Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) 1822-1849 . . . is enslaved in Maryland. 1849 . . . escapes from slavery. 1850-1860 . . . works in the Underground Railroad meets John Brown, and lectures in Boston. 1862-1864 . . . serves as a Union spy in South Carolina and leads a raid up the Comnahee to free 750. 1865 . . . returning to New York after the war, she is thrown off the train by racist conductor. 1866-1913 . . . lives in Auburn, New York 1890s . . . is active in suffrage movement and lectures at both black and white conventions. 1896-1913 . . . builds a home and hospital she runs for indigent African Americans. from Becky Stone, who will portray Harriet Tubman

“Corps of Discovery”
By Jeffrey Smith

For most people, William Clark’s real first name is “Lewis and.” The 29 months he and Meriwether Lewis spent on their odyssey to the Pacific and back made them national celebrities not unlike astronauts in the 1960s; William Clark and Meriwether Lewis were, in a way, the John Glenn and Neil Armstrong of their day.

They were perhaps the most famous explorers since Columbus, heading westward from their homes with many of the same motives. Thomas Jefferson wanted them to find “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.” Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton summed it up best when he thundered on the floor of the Senate that America needed to go “to the East, to India.” After an arduous journey confirming that the fabled Northwest Passage did not exist and, worse yet, “those tremendous mountains” stood in the way, they tried to create a positive spin. Upon their return, Clark wrote his brother Jonathan that they had, indeed, reached the Pacific and were therefore “completely successful [sic] . . . Such as nature has permitted [sic].” Getting to the lucrative east Asian trade would harder than anticipated.

The trek to the west transformed Clark in ways neither he nor any of the others could have imagined. He returned as a man with a new respect for Native American peoples that helped shape his vision of western development. He became one of the great boosters for the West, and ranked among the most respected authorities on United States-American Indian relations—by both sides.

To William Clark, the west was a source of commercial activity and national prosperity. It was a place where government takes an active role in protecting and facilitating expansion of trade, transportation, and culture. It was a place where Native Americans could evolve into “civilized” (i.e., agricultural, westernized) peoples under the protective eye of the United States. It is a source of scientific knowledge, commerce, and even a route to the lucrative Asian trade. And he planned to be part of it.

Part of his reward was appointment as chief Indian agent for the region, which necessitated moving to the frontier town of St. Louis. He spent the rest of his life there, seeing the former French and Spanish settlement grow into a thriving western city and staging point for western development. He became quite the booster for the area, too, telling his brother that it “presents flattering advantages at this time and I think it will increase [sic] as the population increases, which is beginning to be considerable.” Yet alas, he never realized the level of personal wealth he envisioned. However, he did become a leading voice in the great national debate about the west—How should it develop? What role should government play? And what about all the people who already lived there when the United States acquired it?

As the son of a Virginia (and then Kentucky) planter, Clark held a somewhat patriarchal view of society; landowners had an obligation not only to govern and lead, but also to help care for those less able to function and thrive in “civilized” society. This is part of the foundation for his rationalizing owning slaves, for example. But it also shaped his decisions about his political allies in St. Louis as well. When Clark arrived in the city before embarking up the Missouri River, he met with the most influential members of the community; the home of fur-trade czar Auguste Chouteau, for example, became a sort of unofficial headquarters that winter. When he returned and settled in St. Louis, Clark allied himself with those who he perceived to be like himself: men of property and prominence who, like himself, were the most qualified to govern simply by virtue of their position in society. These were the same men with whom he became partners in the Missouri Fur Company, and the ones who comprised the so-called “St. Louis Junta” in the political battles of the late 1810s. They were men of financial success and political influence who owned large tracts of the territory and held claims to even more real estate in large Spanish land grants (now under review since the Americans took over the region). When the public came to view this group as a self-serving political machine, Clark was tarred with the same brush; it kept him from being elected Missouri’s first governor.

Clark’s views on Native Americans didn’t endear him to many expansionists, either. He saw different races as part of a large body of humanity, all of which can presumably rise to the level of “civilization” of the Euro-Americans. But they would all need help through trade, training, schools, land, and even annuities, and he told them so. Clark’s home became the site of numerous negotiations between tribal leaders and himself, and Clark often offered the same message he had in 1805. “The object of my coming to see you,” he told them, “is not to do you injury but to do you good. The Great Chief of all the white people . . . wishing that all his red children should be happy has sent me here to know your wants that he may supply them . . . . [He] intends to build a house and fill it with such things as you may want and exchange with you.” It would be a “win-win” scenario in which both sides thrived, prospered, and advanced in this soon-to-be-tamed wilderness.

