Harriet Tubman and the Problem of Revisionist History

In Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University, has composed a biography of Tubman that goes beyond earlier versions. Miles duly celebrates Tubman’s well-known achievements as a leading conductor in the Underground Railroad, a cause célèbre in the abolitionist movement, a scout and spy for the Union Army, the first woman to play a leadership role in an armed raid in the U.S. military, and an activist in women’s suffrage.

The illiterate Tubman left no written records, so the main sources are the accounts of those who knew and interviewed her. But Miles tells the story with a unique perspective and a not-so-hidden agenda.

Miles acknowledges that Tubman was a God-conscious woman, one of many “Black holy women” preaching and holding prayer meetings in that era (232). Tubman talked to God and believed God talked to her through dreams and visions. She sought God’s help and, when he gave it, she carefully gave him credit. When she was finally freed, she knew that God had done the freeing. Even as Miles’s biography makes aspects of Tubman’s freedom clear, it obscures aspects of her faith in unhelpful ways.

Tubman’s Freedom

In Night Flyer, three aspects of Tubman’s freedom become clear.

1. God freed her from the trauma of slavery.

The Underground Railroad was a one-way route for good reason. Tubman lived in constant fear of being ripped away from the people who loved her most.

Three of her sisters were sold to other slave owners, never to be seen again. She was leased out to other white families, separated from her mother for months at a time. At age 7, she was responsible for caring for a white woman’s baby, even through the night. She was viciously beaten if she was caught sleeping. She suffered a life-altering brain injury as an adolescent when a white man threw a two-pound measuring weight at another slave but hit her instead. She spent the next two days in agony, with no bed to lie on. She returned to work on the third day, her skull fractured, with “blood and sweat rolling down [her] face till [she] couldn’t see” (71). She suffered excruciating headaches and seizures for the rest of her life.

There is no romanticizing American slavery.

The Underground Railroad was a one-way route for good reason. Tubman lived in constant fear of being ripped away from the people who loved her most.

2. God freed her through the provision of nature.

Miles intends to demonstrate Tubman’s “eco-spiritual” worldview (3). Tubman was both “a friend of nature” and “a partner with God.” Trees, for example, are a central theme throughout the book. Tubman’s first cradle was hewn from a sweetgum tree by her father, wrapping her in protective safety. As an adult traveling the Underground Railroad, she found safety once again among the trees, when she “threw herself into the arms of the woods . . . a sanctuary where mounted hunters had no purchase” (127).

3. God freed her for the good of others.

If Egypt is the Southern slave states and the wilderness is the Underground Railroad, the promised land is north of the Mason-Dixon line. Eventually, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, where William Seward (secretary of state under Lincoln) sold her a house and seven acres. The former slave became a homeowner, and her house became a refuge for her family, freed slaves, and broken people who had no family. The poor, the crippled, the abused, and the oppressed found safe harbor there. She spent the rest of her days in Auburn, showing mercy to the marginalized.

Confused Christianity

Yet in Night Flyer, Miles obscures the Christian faith Tubman claimed.

Using categories no 19th-century person would recognize, Miles paints Tubman as the “foremother” of “ecowomanism.” Ecowomanism is a version of liberation theology in which black women are concerned as much with “justice for the earth as with justice for people” (247). According to Miles, the bodies of black women like Tubman were abused by white men under slavery, and they’re being abused now as black lives are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change. “The link between the feminine divine,” writes Melanie Harris, “and the feminization of the earth is important to acknowledge from an ecowomanist frame.”

Miles ably demonstrates that Tubman was influenced by a syncretistic combination of African-derived folk beliefs and multidenominational Christianity. In the end, what matters most for Miles is that Tubman found in this mixture “spiritual and emotional reinforcements” (59). For ecowomanism, it doesn’t seem to matter so much if Christianity is true. What matters is that it works. Ecowomanists may find their reinforcements in other religions or a personalized combination of several just as well.

In short, what gets lost in Night Flyer is the gospel. The word “gospel” is used throughout the book but never clearly defined. Without any record of Tubman’s conversion, Miles relies on conversion stories of black women who were Tubman’s contemporaries. These were largely emotional experiences, marked by falling unconscious on the floor, visions, dreams, or overwhelming feelings of joy.

Miles has limited source material to work from, so she creatively fills in the gaps to reconstruct a story of Tubman according to her own ideals.

Hopeful Future

The points evangelicals tend to criticize about historical figures like Tubman are largely the product of living under the white supremacy of professing Christians, as historians like Miles remind us.

Miles has limited source material to work from, so she creatively fills in the gaps to reconstruct a story of Tubman according to her own ideals.

We may wish Tubman had read more of the Bible, but slavery deprived her of literacy. We may wish she was more precise with her theology. Yet, like Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th century, no black students (especially no black women) in the 19th century were allowed in the South’s conservative theological seminaries. We may wish she’d depended less on ecstatic dreams and visions, but since she didn’t have access to books or a steady diet of sound teaching, why are we shocked?

Thankfully, Miles informs the reader that Tubman worshiped at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a denomination founded by black Methodists who experienced discrimination in the Methodist church (222). But while they renounced the racism, they didn’t discard the doctrine, bringing with them the Methodist Articles of Religion and its orthodox Christian gospel.

Harriet Tubman is a remarkable historical figure. I hope to see her enjoying the environmental ecstasies of the new earth someday. Night Flyer will likely deepen a reader’s appreciation of Tubman’s extraordinary legacy, but it also has the potential to confuse readers about the nature of her faith by introducing ideas Tubman wouldn’t have recognized.