John and his wife, Gloria (whose freedom he purchased after meeting her on a plantation), decided to dedicate their farm to abolition work after an escaped slave near death appeared on their doorstep. The farm community is made up of a variety of blacks, including freeborn blacks, those who have purchased their freedom or been released, and runaways such as Cora. She also goes to school with the children on the farm and with former slaves seeking an education. Cora works on the farm just as she used to work on the Randall plantation, but now she does so as a free woman. Upon arriving in Indiana, Cora takes up residence at a farm owned by John Valentine, a light-skinned African man who uses his white appearance to improve the plight of Africans in America. When Royal had seen Cora in Ridgeway’s custody, he had delayed their journey back to Indiana to rescue her as well. Royal and his partner Red had been in Tennessee to rescue Justin, another escaped slave who is the third man traveling with them. She used the stars and other natural phenomenon to lead her north.Cora’s rescuers, led by a freeborn black man named Royal, take her through the underground railroad to a farm in Indiana. She followed rivers that snaked northward. “She used disguises she walked, rode horses and wagons sailed on boats and rode on real trains.She bribed people. “For the faint of heart she carried a pistol, telling her charges to go on or die, for a dead fugitive slave could tell no tales,” Ms. Tubman was no-nonsense on these journeys, unwilling to suffer weakness among those joining her perilous flight. Over the next decade, she would return to Maryland’s Eastern Shore a dozen times, rescuing some 70 family members and friends. He secured the highest bid for Kessiah and their two children, smuggled them to a local safe house, then sailed up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, where Tubman greeted them and guided them to Philadelphia. But Tubman had plotted with Kessiah’s husband, who had been manumitted, to free his family. In 1850, Tubman made her first trip back to Maryland, where, on the steps of the Dorchester County Courthouse (which was rebuilt in 1854 after a fire), Tubman’s niece, Kessiah, was scheduled to be auctioned off. I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere.” Tubman began plotting her return home to bring her kin back with her: “I was free and dey should be free also. In Philadelphia, she was free, working odd jobs, but lonely. Tubman’s freedom proved to be bittersweet, as she would recount in her biography. Shortly after returning to the farm, Tubman set out on her own, guided through the night by the North Star and well-worn paths of the Underground Railroad up into Pennsylvania, where slavery was illegal. In 1850, Maryland had 279 runaway slaves, leading the nation’s slave states in successfully executed escapes, the author Kate Clifford Larson says in the Harriet Tubman biography “Bound for the Promised Land.” “But few returned to the land of their enslavers, risking capture and re-enslavement, even lynching, to help others seek their own emancipation,” Ms. Sitting on 17 acres, the center will be part of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a 125-mile self-guided driving tour that wends through 36 significant sites along the Eastern Shore.įrom the early 1600s until the mid-1800s, thousands of African-Americans would encounter the marshy wooded landscape of the Chesapeake Bay region, first as a gateway through which slave traders forcibly brought them from Africa into the colonies and later as essential paths and waterways that formed the Underground Railroad. My trip coincided with the state’s renewed fervor around Tubman: On March 11, the Maryland State Park Service and the National Park Service will open the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center, a $21 million project in Church Creek that commemorates Tubman’s journey, from slave to Underground Railroad “conductor” and, later in life, Civil War scout, spy and nurse. I set off on a three-day trek across the Eastern Shore, Tubman’s birthplace and the landscape she traversed, fugitive slaves in tow, from Dorchester County through Delaware into Philadelphia.
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