Introduction
This book will provide some new interpretations and information on the most notable African-American/African-Canadian conductor on the legendary Underground Railroad: Harriet Tubman. Based upon interviews with Tubman descendants, archival materials, and extant literature, this book will acquaint the reader with the experience and contribution of just one of the many notable, identified leaders on the Underground Railroad, placing her in a local, regional, international, and global context.
The Underground Railroad was the first freedom movement of the Americas and is credited with infusing Canada with a number of black people. How did it work? Where did people come into Canada? How were they treated upon their arrival? How is it that we spoke of these things in certain places and why was this missing from the education that I was receiving at school?
The nature of slavery did not lend itself for many to keep detailed records. For slave owners, the date and place of the birth of the offspring of enslaved women was not always recorded and was left to memory. Many now feel that ancestral memory has power; that “indigenous knowledge” has value not always accepted or recognized. However, the selling of slaves had an impact on plantation memory. No one may have remained in your circle who could verify your date of birth, or even your parentage. No one may have realized the need to do so. When an enslaved African was sold, and once that memory was gone, it was as if a library had been lost. The stories about your birth, issues on your plantation, would be lost unless there had been an opportunity for this information to be passed down through African oral tradition or recorded by slave owners.
To this end, there are several dates for Harriet Tubman’s birth in the literature. A descendant fervently believed Tubman to have been born in 1820, “if not earlier.” Harriet Tubman herself indicated that she was “about seventy-five years old” in 1898 as she was trying to ensure that she receive her back pay for her military service and status as a widow. Was she being modest about her age, or is it that she did not know her exact age and took her best guess? Another famous black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, took February 14th to be his birth date as he had never been provided with documentation to indicate otherwise.
There were essentially two types of support for the Underground Railroad (UGRR) escapes: the formal and somewhat documented and those activities that happened on the spur of the moment and that were almost acts of kindness or veiled acts of resistance. Even after the UGRR had ended, the fear and real possibility for legal action kept many stories of assistance and involvement secret, and many of the stories literally went to the grave with the involved persons. In modern times the Underground Railroad is often romanticized to the point where it might almost seem to have been a pleasant, albeit lengthy stroll from a place of hard work and restriction to a place of easy opportunity and acceptance. The truth is that the Underground Railroad was a significantly danger-fraught means of escaping from the real threat of severe punishment or death towards the possibility of freedom in various communities in the northern United States, or further on into Canada. In Canada, Ontario was the largest recipient of those “fugitive slaves,” those freedom seekers. Who would lead such a perilous journey? Why risk one’s life for others? How could she have managed to evade capture? Who was this heroine of legend? How could an “uneducated,” “unsophisticated” enslaved African become the person of historic and contemporary notoriety and fame? How can the legacy of one black woman be so compelling that her story resonates across international boundaries? This book will attempt to provide some new insights into the saga of slavery, the mechanisms of the Underground Railroad, what happened to freedom seekers upon their arrival to places usually called “North,” and the nature of the character of the person who would become known as a famous freedom seeker, a freedom leader, the Moses of her people, Harriet Tubman.
The economies of many countries, including the United States and especially in the agricultural south, were built upon the labour of captured Africans. Slavery, as experienced by the survivors of the “Middle Passage” between Africa and the New World and their descendants, was all encompassing. They had no rights whatsoever under the law. Enslaved blacks had to work constantly under the watchful eye of overseers who whipped slow workers. They could not legally marry and raise a family, they could not attend school or learn to read and write, they could not live where they wished, follow their interests, or move about in society as they pleased.
Unlike the slavery imposed by other societies at other times, this servitude was lifelong and perpetual. If children came about through acts of breeding, acts of love, or acts of violence they were automatically enslaved. And, because Africans had distinctive dark complexions in a society where free people usually were white, their skin colour immediately identified them as being a slave no matter where they were. Their African names, religions, histories, languages, customs, and families were taken from them by the time they were auctioned off. They were required to use the name given to them by their owner and work a hard job for which they received no salary and little recognition. Over time certain slaves started to be freed, perhaps because of guilty consciences, because a slave’s value had decreased due to old age or poor health, changing attitudes about slave owning, or because the dark complexion and distinctive features of the captured Africans started to approximate the colour and appearance of their owners due to forced intimate relations. The northern states, with their large Quaker settlements and anti-slavery proponents, tended to free slaves earlier than other areas. This pressured neighbouring states and Canada to struggle with the debate about abolishing slavery or continuing it.
In 1793 the cotton gin was invented and was widely used. It permitted the plantation owner, through the work of his slaves, to more quickly and efficiently remove the tiny seeds from cotton. This resulted in much more profit for the owners. Because the free labour of the slaves was so valuable to their owners and to the agricultural economy of the south, those who relied the most on exploiting them tended to be the white southerners who had large land tracts that they could not profitably manage to cultivate without slavery — free labour.
In the same year the first fugitive slave law in the U.S. came into force and it allowed slave owners or their agents — bounty hunters or slave catchers — to bring any black person before a magistrate and accuse them of being a runaway. With the vague descriptions of freedom-seeking slaves that existed, any black persons who were so accused and not able to provide immediate proof of their free status were forced to be returned to their “master.”
The first enslaved African, Olivier Le Jeune, was a young boy who was brought into Canada in 1628. Slaves were held in Canada only by the wealthy to do household work, livery work, barbering, and laundry, but this was mostly due to the fact that large-scale plantations did not exist in Canada, so fewer slaves were needed there. However, no matter how many slaves there may have been, slavery was still a dehumanizing process that reduced Africans who had contributed to the process of civilization to mere beasts of burden. Slavery had negative repercussions for that period of history, which have continued through to the present day as evidenced in negative treatment or perspectives about people of African descent and the erroneous idea that only Europeans contributed to civilization. Slavery was abolished in Canada on August 1, 1834, which is known as Emancipation Day.
Black people did not want to be slaves, and fought against it as well as they could. Some resisted passively, by intentionally working extra slowly, pretending not to understand commands, or discreetly contaminating or poisoning food. Many slave revolts are documented, but trying to run away was extremely difficult. Slaves would be tracked down like animals by groups of men with guns and dogs, and they were further disadvantaged by not necessarily knowing where they could go, or who could help them. If caught alive, slaves would be returned to their master where some sort of punishment — a foot or an ear hacked off, an eye removed, or a severe whipping — would be administered to leave the freedom seeker able to work, but unable to attempt another escape. It also signalled to other would-be runaways the punishment they could expect for trying to escape. When it was easy to obtain slaves, the runaway might have been hung, but as the importation of captured Africans slowed down in the nineteenth century, torture, branding, disfigurement, and