In probing the deep spirituality, prophetic persona, and scriptural grounding of Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman (originally Araminta Ross), the authors of these two superb studies have offered fresh assessments of these familiar figures and their biblically based insurgencies against black enslavement. Moreover, these religious biographies of Turner and Tubman have expanded the parameters of African American religious history by examining how their consciousness about the topography and physical geography of their environs and their expansive beliefs about divine revelations through nature interacted with their orthodox Christianity and their African American religious sensibilities. Moreover, Turner and Tubman constructed themselves in settings in which enslavement and evangelicalism shaped their lived realities and gave them religious resources to critique ecclesial accommodations to black dehumanization. They resided in cruel, but paradoxical religious contexts of black bondage where they reckoned with the liberating Biblical language that was embedded in Methodist preaching. Despite the egalitarian theme of sinful depravity in all human beings, and despite the fact that Wesleyan whites mostly mobilized it to support slavery, Methodism provided interpretive possibilities to undergird the liberatory objectives of black worshippers and converts. Turner and Tubman, who were serious, mystical, and religiously sensitive “doers of the word,” believed that God’s divine direction required them to launch sustained and aggressive onslaughts against black enslavement.
Tiya Miles, in an insightful observation, cast Harriet Tubman in history as similarly situated with her black female religious peers, while still delineating her own distinctive characteristics. Though singularly ingenious and resourceful as an Underground Railroad conductor, Tubman resembled other black “holy women,” who, according to the author, were empowered by ecstatic spiritual experiences. Like Tubman, Elizabeth, “a Colored Minister of the Gospel,” Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote were African Methodists, either AME or AME Zion or affiliated with a majority white Methodist sect, who imbibed the Wesleyan salvific tenets of salvation, sanctification, and perfectionism. The mostly Methodist evangelical environment experienced by these African American religious women zealously emphasized the urgency of obtaining salvation and the importance of individual strivings for sanctification. This quest for an invigorated holiness deadened the impulse to sin and produced intense salvific reckonings that yielded the divine gift of perfection through which believers were being remade into a reflection of their flawless Savior.
This religious arena of personal renewal simultaneously developed a parallel salvific sphere of social holiness. The perfection of the self also compelled a similar pursuit of societal perfection. Just as sin reflected defects in humanity, slavery revealed a serious social sin that deserved divine condemnation. Hence, Jarena Lee, the widely traveled evangelist, endorsed the sacred work of abolition, while Sojourner Truth joined the lecture circuit to advance the claims of black humanity and women’s rights. Harriet Tubman followed this same salvific pattern and applied her religious energies to achieve both scriptural and social holiness objectives. An intersecting Wesleyan witness bound together Lee, Truth, Tubman, and their black female contemporaries in developing spiritual authority, autonomy, and empowerment that they deployed “to set the captives free.” Evangelical Christianity, while crucial to the construction of Tubman’s religious being, yielded to her broader encounters with other aspects of God’s creation as foundational influences that shaped her spiritual self.
Notwithstanding Tubman’s adherence to these Wesleyan tenets, she blended them with religious meanings that attached to her environmental surroundings. Hence, Tubman’s capacious religious sensibilities derived interactively from ecclesial and ecological sources. Miles noted that Tubman believed God “unfolded” the Lord’s will through “living ecological contexts.” Land, water, trees, livestock, and the expanse of agrarian fields were landscapes on which divine direction and revelation could be received and discerned. Correspondingly, Tubman believed that God guided her through concrete celestial cues that appeared in the skies, stars, meteors, and moons as she navigated directions for her rescue of the enslaved. Miles correctly declared that Tubman possessed “ecological confidence” that she mobilized as maps to chart her several forays into Maryland and toward freedom destinations in the North and in Canada. Her illiteracy was hardly a handicap for someone learned in navigating rivers and forests and following pathways offered by the stars and other heavenly bodies.
