Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Nonfiction | Biography | Middle Grade | Published in 1955

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapters 13-14

Chapters 15-16

Chapters 17-18

Chapters 19-20

Chapters 21-22

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Bond of Family

Throughout Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, family bonds impact Harriet Tubman’s upbringing, health, skills, and activism. The author presents Harriet’s parents, Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene, or “Old Rit,” as loving, protective, and involved parents who managed to provide consistent care and advice to Harriet even though their work required them to be separated for long periods. Indeed, Tubman may not have survived childhood without her mother. When she fell ill as a six-year-old while working at a local household, her mother insisted to Brodas, the plantation and slave owner, that Tubman should return to her care until she was better. Petry describes how Ben and Old Rit’s knowledge of traditional medicines and love for Tubman helped her survive six weeks of illness: “Rit nursed Harriet back to health. […] Rit kept giving her a hot and bitter brew, made from the root of a plant that Ben brought back from the woods” (34). Ben and Old Rit also fervently hoped that Tubman could receive higher training in cooking or weaving and avoid a life of brutal toil in the fields. Petry includes several scenes in which the parents discuss her chances of having an easier life than they have had.

When it became clear that Tubman preferred to work outside, however, her father taught her everything he knew about working in the woods and foraging for food. Under her father’s tutelage, she learned all about the plants and animals of their region and, even more importantly, how to pathfind and move undetected. Petry explains,

Ben taught her how to pick a path through the woods, even through the underbrush, without making a sound. […] Deep inside herself, Harriet knew what Ben was doing. He was, in his own fashion, training her for the day when she might become a runaway […]. (76).

Family bonds also greatly influenced Tubman’s decision to run away from the plantation and pursue a life of freedom in the North. Her attachment to her family and close relationship with her parents caused her to stay at the Brodas plantation and later motivated her to return to it repeatedly to rescue her loved ones. The author writes that Tubman gave up thoughts about running away for a time since nearly all of her family members were together, and she did not want to leave them. Tubman prioritized her family’s togetherness, thinking, “Old Rit and Ben were here on the plantation. So were her brothers and sisters” (71).

When she did decide to leave, she wanted to make the journey with her brothers since she felt that they would have more success going together and protecting one another along the way. Harriet was deeply disappointed that her brothers were not as confident about their plan as she was and that they had to go back to the plantation in defeat: “It had all seemed so perfect, so simple, to have her brothers go with her, sharing the dangers of the trip together, just as a family should” (93). Despite this false start, Harriet remained attached to her family and did not attempt to run away again until she learned that she and her brothers would be separated from their parents and other siblings and sold to a slave trader.

Once Tubman reached freedom in Pennsylvania, she continued to make her family a priority. Petry claims that while in her early trips to Maryland, she did rescue other acquaintances, she mostly “wanted to rescue members of her own family,” with her primary goal of all her trips being to “guide her own relatives into the free state of Pennsylvania” (123). Harriet was successful in freeing several of her siblings, nieces and nephews, and even her elderly parents. Harriet remained deeply attached to her parents until the end of their lives; she bought a house for them in Auburn, New York, and lived with them there until their passing. Petry’s inclusion of Ben and Old Rit as major characters in the book, and her frequent mentions of Tubman’s siblings, paint Tubman as a loyal family member with close familial bonds that impacted every stage of her life, including her activism.

Nature As Refuge and Resource

Another major theme in Petry’s work is Tubman’s love of nature and the outdoors and the feeling of freedom she had when she was able to be outside. Petry shows how this interest in the outdoors was an important facet of Tubman’s personality that helped her build the expertise she would use to successfully run away, guide others to freedom, and care for people during the civil war. From a young age, Tubman showed a strong preference for working outside instead of indoors, even though enslaved people usually wanted to be assigned indoor tasks as they were generally less brutal than the hard physical labor required of a field hand. As a child, Tubman was forced to work for a local couple who made her help the wife with her weaving work. Petry describes how Tubman hated working indoors: “She hated being inside the house with the loom and the spinning wheel and the endless hanks of yarn. […] She wanted to go home where she could be outdoors” (37).

As Tubman grew older, her boss valued her strength and ability in outdoor work, and she worked outside with her father, Ben, every day. This allowed Ben to teach Harriet what he knew about the land, and she became a skilled outdoorswoman with a host of survival skills. Petry explains,

She learned most of the woods lore that she knew from Ben: the names of birds, which berries were good to eat and which were poisonous, where to look for water lilies, how to identify the hemlocks and the plant that he called cranebill […]. For these things—bark of hemlock, root of water lily, leaf of crane’s bill—had medicinal value (76).

Tubman was an “apt pupil” (76) in these endeavors and soon learned how to walk stealthily through the woods with her father’s help, even sneaking up on him successfully. Tubman used these survivalist skills when she ran away and guided others as a conductor. Unlike other slaves, she was not afraid of becoming lost in the woods or starving to death since she felt confident she could find her way and forage for edible plants thanks to her father’s lessons (95).

