The film “Harriet,” about the life of Harriet Tubman, has been out for three weeks and over three million people have seen it in the United States alone. With the story of this tough anti-slavery worker finally getting the attention it deserves, many people who have seen the film want to dive in deeper with a good biography of the iconic woman.
There have been dozens of children’s and Young Adult books published of the last half-century, but, until the 21st Century, the number of adult biographies has been surprisingly small. After I saw the film on November 3, I read three books about Tubman.
The first biography of Tubman was written by Sarah Bradford and published in 1869. Entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, the book was written by a friend of Tubman’s whose previous efforts at writing had been confined to romantic fiction. In 1886, Bradford reworked the material in the 1869 volume and issued it as Harriet, The Moses of Her People. The book is described as an “as told by Harriet Tubman” work, but Bradford writes in her introduction that there were things Tubman wanted included in the book that Bradford decided to leave out because they could not be verified. Since both editions were hastily cobbled together, and show it, one wonders if important stories were left out because Sarah Bradford just did not have time to look into them. Tubman could not read or write, so the best we have is what people like Bradford wrote that Tubman said. You can read Harriet, The Moses of Her People online here for free. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman can be found here.
I read a lot of books from the 19th Century, and I have to say that these two are not very good reads. They are unreliable and at times Sarah Bradford can be incredibly condescending. Even Tubman’s friends in Auburn, New York were concerned that Bradford did not capture the voice of the Harriet that they knew. On the other hand, all of the modern biographies of Tubman rely to some degree on Bradford’s books. If you read one of the scholarly biographies and you want more, you can try out Harriet, The Moses of Her People, as well as read the “Woman Whipping” chapter in Scenes in the Life. Bradford’s insistence on exaggerating the number of slaves rescued by Tubman is just one of her literary crimes.
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton is a good scketch of Tubman’s life by a well-known historian of women in the 19th Century. Clinton gives you a good look at Tubman’s life, and it is economical in its language, but I wound up preferring a different modern biography.
Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero by Kate Clifford Larson is my favorite of the three books. It provides a detailed look at the slave society of Maryland’s Eastern Shore where Tubman grew up, as well as the known details of Tubman’s life there. The book eschews mythmaking and offers a realistic narrative of Tubman’s self-liberation, along with the ways that the network of men and women, white and black, of the Underground Railroad helped her in her journey.
I will try to make time to write a full review of this good biography of a great freedom fighter.
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