It also shaped his views on slavery too. African-Americans would also need help that came through slavery and for some, eventually, mentored freedom. In Clark’s mind, slavery protected African-Americans—including his manservant and fellow westward traveler York—from a society that they neither fully understood nor were fully capable of functioning alone within. He was, he no doubt figured, doing them a great favor by retaining them as slaves until they were “ready” for freedom; in fact, Clark freed several of his slaves (possibly including York) in later years so they could pursue other lines of work.

Today, we still leave William Clark stuck on the Corps of Discovery. After all, it did shape the rest of his life, lead him to a life connecting east and west, white and native cultures, commercial realms. His gravestone in St. Louis’ Bellefountaine Cemetery, constructed as part of the journey’s centennial celebration, sports the heads of buffalo and bear, but it recognizes him as “statesman.”

William Clark (1770 - 1838)

“Trail of Tears”
By Will Goins

Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee syllabary, the means by which anyone speaking the Cherokee language could become literate, has become an almost mythological man and little seems to be truly known about him. The creation of the syllabary has been universally hailed as a monumental work. It is the only alphabet created by one man. An innovative and efficient means of expression and pedagogy describes his work in the creation of this empowering written language. 
 
Not many of the events of Sequoyah's life are known with certainty. His name appears in a few public documents, and some accounts of him have been given in several works of reference. The larger number of these accounts have come from two or three sources which are, unfortunately, not altogether reliable. Nonetheless, he is a historical figure that became the first Native American linguist and empowered an entire nation with literacy and a means to preserve their culture in their own way and with their own words. 
 
Sequoyah lived as a boy with his mother at Tuskegee town in Tennessee. This was just out side of Fort Loudoun in what's now Monroe County west of Chillhowee Mountain, which is approximately one and a half miles east of Tasgigi, Monroe County, Tennessee. This location is only about 8 miles from Echota, the capital of the old Cherokee Nation. As far as his birth year, the best estimation is from 1760 to 1765. There is dispute about his exact birthrate.  Various dates are used by scholars. Nonetheless, Sequoyah, was born about 1760. It has been recorded that, Sequoyah stated that when an Iroquoian Peace Delegation visited at New Echota in 1770, he was living with his mother as a small boy and remembered the events. The territorial capital called "Knoxville" was founded when he was probably a teenager. It seems certain that Sequoyah lived in that section of the country during his boyhood and later removed to Will's Valley in northern Alabama.
 
Seemingly, the written language held a particular fascination for him. Seeing the written page used by white people, Sequoyah decided that he could also create this type of codification and system for the Cherokee words and language. Ultimately, he concluded that each letter represented a sound and that he would do this for the sounds in the Cherokee language. This idea, which came to him around 1809, was the seed from which the Cherokee syllabary grew. Sequoyah did not so much create the syllabary as reveal an ancient and powerful system of writing that had belonged to the People in the ancient times. The Cherokee syllabary became a hope of providing away for Cherokees to transmit their language and ideas. This has been so important to the preservation and continuance of a civilization culture and enabled the Cherokee to record and preserve their traditions for future generations.
 
