Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman

Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman, published in 1954, is a middle grade biography of Underground Railroad conductor and activist Harriet Tubman. It is nonfiction but contains several fictionalized elements. Author Dorothy Sterling is known for historical nonfiction; she was one of the first American writers to bring Black history to young audiences, and Freedom Train keeps with this mission. It shares the story of Harriet’s early life as an enslaved person in Maryland, her decision to use the Underground Railroad to seek freedom, her tireless work to help others do the same, her service to the nation during the Civil War, and her later life as a social activist. Sterling shows how Harriet and others draw on deep convictions and religious faith to survive horrific times and considers the lasting impact that both Harriet and the Underground Railroad have on American society. 

This guide refers to the 1987 Scholastic paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of racism, child abuse, death, graphic violence, and gender discrimination. In particular, they discuss anti-Black racism and enslavement.

Language Note: As a text written in 1950s US English, Freedom Train contains some outdated language. In this guide, terminology such as “Master” and “Mistress” will be preserved in direct quotations when discussing specific characters not identified by other names in the original text; the word “slave” will only be used in direct quotations or in reference to the institution of the transatlantic slave trade. This guide also preserves the original text’s references to Harriet’s disability as “sleeping spells,” although modern biographers believe it is likely that she experienced epilepsy because of the traumatic brain injury she received as a teenager.

Summary

Harriet Tubman, at seven years old, is an enslaved Black person working in the house of Miss Sarah and her husband. Her job is to clean, wait at the table, and tend to Sarah’s infant child. She is always exhausted and hungry, and she is frequently yelled at and brutally beaten for her perceived failures. One day, she tries to sneak a lump of sugar to eat. Sarah catches her and runs after her with a whip. Harriet hides in a pigsty, where she is eventually discovered by her father, Daddy Ben. Ben takes her home and tries to comfort her, but her mother, Old Rit, points out that her life would be easier if she smiled and complied with the “whites.” Harriet is unable to agree with this perspective, however: Something inside her rebels against the idea of subservience. The next day, Sarah whips Harriet until she is nearly unconscious. Rit nurses Harriet back to health, and Harriet is next sent to work outdoors, in the fields.

Harriet has people in her life who support her desire for freedom. Cudjoe, an elderly Black man on the farm, teaches Harriet what the Bible teaches about liberation and hears news about rebellions against enslavers and abolitionists working to end slavery. When she is a young teenager, Harriet meets a man named Jim who tells her about the Underground Railroad, a secret network of people who help enslaved people travel north into states where slavery has already been made illegal. When Jim decides to seek freedom, Harriet helps him by getting in the way of an overseer trying to capture him. She is severely injured when the overseer throws a metal weight at Jim but misses, hitting Harriet in the head. Harriet’s skull is fractured. Rit tends to her for months during her slow recovery. When Harriet’s wound finally heals, she has a permanent dent in her skull. She sometimes falls asleep unexpectedly, even when she is standing up.

From this incident, Harriet learns that she can stand up to the white people around her and survive. She secures permission from her enslaver to hire out her time in exchange for a weekly payment to him, and she begins to save up money. Her goal is to save enough to purchase her freedom, but her enslaver sets a very high price, and Harriet works many jobs to save money faster. During this time, she meets a free Black man named John Tubman. They fall in love and marry. John begins to run through the money that Harriet saved, and they argue often. When her enslaver dies, Harriet learns that his widow plans to sell Harriet and her brothers to work on cotton plantations in the South. She decides to use her knowledge of the Underground Railroad to plan her flight to freedom.

Harriet goes to the home of a local Quaker and gets information about a route to take and the location of a white man who will help her along the way. She talks her brothers into escaping with her, and they set out on a rainy night. The weather makes the journey difficult, and her brothers persuade her to turn back. Harriet soon learns that the sale of her and her brothers is imminent; she decides to leave on her own that night. She follows the Choptank River, careful to avoid the traffic around its banks. When she reaches its source, she turns onto the road to Camden, Delaware. When she arrives at the home of Ezekiel Hunn, the man whom the Quaker woman told her to look for, it is near midnight. She paces all night, trying to stay alert. In the morning, she cautiously approaches a woman at the house. It is Eliza, Ezekiel’s wife. Eliza and Ezekiel bring Harriet inside and make sure that she eats and has a comfortable night’s rest.

The next morning, Ezekiel drives Harriet as far as he can and explains how to locate his brother John’s home on her way. John drives Harriet another part of the way and leaves her with directions to a bridge outside Wilmington, Delaware, where she waits for a conductor who will help her cross the heavily patrolled bridge. When Harriet meets the conductor, he disguises her as a man, and they cross the bridge together on foot. In Wilmington, Harriet finds Thomas Garrett’s house. Thomas hides her in a secret room until Sunday, when the people who capture freedom seekers are in church. On Sunday, he drives her through the city. Before he leaves her, Thomas explains where to cross into the free state of Pennsylvania. Harriet makes the last leg of her journey and is overjoyed to find herself finally free.

