Harriet Tubman: Chapters 19–22

The placard above it read: “No Northern hemp shall help to punish our felony.”

“The miserable old traitor and murderer belongs to the gallows and the gallows will have its own.”

In Boston, Wendell Phillips, Abolitionist and reformer, commended those who looked “upon that gibbet of John Brown, not as the scaffold of a felon, but as the cross of a martyr.”

Shortly afterward she went to Boston where she filled two speaking engagements, one at a meeting of the New England Antislavery Society on May 27th, the other at a women’s suffrage meeting on the 1st of June.

He talked about the need for money for overcoats for the militia.

That winter on Boston Common, Harriet heard the word “overcoat” become a joke, a slang word for “warmonger.”

In order to earn money to buy food with, she made pies at night, and a home-brewed root-beer, which she got one of the contrabands to peddle in the nearby army camps during the day.

Since the rebellion she [Harriet] has devoted herself to her great work of delivering the bondman, with an energy and sagacity that cannot be exceeded.

With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December, the long period of agitation for the abolition of slavery came to an end.

She made repeated efforts to obtain some kind of remuneration for her service with the Union forces.

The folk in Auburn said Harriet had married him in order to take care of him, that even though he was a big, handsome, young man, he had tuberculosis.

She had a highly developed sense of the dramatic, a sense of the comic, and because in her early years she had memorized verses from the Bible, word for word, the surge and sway of the majestic rhythm of the King James version of the Bible was an integral part of her speech.

And she invariably ended the recital with a note of pride in her voice, as she said: “And I never run my train off the track, and I never lost a single passenger.”

She could speak of the death of Lincoln, and epitomize all the sorrow in the world by telling about an old man, at the Contraband Hospital at Fortress Monroe, who, hearing that Lincoln was dead, lifted his tremulous old voice in prayer: “We kneel upon the ground, with our faces in our hands, and our hands in the dust, and cry to Thee for mercy, O Lord, this evening.”

Despite her work as a nurse, a scout, and a spy, in the Civil War, she will be remembered longest as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, the railroad to freedom—a short, indomitable woman, sustained by faith in a living God, inspired by the belief that freedom was a right all men should enjoy