Historians describe him as a man who was below medium height and slightly gimp in his walk from a childhood affliction. Sequoyah adhered to the ancient beliefs of the Cherokees and wore the traditional shirt, leggings, moccasins, and turban. Seemingly, Sequoyah he never acquired any knowledge of the English language. Although many historians believe that he was the son of a Cherokee woman and a white trader named Nathaniel Gist, his descendants dispute this claim. To most Americans he was known as George Guess; to the Cherokee he was known as Sogwali. The name Sequoyah was given to him by missionaries. Since traditional Cherokee society is matrilineal, and one’s clan is obtained through the mother, this information is of most relevance and important when researching the man’s history and background. Sequoyah’s mother’s name was Wu-te-he, and she belonged to the Red Paint Clan. The only certain information regarding his father is a statement made during Sequoyah’s lifetime about his father, which appeared in the Cherokee Phoenix (August 13, 1828). This stated his paternal grandfather was a white man. Sequoyah’s father was half Cherokee and his mother a full blood. His father’s name has been identified as either George Gist, a German peddler, or Nathaniel Gist, a friend of George Washington’’s and ancestor of the Blair family of Washington, D.C.  
Earlier employed as a blacksmith, silversmith and a trader in the Cherokee country in Georgia, he set out to create a system for codifying the Cherokee language to writing, and he compiled a table of 85 characters. This Cherokee alphabet or "syllabary" is composed of 85 unique glyphs, each representing a distinct phonetic component of the Cherokee language. As the story goes, Sequoyah turned his full attention to developing his syllabary around 1809, much to the chagrin of his wife, who considered his work a useless effort. In approximately 1809, Sequoyah gathered with some friends in his shop, and the conversation led to a discussion regarding the non-Indian’s method of communicating through writing. He pondered devising a way for the Cherokee to be able to do the same thing, although many of those around him were skeptical.  His plans were interrupted by the War of 1812. He volunteered at Turkeytown on October 7, 1813, and a month later was involved in the battle of Tallaschatche. His total length of service was three months, but three weeks after the term ended, he reenlisted. On March 27, 1814, he fought in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Just 15 days later, he was discharged and was paid $66.80 for 147 days of service.
Sequoyah started with the idea that letters stood for sounds, then tested it. There is some dispute as to when the syllabary was completed. Many historians date its completion at about 1821; Cherokee tradition holds that it was created much earlier and was actually in use as early as the late 18th cent. Sequoyah's system was not automatically embraced once he revealed it. His own people burned his books and it took him 25 years and the threat of being executed before his own people finally realized the value of preserving their traditions. Some thought that he was wasting his time when he began working on the syllabary, too, some even saying that he had come under the spell of witchcraft or was insane. In spite of this criticism, he pressed on knowing that it was possible.
He completed this important linguistic work by inversion, modification, and invention adopted the symbols to Cherokee sounds, while living in a remote cabin in Arkansas Territory in the early 1820s. Once he had shown the Cherokees living there what he had done, he traveled back to the Cherokee Nation in present-day Georgia to share his work with the main body of the tribe. Here he was met with skepticism at first, but once he had taught the system to some Cherokee youths, who were able to learn it quickly and easily, tribal leaders became enthusiastic. Sequoyah was hired as a teacher to help spread the syllabary's use, and in a short time, any Cherokee speaker who desired could read the language. Within one year, 98% percent of his nation became literate in their own language, which had never before existed in written form. 
Missionaries were enthusiastic, seeing a new way to help spread their message. With their help, the Cherokees were able to procure a set of type and set up their own printing operation. This led to the establishment of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper published by American Indians, which greeted its first readers in both Cherokee and English. The syllabary made it possible, on February 21, 1821, for the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix to be issued. 

Sequoyah (1760 - 1843)

“Around the world on a Sailing Ship”
By George Frein

Looking for a job and a little adventure, Herman Melville, just 21, found himself in a small boat, with only a quarter inch of cedar planking beneath him, being towed at break-neck speed by 60 tons of harpooned whale over Pacific waters hundreds of fathoms deep.

The great sea voyage of Herman Melville’s life took him around Cape Horn to the South Seas on a whale ship and brought him home on a navy vessel. The voyage lasted nearly four years. But an even greater journey began when he sat down at his desk to write about the sea. That journey lasted the rest of his life and took him over even deeper philosophical waters.

Melville’s great literary voyage was not a private introspection. That would not have required so much writing. Six sea books poured out of him in as many years: Typee (1846); Omoo (1847); Mardi (1848); Redburn (1849); White Jacket (1850); Moby-Dick (1851). Each one was an invitation to his countrymen to go to sea with him in order to consider about their lives at home.

Melville said he wrote for “landsmen . . . pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” He took them to sea so they could think: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.”