Harriet works for various families and saves money. On a day off, she meets William Still, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. William becomes her first real friend in Pennsylvania. Harriet tells him that it is her intention to return to Maryland as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. She will become like Moses, leading her people to freedom. Harriet’s first trip back is to help her sister Mary Ann leave the South. Next, she makes the dangerous journey to help her brother William Henry and his girlfriend, Catherine, go north. Because the Fugitive Slave Act has just passed, it is no longer safe for Harriet to end their journey in Pennsylvania. She escorts William and Catherine all the way to St. Catharines, in Ontario, Canada. Here, a small number of self-emancipated Black people have relocated and are trying to build their own community. Harriet helps by cooking, chopping wood, and providing nursing care to the sick. The community continues to grow, and on Harriet’s next trip to St. Catharines, when she brings her brothers Benjamin, Robert, and Henry to the North, the town has grown to 6,000 people.

Rit and Ben are too elderly to walk the long way from Maryland to Pennsylvania, but Harriet raises the money needed to pay for train tickets and false documents, and she brings her parents north. In 1857, Harriet builds a house in St. Catharines for her parents, and the whole family is back together at last. Harriet spends a few months each year in St. Catharines with her family, but she does not stop traveling back to Maryland to help others find their freedom. She becomes famous among both the enslaved and the enslavers, and people begin to refer to her as “Moses.” In December 1860, she makes her final trip into the South as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a few months before the beginning of the US Civil War. Rit complains that St. Catharines is too cold, so Harriet builds a house in Auburn, New York, and she and her parents settle there.

In the months before the Civil War begins, Harriet and others help a man called Charles Nalle escape from the New York jail where he is being held under the Fugitive Slave Act. Instead of being sent back to Virginia and re-enslaved, Charles makes it to Canada and stays free. Harriet also meets and befriends John Brown, a prominent abolitionist who is planning to conduct raids in the South to help enslaved people obtain freedom. Harriet and John plan his campaign together, but when the time comes to put the plan into action, Harriet’s head injury causes her to fall ill again. John captures the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, but he is arrested and executed soon afterward. Harriet mourns John and is inspired by his sacrifice. When the Civil War finally begins, Harriet is determined to enlist in the Union Army.

Because she is a Black woman, it takes her a whole year to enlist, but she finally arrives in coastal South Carolina to join the command of Major General David Hunter. Hunter is unofficially building the first Black regiment in the Union Army. Like Harriet, he believes that the war cannot be won without the help of Southern Black people rising up against their oppressors, and he asks Harriet to act as a liaison with the Black communities in the area. Harriet helps teach local people skills and trades that they can use to earn money, and she is pleased as hospitals, schools, and housing are established for the formerly enslaved. Hunter asks Harriet to act as a scout, using her understanding of how to move undetected throughout the countryside to secretly travel farther into the interior of the state, which is still held by the Confederacy, and report on the location of the rebel troops.

On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all Black residents of Confederate states are legally free. Hunter’s Black regiment is subsequently made an official part of the nation’s army. Soon, several more such units form, and the Union Army makes progress in moving inland from the coast. In 1864, General Sherman begins his March to the Sea, moving Union troops from Tennessee through Georgia and toward South Carolina’s interior. Hunter knows that the war is now all but won, and he sends Harriet home to Auburn to visit her parents. Because the family’s finances are always precarious, Rit asks Harriet where her pay from the Army is. Harriet explains that once Black troops were made official, the Army offered them much lower pay than the white troops. Black soldiers—including Harriet—refused to draw this insulting pay, saying they would fight for free until all soldiers were paid equally. Harriet has paperwork showing what she is owed, and she intends to collect it.

When Harriet meets with Secretary of State William Seward, he tells her that he can only get her back pay for her if she stays in the Army. He offers Harriet a new posting, but before she can get there, a group of women from the Sanitary Commission persuades her that her help is urgently needed in the Black hospitals of Virginia, which are in deplorable condition. Harriet chooses to go to Virginia, where she works to improve the hospitals until 1865. That April, Lincoln is assassinated. In the summer, Harriet returns to Auburn for good. She continues to serve the public by taking needy people into her home and opening two Black schools. In 1869, she marries a former soldier, Nelson Davis. Rit and Ben pass away, and in 1888, Nelson also dies. Harriet stays busy, founding a church, starting a home for the elderly, and working on behalf of women’s suffrage and the temperance movement. Because the money she can earn raising chickens and selling vegetables is not enough, she engages in a years-long fight to get her back pay from the government and allows a neighbor, Sarah Bradford, to write and sell her biography. In 1913, Harriet passes away at home, surrounded by her loved ones.