Harriet Tubman Essays

Women throughout American history have played key roles in society, rarely straying from the assigned mold they were told to aspire too. Many women did not have the chance to stray from society’s standers, however, some women broke through the mold against all odds. Harriet Tubman is the greatest possible example of women gaining influence over society and violating traditional gender-based expect talons of woman. Tubman being female, black, and a slave put her in the most unfavorable positions possible in the 1800s, but Tubman transcended all expectations and was highly exalted by men and women of all races.

Tubman was a leader. Tubman was born to slaved parents and escaped with two of her brothers. Once she was free Tubman chose to continue traveling back and forth between the South and the North to help other slaves to freedom, she used a complex system known as the Underground Railroad. Tubman was known as the conductor of the railroad and brought over eight hundred slaves to freedom. Tubman’s amazing work gained the respect of people with high social standing and power.

The respect for Harriet Tubman is best shown in a letter John Brown wrote to his son after meeting her for the first time. John Brown was a radical white abolitionist who was hoping to recruit Tubman for a planned raid on the federal arsenal, in the letter to his son Brown uses male pronouns to describe Tubman stating “He Harriet is the most of a man naturally; that [ Brown had] ever met with.”(Horton 125) Brown using male pronouns to describe Tubman, in his own way, is saying how Tubman breaks the set concepts of gender at the time. Brown’s admiration for Tubman is also expressed in a letter from Wendell Phillips. In Phillips’s letter he recalls that Brown introduced Tubman by saying ‘“Mr. Phillips, I bring you one of the best and bravest persons on this continent—General Tubman, as we call her.”’(Horton 143) This is a revolutionary statement for many reasons, even though Brown is a supporter of black rights, women were seen as incapable of handling the role of leadership, and to give a woman the title of General unprecedented let alone a woman of color.