His first book, Typee—with its description of lush tropical nature and the alluring maiden, Fayaway—was Melville’s most popular book and it gave him a career-long reputation as “the man who lived among cannibals.” The Typee, with whom he lived briefly after jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands, probably were cannibals; they were certainly “savages” in the mind of the civilized world. And yet, they lived at ease and leisure in a Polynesian paradise. “There wasn’t a padlock in the valley,” Melville noticed. There were no mortgages, no debts, no assault and battery attorneys, no money. Their reputed cannibalism was “a rather bad trait in their character,” he admitted. But compare: “The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars . . . are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” Melville thought “four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.”

By the time Melville made his way to Tahiti and then on to Hawaii he had seen the consequences of missionary work all over the South Seas. He saw natives who had been “civilized into draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden.” He witnessed a pair of islanders harnessed to a go-cart and made to pull a missionary’s wife on her daily outing for fresh air. Knowing his audience, Melville was careful to praise the missionary’s spiritual cause while suggesting that it was only human and so prone to error and abuse. Yet he invited his readers to confront a scene in which “the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers.” Is civilization, he asked, a blessing or a curse? He repeated this question in his next two books: Omoo and Mardi.

At Honolulu Melville joined the Navy to make his way home and wrote about his return voyage in White Jacket, a book he turned out in two months of intense writing. In his tour of duty on board the frigate United States he witnessed 163 brutal floggings of American seamen. In White Jacket he asked: Was it necessary for a democratic country to subject sailors in its navy to the same inhumane practices that obtained in the navies of tyrants like the Czar of Russia. Flogging made him question whether the nation really was a democracy. Though White Jacket was an adventure story, it raised philosophical issues hinted at in its subtitle: The World in a Man of War and in the observation “No school like a ship for studying human nature.”

Earlier in the summer of White Jacket, Melville wrote Redburn, a book about his first time at sea the year before he went to the Pacific. That journey took him to England and back on merchant ship. On the way over the cargo was cotton; on the way back it was immigrants, whose misery and inhumane treatment touched Melville. He wrote defending them all: “Let us waive the agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shore; let us waive it with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come. . . . For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.” Proud of the nation’s diversity, he wrote: “America is not so much a nation as a world.” Though Redburn was about an earlier journey, it expressed some of the philosophy that grew up out the writer’s voyage around Cape Horn with an international crew.

Melville had been writing at break neck speed but he was reading at an even great rate: Shakespeare, the Bible, Hawthorne, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Balzac, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Carlyle, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dickens, Goethe, Homer, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Milton, Plato, Ruskin, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Seneca, Tennyson, and much more. “I have sailed through oceans, but I have swum through libraries,” he said.

Then there was his research for Moby-Dick. It made him feel, he said, like “a sub-sub-librarian gone through long Vaticans and street stalls of the earth.” The great epic that resulted was more than a tale about the whale fisheries. Homer had written about Achilles and Odysseus, noblemen who were fit subjects for epic literature. Melville wrote, as he said, about the “meanest mariners and renegades, and castaways.” But to them he attributed a dignity “not of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

The God absolute of Moby-Dick was the white whale himself. It was, he said, a “Job’s whale” and it symbolized the author’s quarrel with God, no less than Captain Ahab’s. And after the whale sunk the ship and only the narrator, Ishmael, survived, Melville had him address his readers with words taken straight from the book of Job when each of the four messengers brought Job news of his ruin: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” What Hawthorne said of Mardi is even more true of Moby-Dick: it is a book that makes readers swim for their very lives.

After Moby-Dick Melville’s public career went into decline, but he still traveled: to Europe, to Egypt and the Holy Land, and once more around Cape Horn. But Herman Melville’s greatest journeys continued to be those philosophical ones he took at his writing desk. And Americans can still profitably travel with him in works like The Confidence-Man, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” Battle-Pieces, his Civil War poetry, and most notably his great posthumous work, Billy Budd, Sailor.

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

The Underground Railroad
By Becky Stone

Historians have had a hard time documenting the life of Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave whose primary work took place in secret and under the cover of darkness. No records were kept of the Underground Railroad with the exception of William Still’s notes from his interviews with the fugitives who came through the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office. Who was this woman trapped between myth and reality in the American imagination?

