Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman

Araminta "Harriet" Ross Tubman Davis (1822-1913), best known as Harriet Tubman, was a fugitive slave whose work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad made her a legend. Born in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 and supported herself by working in Philadelphia hotels before relocating in Canada and, later, New York. Tubman first returned to Maryland in 1850, when she helped a niece escape from Baltimore, and over the next ten years, she frequently risked her life to liberate family members and other slaves in the area. During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a nurse and a spy for the Union army in South Carolina, where she was known as General Tubman. After the war, Tubman established a retirement home for indigent African Americans and spoke at women's suffrage meetings. Sarah Hopkins Bradford (1818-1912) met Tubman's parents in a Sunday School class while visiting her brother in Auburn, New York, during the Civil War. When Tubman and her friends decided to publish Tubman's life story, Bradford was a logical choice to author the volume: she lived in nearby Geneva, New York and had already written biographies of Peter the Great and Columbus. But Bradford moved to Germany in 1868—before she had finished writing the book—leaving her printer, William J. Moses, to compile and edit Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869). As a result, Scenes is disjointed, skipping from anecdote to anecdote with little regard for chronology. Moreover, fewer than half of Scenes' pages were written by Bradford; the book republishes a variety of newspaper articles, letters and documents related to Tubman's life, including the earliest substantive biographical sketch of Tubman by Boston abolitionist Franklin Sanborn. Bradford later revised Scenes and published a more cohesive version of the biography as Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886).Bradford presents Tubman's biography as a "plain and unvarnished account of some scenes in the life of a woman," but her narrative makes Tubman into a mythic figure, a woman with the courage of Joan of Arc, the compassion of Florence Nightingale and the spiritual insight of Moses. Tubman repeatedly risks torture by returning to slave states, volunteers as a nurse during the Civil War, and also receives spiritual guidance in dreams and visions, when "her 'spirit' leaves her body, and visits other scenes and places, not only in this world, but in the world of spirits".