In the last decade I have spent a lot of time studying Harriet Tubman. I had heard of her in my youth, but she was more of a legend to me back then than an historical figure. In the 21st Century there are now scholarly biographies of Tubman, which I have read. The internet makes old newspaper accounts of her speeches accessible and I have explored those for hours online. My sister and I visited the neighborhood where she was enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the wetland where she made her escape. Right before the Pandemic, my wife and I went to Auburn, N.Y. to her home, her church, and her grave. We saw where she cooked, and sewed, and plotted the rescue of enslaved people. After decades of Tubman being both famous and almost unknown, I saw the Hollywood movie version of her life.
Tonight I saw the new PBS documentary on Tubman titled Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom. This is an excellent hour-long introduction to the life of a truly remarkable woman dedicated to direct action against slavery. It relies on her own words, historians, biographers, and caretakers of her historic sites to tell the story of this conductor on the Underground Railroad and outspoken abolitionist.
Historian Erica Dunbar discusses slavery in Maryland, where small slaveowners often rented out their slaves. Because slavery was more economically precarious in Maryland than elsewhere in the Slave States, owners looked for ways to make money from the people. For Harriet, her work outside her enslaver’s property allowed her to familiarize herself with the wider world and she worked on the docks, learning about the Free States from the watermen she worked with.
Chris Haley, Maryland State Archivist, says that the destruction of the Black family was central to slavery. Kate Clifford Larson, a modern biographer of Tubman, tells us that as slavery became more profitable in the western states like Texas and Louisiana, the less profitable Border State slaves were in constant danger of being sold away. Those who were sold to those states typically only lived for seven years after the sale. Being sold off meant that a family died.
Historian Fergus Bordewich talks about the impact of her visions after she had her skull fractured when she protected a black child against his overseer. She saw the visions as coming from God. Although the injury was a disability for her for the rest of her life, she came to see her life as one filled with purpose.
The documentary shows Tubman’s escape to freedom and describes her arrival in free Philadelphia and her enlistment in the Abolitionist cause. Manisha Sinha, a leading historian of the Abolitionist Movement, tells us that the first Abolitionists were escaped slaves. Many white Abolitionists later described their conversion to the cause as coming after they heard an escaped slave speak. Tubman spoke out for the end of slavery, but she also directly challenged it by risking her life and freedom to make thirteen trips to Maryland to rescue seventy enslaved people. Even before the Civil War began, Cornell’s Edward Baptist says that whatever the mythology of the Underground Railroad is, “what Harriet Tubman was doing was more like a military raid.” Mia Bai of the University of Pennsylvania reminds us that it was especially dangerous for Blacks to help escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad because they could be enslaved for providing assistance.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act heightened the dangers to Tubman and those she was trying to liberate. Professor Marcia Chatelain says that one of the tragedies of the Fugitive Slave Act is that it deputized ordinary people to enforce the extension of slavery. Now people in the Free States could be impressed into involuntary service as slave catchers. It also meant that Tubman could no longer assure her “passengers'” freedom by bringing them North. Now she had to get them to Canada.
The last quarter of the film describes her role in the Civil War when she helped hundreds of Blacks reach freedom in the lines of the Union Army. Her willingness to endlessly put her own life on the line to free others and deal the death blow to slavery makes her a hero for the ages. Yet, even after the war ended and slavery was abolished, white supremacy still ruled. One of the last stories told in the documentary is of her refusal to be ejected from a white railroad car, and of the beating she got from the conductors and white passengers for her insistence on her own dignity.
Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom is an engaging retelling of the heroic life of a seemingly ordinary Black woman who risked everything every day for her vision of freedom.
Note: Although tonight was the premier, it will be shown again several times on most PBS stations.
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