She was the granddaughter of a pure-blood African (probably Assante) slave. The Assantes were known for their strength, their intelligence, their knowledge of agriculture, and their spirituality. Named Aramintha “Minty” Ross, Harriet was the fifth of nine children born to Harriet Green and Ben Ross. Family was always of paramount importance to Harriet. It was in order to rescue family members that she returned to Maryland. Most fugitive slaves were men. Harriet is the only fugitive slave, male or female, on record who returned time and time again to the slave states to rescue others. Harriet was illiterate, but carried herself with dignity among the elite of the abolitionist movement. Harriet is the only female fugitive slave on record to have planned and led a successful military operation during the Civil War.

The Underground Railroad was well established by the time “Minty” Ross made her get-away in 1849. A loose network of assistance to freedom had been operating since the 1600’s. By the end of the eighteenth century those networks had become more organized. By the early 1830’s,
those networks inherited the name of the newest system of transportation. The metaphors of the railroad system permeated their code. ”Conductors” brought “cargo” to “stations” run by “stationmasters” or “agents.” And the routes of escape were called “liberty lines”. Most fugitives made their way North from the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky. Although we think of white abolitionists as the stationmasters on the Underground Railroad, the network was also made up of many free blacks and slaves.

Harriet, born in 1822, grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where many free blacks and slaves worked together in the timber, shipbuilding, and sailing industries along the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay. The black population – slave and free - through their work, knew the land well, had access to transportation and were able to set up communication networks. The importation of slaves from Africa had been outlawed in 1808. Slaveholders had to make the most of the slaves they already had. The agricultural economy of the Deep South needed more slaves. Slaveholders began to sell their slaves south. Maryland and Virginia became known as “breeder states”. Until then, slave families had remained relatively intact. The threat of being sold south was horrifying - terrible enough to prompt slaves to run away, with or without their families. Slaves sold south were never heard of again. They were as good as dead. Suddenly, with the increasing number of slaves sold south, the Eastern Shore was primed for runaways. There were the marshes and waterways that were familiar to a large number of slaves and free blacks. And Pennsylvania, if everything went smoothly, was only 3 -5 days travel away. Besides, there were significant numbers of white abolitionists in the Eastern Shore and Delaware providing aid. The 1850 census recorded 259 runaways from Maryland, the greatest number of all the slave-holding states.

Harriet first ran away with two of her brothers. They returned. A few weeks later, Harriet made a run for freedom alone - successfully. Most likely Harriet took this route: northeast along the Choptank River, north across the Delmarva Peninsula to Wilmington from where you could cross over into Pennsylvania. The particulars of her or anyone’s escape remain secret – to this day.

Fugitives moved at night. They foraged for food and seldom had adequate clothing. Harriet talked of eating “marsh rabbits” (muskrats). They walked, ran, sometimes crawled on their bellies. Once they arrived at an agent’s house, they were hidden, given food, clothing and directions to someone else who could help. Stationmasters never knew who was coming, how many, or when. Fugitives traveled in small groups. Harriet once led a group of eleven. That was unusually large. Harriet carried a pistol, but she primarily led with her great strength of spirit, her uncanny knowledge of the woods, and trust in God. She believed that God would warn her of danger by giving her heart a “fluttery feeling.” “Fluttery feelings” saved her and her passengers more than once. Harriet always started her trips on Saturday nights. The next day was Sunday. The slaves might not even be missed on Sunday. No newspaper alerting the public of runaways was published on Sundays. That would automatically give them a day’s head start on the authorities. Harriet ran most of her trips in the late fall or in winter because of the longer nights. Cold, hungry, tired, riddled with fear and anxiety, many fugitives did not make it to even the first Underground stop. Harriet made this trip over and over. During her eight years on the Railroad, Harriet made 11 - 13 trips, leading somewhere between 70 and 80 fugitives to freedom . . . never losing a passenger.

Her most remarkable escape came during the Civil War in South Carolina where Harriet served as a spy for the Union’s Department of the South. She planned and led an expedition of several ships up the Combahee River which resulted in the burning and destruction of several plantations and Confederate outposts and the freeing of approximately 750 slaves.

Harriet’s work during the war included cooking, laundry, spying, and nursing. After the war, Harriet became a suffragist. She continued to raise money for the care of former slaves. Before she died in 1913, she saw the fruition of her dream - the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Home maintained by her church as “a home for elderly and indigent colored people.” Harriet Tubman has been described as “The Moses of her people,” the “greatest heroine of the age.” By her example, she was a heroine for all the ages.

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913)

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