gertie and husband Nelson Davis, ca. 1887.

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born a slave in Maryland, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. She made some 13 missions to rescue about 70 people, family and friends.

Kandake was the title for queens and queen mothers (and often means the first royal wife) of the ancient African Kingdom of Kush, which was an ancient Nubian state centered on the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and River Atbara in what is now the Republic of Sudan. The Kingdom was a prosperous land ruled from the capital, Meroe. They were known as Nubian warrior queens, queen regents, and ruling queen mothers. They controlled what are now Ethiopia, Sudan, and parts of Egypt.

Kandake means “great woman”, and was used as a royal title or dynastic name. It is sometimes translated into English as “Candace”. Some of the queens ruled in their own right; others ruled with their husbands, but these queens were not merely consorts, they usually had equal power with the king. At least one Kandake was the ruler while her husband was consort. Kandakes farmed, traded with Greeks and built the Pyramids, and some were warrior queens who led their armies into battle.

Early Neolithic settlements from prehistoric Egypt have been found in the central Nubian region dating back to 7000 BC, with Wadi Halfa believed to be the oldest settlement in the central Nile valley. Parts of Nubia, such as Ta-Seti (the first nome or administrative region of ancient Egypt), were continuously a part of ancient Egypt throughout the dynastic era. Other parts of Nubia, particularly Lower or Upper Nubia, were at times a part of ancient Pharaonic Egypt and at other times a rival state representing parts of Meroë or the Kingdom of Kush. However, by the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, all of Nubia was united with Egypt, extending down to what is now Khartoum.

Towards the end of the dynastic era, Upper Nubia broke off from Egypt proper. During that time, the Nubians founded a dynasty that ruled Upper and Lower Egypt in the eighth century BC.

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days, and was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It lasted in about half the states until 1865, when it was prohibited nationally by the Thirteenth Amendment. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.

The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. The power relationships of slavery corrupted many whites who had authority over slaves, with children showing their own cruelty. Masters and overseers resorted to physical punishments to impose their wills. Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer of the slave. Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, conditions permitting abuses.

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Jacob Fontaine, born in Arkansas in 1808, was brought to Austin in 1839, where he spent the remaining years of his enslavement as a preacher and local leader. After emancipation, he founded the First Colored Baptist Church in Austin, and published the Austin Gold Dollar, one of the earliest known black newspapers in the region. 

Prints and Photographs Collection, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

102 y/o Dancer Sees Herself on Film for the First Time

Black Panthers protesting against the Vietnam War, Washington D.C, 1969.