She wasn’t a very impressive woman–just a little over five feet tall, in her late thirties, with dark-brown weathered skin. She couldn’t read or write. The clothes she wore were coarse and worn, though neat. When she smiled, people could readily see that her top two teeth were missing.
She lived alone. It was said that she had abandoned her husband when she was twenty-nine. She gave him no warning. One day he woke up, and she was gone. She talked to him only once after that, years later, and she never mentioned his name again afterward.
Her employment was intermittent. Most of the time she took domestic jobs in small hotels: scrubbing floors, making up rooms, and cooking. But just about every spring and fall, she would disappear from her place of employment, come back broke, and work again to scrape together what little money she could. When she was present on a job, she worked hard and seemed physically tough, but she was also known to suffer with fits where she would suddenly fall asleep. She attributed her affliction to a blow to the head she had taken during a teenage fight.
She certainly did not fit the profile of a legendary hero. She seemed on the surface to be someone that would hardly even command respect from anyone. Yet, scores during her time recognized and respected her role as their leader. What people you might be asking now? Well, to begin with, the hundreds of slaves who followed her to freedom out of the South. They certainly recognized and respected her leadership qualities. So did just about every abolitionist in New England. The year was 1857. The woman’s name was Harriet Tubman, but in her time she was more commonly called “Moses” because of her ability to go into the land of captivity and bring so many of her people out of slavery’s bondage.
The best guess is that she was born a slave somewhere between 1820-25 in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another slave and hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. She was a devout Christian and experienced strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God.
Around 1844, in her mid to late twenties, she married John Tubman, a free black man. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of Harriet’s slave status. Since the mother’s status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages – free people of color marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. When Harriet talked to her husband about escaping to freedom in the North, he wouldn’t hear of it. He told her that if she tried to leave, he would turn her in. So when she decided to take her chances and go north in 1849, she did so alone, without a word to him. Her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, said that Tubman told her:
I had reasoned this out in my mind: there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive.
I should fight for my liberty as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.
Tubman made her way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, via the Underground Railroad, a secret network of free blacks, white abolitionists, and Quakers who aided escaping slaves on the run. Though free now herself, Harriet vowed to return to Maryland and bring her family out. In 1850, she made her first trip as an Underground Railroad “conductor”– someone who retrieved and guided slaves out with the assistance of sympathizers along the way.
Each summer and winter, Tubman worked for the funds she needed to make return trips to the South. And every spring and fall, she risked her life by going south and returning with more people. She was fearless. And her leadership was unshakable. It was extremely dangerous work, and when people in her charge wavered, she was strong as steel, knowing that escaped slaves who failed would be beaten and tortured until they gave information about those who had helped them. So she never allowed any people she was guiding to give up. “Dead folks tell no tales,” she would say to a faint-hearted slave as she put a loaded pistol to his head. “You go on or die!”
Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman guided out more than three hundred people, including many of her own family members. She made nineteen trips to the South and was always very proud of the fact that she never lost a single person under her care. “I never ran my train off the track,” she once said, “and I never lost a passenger.” Southern whites put a $12,000 price on her head–a fortune at that time. Southern blacks simply called her “Moses.” By the start of the Civil War, Harriet had brought more people out of slavery than any other American in history–black or white, male or female.
Tubman’s reputation and influence commanded respect, and not just among slaves who dreamed of gaining their freedom. Influential northerners of both races sought her out, such as Senator William Seward, who later became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and outspoken abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglas. Harriet’s advice and leadership was also requested by John Brown, the famed revolutionary abolitionist. Brown always referred to Harriet as “General Tubman.” And was quoted as saying she “was a better officer than most whom he had seen, and could command an army as successfully as she had led her small parties of fugitives.”
Harriet Tubman would appear to be an unlikely candidate for leadership, because the deck was certainly stacked against her. She was uneducated. She lived in a culture that subjugated people of her race. And she labored in a country where women would not earn the right to vote for nearly eighty more years. Despite these seemingly impenetrate able barriers, Harriet Tubman became an incredible leader. Her legacy to us all in this regard is that leadership is not a position, it is a quality.
Source: Wikipedia and The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell
“Self-preservation is the first law of nature; self-sacrifice the highest rule of grace.” – Unknown
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué