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Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom Paperback – January 5, 2005

by Catherine Clinton (Author)

4.6 1,570 ratings

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The definitive biography of one of the most courageous women in American history "reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend" (Newsday).

Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harper's Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet.

Now, in a biography widely praised for its impeccable research and its compelling narrative, Harriet Tubman is revealed for the first time as a singular and complex character, a woman who defied simple categorization.

"A thrilling reading experience. It expands outward from Tubman's individual story to give a sweeping, historical vision of slavery." --NPR's Fresh Air

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Back Bay Books
Publication date

January 5, 2005
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0316155942
ISBN-13

978-0316155946
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Popular Highlights in this book

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By 1808 the external slave trade was prohibited due to constitutional mandate.
Highlighted by 218 Kindle readers
By the 1840s, informal networks were well established, as was the reigning metaphor of the Underground Railroad (UGRR).
Highlighted by 180 Kindle readers
The mortality rate for black children in the Chesapeake during the first half of the nineteenth century was double that of white infants.
Highlighted by 150 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A thrilling reading experience. It expands outward from Tubman's individual story to give a sweeping, historical vision of slavery."―NPR's Fresh Air

"Clinton's well-researched book reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend."―Liza Featherstone, Newsday

"Superior. Clinton wisely keeps the focus on Tubman and her remarkable life...This compelling biography brings alive the passion of those tormented times."―Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

"A lucid, well-researched biography that contextualizes a remarkable life in all its remarkable accomplishment."―Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Christian Science Monitor

"Reads more like an adventure tale than a history lesson...This biography provides an in-depth look at Harriet Tubman and holds moments of wonder for readers."―Bernadette Adams Davis, BookPage

About the Author

Catherine Clinton was born in Seattle on April 5, 1952. She was raised in Kansas City, Missouri from the age of two and attended the Sunset Hill School for Girls (now Pembroke Hill School), graduating in 1969. She graduated from Harvard University (Lowell House) with a joint degree in Sociology and Afro-American Studies in 1973. Her senior honors thesis was on the role of the plantation mistress in the Old South. She won the Isobel Briggs Traveling Fellowship from Radcliffe College and went to England. She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Sussex in 1974, completing her thesis on Fanny Kemble. After a detour as an instructor at the University of Benghazi in the Libyan Arab Republic, she returned to the United States to attend Princeton University. She entered the Ph.D. program in history at Princeton University in 1975 and left to take a job at Union College in 1979. She received her doctorate in history from Princeton in 1980, completing her dissertation on the role of the plantation mistress from 1780-1835 under the direction of James M. McPherson. In 1982 she married New York City architect Daniel Lee Colbert. In 1983 she left Union College to take a job in the history department at Harvard University, the same year that she published her first book: The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. She and her husband moved to Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1984 her first child, Drew Colbert was born in Boston. The same year her second book, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, appeared. In 1988 she left the history department at Harvard to teach in the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University. During this period, she became interested in children's education and became a consultant and writer for secondary school social studies texts. In 1989 her second son, Ned Colbert, was born in Boston. In 1990 she returned Harvard to teach in the Department of Afro-American Studies. She and her family moved to Greenwich, Ct. in 1991. In the fall of 1993, she left Harvard to teach African-American literature in the Department of English at Brown University, where she taught for one semester. In 1994 she decided to concentrate on writing full time to give her the flexibility to spend more time with her young children. She has written, edited, co-authored or co-edited over a dozen books to date. In 1993 she became interested in screenwriting and sold several historical projects for television, although none, to date, have been produced. She has written for the History Channel, consulted on projects for WGBH, and is a member of the Screen Writer's Guild. She also became involved in writing children's books, and has concentrated on non-fiction books for kids. In the fall of 1997 she held the Douglas Southall Freeman Visiting Chair of History at the University of Richmond, and then in the fall of 1998 was the Lewis Jones Visiting Chair of History at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. From the fall of 1999 until May 2001 she held the Weissman Visiting Chair of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. For the academic year 2001-2002 she held the Mark Clark Chair of History at the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2003-2004, she will be a visiting professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Ct. She continues to be an affiliate of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. Her newest children's book, A Poem of Her Own, has been published by Harry Abrams in 2003. She has recently completed a biographical study of Harriet Tubman.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (January 5, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316155942
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316155946
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #33,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in U.S. Abolition of Slavery History
- #151 in Black & African American Biographies
- #376 in Women's Biographies

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Vicki Lindner

Harriet Tubman

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2024

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A great biography of a former slave who played a major role in The Civil War. A good account of her collaborations with white abitionists, too

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2023

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In the past, I've heard the name Harriet Tubman and recently decided to read about her. I made a good decision because Catherine Clinton writes a fabulous tale that made me know, and feel fortunate to learn, about a tremendous person.

2 people found this helpful

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Stan Prager

Well-Written & Engaging

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2023

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In 2016, Jack Lew, President Obama’s treasury secretary, announced a redesign of the twenty-dollar bill that would feature on its front a likeness of Harriet Tubman, arguably the most significant African American female of the Civil War era, while displacing Andrew Jackson, who not only owned slaves but championed the institution of human chattel slavery, and was likewise a driving force behind the Indian Removal Act, one of the most shameful episodes in our national saga. Immediate controversy ensued, which was ratcheted up when Donald Trump stepped into the White House. Many have correctly styled Trump as having almost no sense of history, but he did seem to have had a kind of boyhood crush on Jackson, who like Trump did whatever he liked with little regard for the consequences to others, especially the weak and powerless. Trump relocated a portrait of Jackson to a position of prominence in the Oval Office, and his new treasury secretary postponed the currency redesign, almost certainly an echo of Trump’s campaign grievance that putting Tubman on the bill was nothing but “pure political correctness.” Meanwhile, resistance on the left grew, as well, as many pointed to the disrespect of putting the face of one who was formerly enslaved on legal tender that is a direct descendant of that once used to buy and sell human beings. Then there is the paradox in the redesign that puts Tubman on the obverse while maintaining Jackson’s presence on the reverse side of the bill, perhaps reflecting with a dose of disturbing irony the glaring sense of polarization that manifests the national character these days, much as it did in Tubman’s time. Still, the Biden Administration has pledged to accelerate the pace of issuing the new currency, but there remains no sign that anyone will be buying groceries with Tubman twenties anytime soon. We can only imagine what Harriet Tubman, who was illiterate and lived most of her life in poverty, would make of all this!
A dozen years before all this hoopla over who will adorn the paper money, acclaimed historian Catherine Clinton published Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [2004], a well-written, engaging study that turns out to be one of a string of books on Tubman to hit the press nearly at the same—the others are by Kate Larson and Jean Humez—which collectively represented the first scholarly biographies of her life in more than six decades. (There have since been additional contributions to the historiography.) Surprisingly, Tubman proves a tough subject to chronicle: a truly larger-than-life heroic figure who can be credited with verifiable exploits to free the enslaved both before and during the Civil War—admirers nicknamed her “Moses” for her role in spiriting fugitives to freedom, and she was later dubbed “General” by John Brown—her achievements have also long been distorted by myth and embellishment, something nourished early on by a subjective biography of sorts by her friend Sarah Bradford that is said to play loose with facts and events. Then there is the challenge in fashioning an accurate account of someone who spent much of her consequential years living in the shadows, both by the circumstance of anonymity imposed by her condition of enslavement, as well as the deliberate effort to wear a mask of invisibility by one operating outside the law where the penalty for detection would be a return to slavery or, much more likely, death. For the historian, that translates into a delicate—and precarious—balancing act.
Clinton’s approach is to recreate Tubman’s life as close to the colorful adventure it certainly was, without falling victim to sensationalism. She relies on scholarship to sketch the skeletal framework for Tubman’s life, then turns to a variety of sources and reports to put flesh upon it, sharing with the reader when she resorts to surmise to shade aspects of the complexion. In this effort, she largely succeeds.
Born Araminta Ross in Maryland in perhaps 1822—like many of the enslaved she could only guess at her date of birth—Tubman survived an especially brutal upbringing in bondage that witnessed family members sold, a series of vicious beatings and whippings, and a severe head injury incurred in adolescence when a heavy metal weight tossed by an overseer at another struck her instead, which left her with a lingering dizziness, headaches, seizures, and what was likely chronic hypersomnia, a neurological disorder of excessive sleepiness. It also spawned vivid dreams and visions that reinforced religious convictions that God was communicating with her. By then, she was no stranger to physical abuse. Tubman was first hired out as a nursemaid when she herself was only about five years old, responsible for rocking a baby while it slept. If the baby woke and cried she was lashed as punishment. She recalled once being whipped five times before breakfast. She was left scarred for life. Tubman’s experiences serve as a strong rebuke to those deluded by “Lost Cause” narratives that would cast antebellum slavery as a benign institution.
Despite her harsh treatment at the hands of various enslavers, Tubman proved strong and resilient. Rather than break her, the cruelties she endured galvanized her, sustained by a religious devotion infused with Old Testament promises of deliverance. Still enslaved, she married John Tubman, a free black man, and changed her first name to Harriet shortly thereafter. When she fled to freedom in Philadelphia a few short years later, he did not accompany her. Tubman’s journey out of slavery was enabled by the so-called “Underground Railroad,” a route of safehouses hosted by sympathetic abolitionists and their allies.
For most runaways, that would be the end of the story, but for Tubman it proved just the beginning. Committed to liberating her family and friends, Tubman covertly made more than a dozen missions back to Maryland over a period of eight years and ultimately rescued some seventy individuals, while also confiding escape methods to dozens of others who successfully absconded. In the process, as Clinton points out, she leapfrogged from the role as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad to an “abductor.” Now known to many as Moses, she was a master of disguise and subterfuge; the illiterate Tubman once famously pretended to read a newspaper in order to avoid detection. To those who knew her, she seemed to be utterly fearless. She carried a pistol, not only to defend herself against slavecatchers if needed, but also to threaten the fainthearted fugitive who entertained notions of turning back. She never lost a passenger.
At the same time, Harriet actively campaigned for abolition, which brought her into the orbit of John Brown, who dubbed her “General Tubman.” Unlike other antislavery allies, she concurred with his advocacy for armed insurrection, and she proved a valuable resource for him with her detailed knowledge of support networks in border states. Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was, of course, a failure, and Brown was hanged, but her admiration for the man never diminished. With the onset of the Civil War, Tubman volunteered to help “contrabands” living in makeshift refugee camps, and also served as a nurse before immersing herself in intelligence-gathering activities. Most spectacularly, Tubman led an expedition of United States Colored Troops (USCT) on the remarkable 1863 Combahee River Raid in South Carolina that freed 750 of the formerly enslaved—then recruited more than 100 of them to enlist to fight for Union. She is thus credited as the first woman to lead American forces in combat! She was even involved with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in his preparations for the assault on Fort Wagner, later dramatized in the film Glory. When the war ended, Tubman went on to lobby for women’s suffrage, and died in her nineties in 1913—the end of a life that was given to legend because so very much of it more closely resembled imagined epic than authentic experience.
In this biography, Clinton the historian wrestles against the myth, yet sometimes seems seduced by it. She reports claims of the numbers of the enslaved Tubman liberated that seem exaggerated, and references enormous sums slaveowners offered as reward for her capture that defy documented evidence. There’s also a couple of egregious factual errors that any student of the Civil War would stumble upon with mouth agape: she misidentifies the location of the battle of Shiloh from Tennessee to Virginia, and declares Delaware a free state, which would have been a surprise to the small but yet enduring population of the enslaved that lived there. For these blunders, I am inclined to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt; she is an esteemed scholar who likely relied on a lousy editor. Perhaps these mistakes have been corrected in later editions.
In June 2023, shortly after I read this volume, I had the pleasure to sit in on Catherine Clinton’s lecture on the life of Harriet Tubman at the Civil War Institute (CWI) Summer Conference at Gettysburg College. Unlike all too many academics, Clinton is hardly dull on stage, and her presentation was as lively and colorful as her subject certainly must have been in the days when she walked the earth. During a tangent that drifted to the currency controversy, she noted that one of the more superficial objections to the rebranding of the twenty was that there are no existing images of Tubman smiling, something Clinton—grinning mischievously—reminded the audience should hardly be surprising since Harriet once dealt with a toothache while smuggling human beings out of bondage by knocking her own tooth out with her pistol, an episode recounted in the book, as well. Harriet Tubman’s life was an extraordinary one. If you want to learn more, pick up Clinton’s book.

5 people found this helpful

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Marifrances Aurora

Interesting, Well Written

Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2023

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This is a well documented narrative of Harriet Tubman's life actions in her fight for the deliverance of American slaves to a state of freedom. Amply footnoted to encourage further investigation, it is well written. I enjoyed the style of the book and the lack of typographical errors. I recommend this book for those interested in the verifiable facts of Harriet Tubman's life. A truly remarkable visionary woman of enviable strength of conviction and drive to action.

4 people found this helpful

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Tonya LaFarr

Wonderful Book

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2023

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This book opens your eyes about the slave era. I recommend it to everyone.

4 people found this helpful

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Joyce D. Cottrell

Wonderful story of the life and struggles of Harriet Tubman

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2023

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While I had heard of Harriet Tubman, I had never read about her in depth. Nor did I realize her zeal and dedication to getting so many slaves to freedom. This is a marvelous biography, and I believe it should be required reading in our schools.

2 people found this helpful

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Sham

I didn't know all this

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2023

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I've been familiar with some of the accomplishments of Harriet Tubman, but this book reveals more information that I had known up to this point. Excellent piece of American history.

3 people found this helpful

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Wayne A. Smith

A True American Hero

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2020

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The word HERO gets applied much too broadly. People who are trapped and have to endure bad things that happen to them are now labeled with a word once reserved for those who knowingly accept great risk in addressing whatever dire situation that presents itself.

Harriet Tubman is a true hero. Born a slave, she "stole herself away" (to use Frederick Douglass's description of his own escape) to freedom in the North. Then she returned to slave states (mostly Maryland) time and time again to rescue family and others and deliver new souls to freedom. Each journey risked grievous injury, re-enslavement, or death if she were discovered in the act of spiriting valuable property away from slave holders. I can think of few of our countrymen and women who so consistently put themselves in harms way in exercise of a noble calling (military service excepted).

The author tells Tubman's story. Sadly for readers. the documentation and details of Tubman's individual journey's back to the South to conduct slaves to freedom is lacking. We know she went, about when she went and about how many times she made the journey. Tubman did not record details, nor was she asked when interviewed, of the particulars of her forays nor freedmen and women she journeyed with. Part of this was the fact that there was a reward on her head and she was at risk (as well as the slaves she brought north) under the Fugitive Slave Act even in free states. Discretion was needed. Part of it was that the few who interviewed her and produced books on one of America's most famous freedwoman didn't ask those types of detailed questions. We do know more about her life as a slave (though even that is incomplete in major details) and of her work for the Union as a scout and nurse in Virginia and South Carolina as well as her philanthropic efforts later in life.

The author does about as well as anyone can with a great story lacking in details. Of necessity, and for context, the book delves into slave life and experiences in general. The few memorialists who kept records or wrote of their work as station masters / financiers of the Underground Railroad also are brought into the story.

This is great history and a great story. Even with the gaps of information, the author does justice to the memory and life of Harriet Tubman.

16 people found this helpful

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Doug

Purchased as a present.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2022

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Purchased as a present.

Pieter Koeleman

A must read

Reviewed in Canada on August 9, 2020

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It's not a novel you read easy. It's more a study with a lot of references. However it gives a well documented overview of the struggle the black people encountered on their road to freedom.

One person found this helpful

Isabelle

The best

Reviewed in France on March 1, 2020

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Very good biography. It is a pity it is not translated in French.

James Squires

Beautiful Thank You

Reviewed in Canada on April 8, 2020

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Beautiful Thank You

Carolyn

A must read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2020

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Harriet Tubman was a truly amazing woman. Her achievements & courage are remarkable and arguably unique. Everyone should read this book. Catherine Clinton does a wonderful job of telling the story of Harriet's long life, piecing together incomplete information into a good blend of historical events and personal stories. Everyone should know about Harriet Tubman, where she came from and what she did.

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