Tubman also used her knowledge of nature when serving with the Union Forces during the civil war. Tasked with caring for Black American patients who had fled enslavement, she realized that many of them were suffering from dysentery, a potentially fatal intestinal infection that causes chronic diarrhea. It was difficult for Tubman to apply her knowledge since the military camp where she worked was situated at Port Royal, a sea island close to North Carolina, with different vegetation than her native Maryland. However, she looked for the medicinal crane’s bill and lily roots, which her family and community had always used for stomach problems, and when she found them, she “boiled the roots and herbs, making a strange-looking concoction” (223). Tubman fed this medicinal broth to her patients to heal them, earning her deep respect from many of them who felt certain that “no one could die if Moses [Tubman] was at the bedside” (223). Throughout Petry’s book, the author makes it clear that Harriet’s love of nature and knowledge of the landscape was more than a subject of interest; it was a cornerstone of her personality and a skill set that helped her provide for herself and others.

Religious Faith and Biblical Allegory

Another major theme of this book, and indeed of Tubman’s life, was her Christian faith and worldview, which influenced how she lived and how others perceived her. Though she could not read the Bible herself, Harriet grew up steeped in religious tradition. She heard Bible stories from her family and community members and often sang Christian spiritual hymnals along with the other slaves on the Brodas plantation. Petry portrays her parents as devout Christian believers too, who prayed for their children’s welfare and passed on their religious beliefs to their children.

From Petry’s book, we learn that religious imagery and stories were a powerful means of connection and motivation for slaves. Slaveholders understood this, which prompted them to ban certain religious songs on plantations. Indeed, Denmark Vesey supposedly inspired slaves to rebel by telling them stories about Moses leading his people out of Egypt to freedom in Israel. After Vesey’s violent uprising, slave owners banned songs about Moses rebuking the Egyptian Pharoah and rescuing his people because they worried that the lyrics, “Tell old Pharoah / Let my people go!,” could inspire slaves to revolt against their “pharoahs,” too (17). However, Old Rit still taught Tubman each lyric of these “forbidden” songs in private, demonstrating the importance of these hymns to her family (24). They also banned separate church services and Sunday school for enslaved people (56).

While slaves became more careful in their song choice, they still sang many spiritual hymns that expressed their longing to escape slavery. Their lyrics could have both literal and coded meanings. For example, when Tubman runs away from the plantation, she relies on spiritual lyrics to communicate her intentions to her family, singing, “When that old chariot comes/ I’m going to leave you/ I’m bound for the promised land, […]” (95). While the “promised land” in the hymn refers to ancient Israel, Tubman uses it as a stand-in for the free state of Pennsylvania.

While these biblical comparisons and coded lyrics were helpful to Tubman, she did not view the Bible or God as mere symbols or a means of communication. A deeply religious woman, Tubman often prayed for strength and good fortune in the face of many dangers as both a slave and later a conductor on the Underground Railroad. For example, when Tubman is panicked that the slave owner Brodas will sell her to a slave trader, she prays to God that Brodas will change his mind or die. Petry represents Tubman’s prayer as such: “Lord, if you’re never going to change that man’s heart—kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way—” (66). Remarkably, Brodas died just days later from a serious illness. Hearing this startling news, Tubman was distressed since “she believed that her prayers had killed him” (69), which shows how deeply she believed in her prayers and in a God who could answer them.

While Tubman was clearly opposed to slavery and was willing to go to great lengths to help slaves attain freedom, Petry portrays her as uncomfortable with violence, even against slave owners. Despite Brodas’s cruelty to her and her family and his broken promise to manumit them when he died, she instead felt guilty at the thought of killing another person. Tubman maintained this compassionate perspective throughout her life. For example, when she met abolitionist Brown and heard his plans for violent insurrection, she was “repelled by the thought of the bloodshed that must inevitably take place” (198). Petry claims that while Brown and Harriet Tubman were both Christians, Brown “worshiped a God of wrath, of vengeance,” while Tubman had faith in “a God of infinite mercy, of gentleness” (198). Petry portrays Tubman as frequently praying to this gentle God when she feels nervous or afraid on her missions. Throughout the book, she prays, “Lord, I’m going to hold steady on to You, and You’ve got to see me through” (93).

Once Tubman had gained a reputation for guiding slaves to freedom, enslaved people reverently referred to her as “Moses,” comparing her to the biblical character who led his people out of slavery in Egypt. This was out of respect and likely to try to conceal her identity from slaveholders, who eventually made the connection between the two. Telling stories about “Moses” became an extension of slaves’ Christian faith, since in sharing tales about her successes, “their faith in a living God would be strengthened, their faith in themselves would be renewed” (129). This title stayed with her for her whole life; the patients she cared for at the military camp during the civil war also called her “Moses” out of respect (223). Even Colonel Montgomery used this nickname for her (226). This name also informed the title of one of the first biographies of Tubman’s life, which was written by her friend Sarah Bradford Hopkins and entitled Harriet, The Moses of Her People (234). Petry explains that the 1914 plaque dedicated to her in Auburn, New York, also writes that she was “called the Moses of her people” who had an “implicit trust in God,” ensuring that she would continue to be remembered for her faith and her Moses-like accomplishments (242).