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Review

Reviewed Work(s): Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 409. Paper $24.95. Cloth $89.95. by Milton C. Sernett

Review by: Margaret Washington

Source: The Journal of African American History , Vol. 95, No. 2 (Spring 2010), pp. 260- 262

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.2.0260

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260 The Journal of African American History

and published interviews. In the discussion of the rebellion itself and the responses and repercussions, Scully describes the mass panic among white Virginians who created a volatile atmosphere of intense racial mistrust. White male dominance was restored through the execution and vilification of the “slave rebels.” Sensationalized newspaper accounts fomented racial disharmony and social unrest. Ultimately, white supremacists used the revolt to further justify the maintenance of complete white control.

The title, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, is somewhat misleading, since it suggests that the primary focus is the religious environment that produced Nat Turner. However, this study sheds very little light on Nat Turner’s religion or the religious basis for resistance and rebellion among enslaved African Americans. Turner and other the African Americans, free and enslaved, play only supporting roles in this discussion of race and religion in antebellum Virginia.

Quenton L. Keatts Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 409. Paper $24.95. Cloth $89.95.

The first scholarly biography of Harriet Tubman, the famous Underground Railroad conductor, did not appear until 1943, and after a hiatus of sixty years, a trilogy of works on Tubman was published in 2003 and 2004. However, given that this amazing Maryland-born, non-literate, former slave, who came to be known as the “Moses of Her People,” had not only been given her rightful place in the historiography, one would think that a new work would add little to the existing literature. However, in Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, Milton C. Sernett adds to the Tubman scholarship in an original and engaging manner by using Tubman’s life to examine Tubman’s place in U.S. history and investigate how she “has captured the American imagination so strongly, especially in the recent past.” In weaving together the “real Tubman,” the sainted Tubman, and the symbolic Tubman, Sernett re-presents her as a “national icon” who teaches us “about ourselves as the American people.”

Sernett begins by examining how Harriet Tubman was enshrined in American culture beginning with white abolitionists who first inscribed her place in history by recounting her Underground Railroad activities in newspaper accounts during the Civil War. Tubman herself, a great storyteller, helped to create her public persona. These “stories” and recollections were used by Sarah Bradford in 1869 to hurriedly compose the text for Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Bradford managed to reissue Scenes in 1886, to help support an impoverished Tubman. Republished as

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Books Reviews 261

Harriet, the Moses of Her People, Bradford not only took “literary license,” but Sernett also points to Bradford’s use of “racist and stereotypical language and imagery.” While Tubman was still alive and residing in Auburn, New York, Bradford and others were compiling what people said about her. Sernett believes that Bradford’s interposition in the narrative creates a “mediated biography,” which was the source of the myths that developed around Tubman’s antislavery activities, including descriptions of sensational escapes. Bradford was the one who wrote that Harriet returned to the South “nineteen times” and brought over “three hundred” enslaved people to freedom. Likewise, the amount of the reward for her arrest shot up to $40,000 in Bradford’s recounting. Sernett devotes too much space to the debate over what Harriet’s exploits may or may not have achieved as part of the Underground Railroad, and the recent studies of antislavery vigilance committees suggesting that Harriet Tubman was by no means unique. However, Tubman emerged as the dominant historical symbol of black resistance to slavery and she has been embraced, memorialized, commemorated, and championed by Americans from the late 19th century to the present.

Tubman’s representations changed over time and were captured by various segments of American society. Harriet Tubman, the warrior, was a popular image from the late 1850s into the Civil War, when she was allowed to ride at the head of Colonel James Montgomery’s troops, and later led a squad of black spies on reconnaissance missions for the Union Army. With the coming of Jim Crow and heightened white chauvinism, most Americans in the mainstream forgot about Harriet Tubman, but African Americans did not. Tubman was the guest of honor at the inaugural meeting of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and a souvenir poster from the meeting included an image of Tubman standing with a rifle. Other African American groups celebrated Tubman, and after her death in 1913 the black residents of Auburn purchased her home with plans to make it a memorial to her life and work. This was to be the first of many memorializations of Tubman, which continued steadily in many art forms. She is often depicted as the Underground Railroad conductor, and “Moses,” or as the demanding “General Tubman”; and in 2000, there was the controversial mural painted in Baltimore, Maryland, depicting a gun-toting Tubman parting the Red Sea. Tubman had become an iconographic figure, even if she never actually “led” men into combat. Although the U.S. Army never officially recognized Tubman’s service in the military, a U.S. Navy battleship was named for her during World War II. In examining historical writings, literature, poems, paintings, sculptures, and other representations, Sernett is able to reveal the complexity and capaciousness of Harriet Tubman as a historical figure, powerful enough to become an enduring icon.

There are some redundancies and repetitions in this study. Sernett takes up too much space in too many places discussing the early biographers Sarah Bradford

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262 The Journal of African American History

and Earl Conrad; and while there is a separate chapter devoted to modern authors, they also are discussed throughout the work. Sernett’s assertion that Conrad, like Bradford, produced a “mediated biography” in 1943 because he could not “free himself from the context of his times and the convolutions on race that were then current” is unconvincing. Scholarship is shaped by the times in which it is carried out, but this does not mean that scholars did not offer a balanced perspective in their work. We should keep in mind, Sarah Bradford was not a scholar; and Earl Conrad, a leftist journalist who wrote at least twenty-five books, conducted exhaustive research for his well-written study for which he is not given enough credit.

Nonetheless, Sernett’s Harriet Tubman is a rich, informative, well-documented study by a noted historian of the African American experience who has written about antislavery activities and African American religion as well as a significant work on the Great Migration. Some may question whether Tubman is “America’s most malleable icon,” as Milton Sernett maintains, but those interested in the evolution of Americans’ collective memory of Harriet Tubman in its many artistic, political, social, and historical forms will enjoy this book.

Margaret Washington Cornell University

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 362. Cloth $49.95.

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson’s Exiles at Home confirms the familiar and unfortunate history of “Creoles of color” in New Orleans and describes the failed efforts by 19th-century “colored” political leaders to maintain positions of power and social status in post–Civil War Louisiana. Moving beyond the prominent figures associated with the Creoles’ history such as Homer J. Plessy and Rodolphe Desdunes, Thompson uncovers many individual actors who struggled to maintain a unique community in a society increasingly divided between black and white. Most significantly, her analysis does not focus on Creoles of color as coming up against an overpowering tide of racialization by the end of the 19th century, but examines the stories of individuals who came together to defiantly define themselves as a cultural group. When legal or “Jim Crow” segregation was thrust upon New Orleans’s Creoles of color, they were not passive, but engaged in constant political, social, and economic struggles to negotiate their distinctive place in the new order and to preserve the community’s legacy.

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