Tubman was nurtured in a resilient family that, despite the cruelties of enslavement, provided her with a solid emotional foundation, notwithstanding periods of compelled neglect and responsibilities for caring for a younger brother. Familiarity with freedom as a concrete possibility came to her because her father had been manumitted, and the woods into which she often wandered provided refuge from the harsh farm labor that was imposed upon her. Tubman, to preserve her psychic health, relied upon insights, clues, cues, foresight, and other inheritances of unknown lineage from a West African religious background that shaped her spiritual reality. All of these disparate religious inputs coalesced around a divinely inspired desire to free the enslaved. Even her physical disability, caused by a block of iron that an overseer hurled onto her head, intersected with her deepening spirituality. Disturbed sleep patterns, Miles observed, and episodes of fainting and bodily and mental incapacities, testified to God’s protection and communication with Tubman whenever she succumbed to these trances and bouts of unconsciousness. Tubman’s escape from Maryland, her flight to Philadelphia and beyond, and the dozens of enslaved people, including family members, whom she rescued benefited and witnessed her mastery of nature and faithful reliance upon God’s multifront guidance.
These decades of surreptitious movements, strategy, and an invigorated lived religion facilitated the transfer of these experiences to Tubman as a scout and military operative for the Union Army during the Civil War. Tubman’s involvement in the Combahee River operation in South Carolina resulted in the emancipation of 750 enslaved people. Here was the culmination of Tubman’s liberationist project that started with steering Underground Railroad passengers out of bondage. That the Civil War was being fought for these same objectives was reinforced and realized through Tubman’s participation in this Combahee campaign.
The original Araminta Ross, like Sojourner Truth (formerly Isabella Bomefree), reconstructed herself with the first name of her mother and the surname of her husband, a free black man, and she became Harriet Tubman. This right to shift appellations, whether from her nickname, Minty, to the autonomous Harriet, or to the deliverer, Moses, Tubman, with stealth and secret networks of Quakers, abolitionists, and black religious communities, like a phantom, appeared and disappeared while dangerously engaged in her emancipationist ventures. Navigating nature across the miles stretching from Maryland to Canada, Tubman mobilized a palpable faith force that connected her ecological expertise to disparate African Methodist congregations that shielded and nurtured her daring abolitionism. Often seen, but at other times unseen, her phantom presence became the subject of legend.
Historians chronicling the history of Israel African Methodist Episcopal in Albany, New York, claimed that Tubman slumbered under the stairwell that ascended to the upper story where the sanctuary was located. At the spot where Tubman slept, she also hid the fugitive slaves whom she was leading to “Canaan.” Tubman settled for a time in St. Catharines, Ontario, her destination in Canada for the enslaved whom she commandeered on the Underground Railroad. Aiding her efforts were members at Salem British Methodist Episcopal Church, a derivative body of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Tubman occasionally worshipped with this congregation whose origins drew from outrage over the Fugitive Law that the US Congress enacted in 1850. Later, Tubman, in 1859, bought a home in Auburn, New York, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation spiritually sustained her and her newly settled family. Though this roster of black Wesleyan churches was scarcely chronicled in Miles’ narrative, the author surely implied that the intersection between Tubman’s ecological and ecclesial engagements showed the broad religious grounding of this elusive emancipator.
Both Tubman and Turner hurled effective onslaughts against black enslavement. Tubman methodically undermined black bondage through deliberate but steady insurgencies achieved through careful collective escapes. Turner, on the other hand, organized fellow freedom fighters to deliver justice for the enslaved through violence against enslavers and their families. This attack upon the households of slaveholders, Turner believed, would spur widespread insurrections that would end slavery. Tubman, unlike Turner, though she threatened the use of her firearm against faint-hearted passengers on her Underground Railroad, eschewed violence against enslavers as her means to assault enslavement. Boarding passengers onto the Underground Railroad was for her the better strategy. Nonetheless, Miles in her Tubman biography and the late Anthony E. Kaye and his posthumous collaborator, Gregory P. Downs, in their interpretation of Nat Turner agree that the religious sensibilities of their respective subjects invigorated the battles against slavery. Both Tubman and Turner drew upon Wesleyan evangelical influences and became African Methodists, which was a temperament more than an ecclesial identity. From this Wesleyan interpretation, they sought divine guidance, whether from their African religious background, through nature, or from scripture, about how to undermine and destroy black bondage. Their expansive view of Christianity affected how innumerable black Methodists in diverse ecclesial and “brush arbor” settings lived out their faith.
Just as Miles situates Tubman in the historical context with other black “holy” women, so Kaye and Downs identify Nat Turner as the product of a black religious and emancipationist context in which African American religious self-determination and participation in armed freedom movements became models for him to follow. Unlike other accounts about Turner, Kaye and Downs argued that Methodism framed his religious development. The sect’s “practical divinity” emphasized fasting, praying, and living uprightly. Accompanying these visible evidences of scriptural holiness was a corresponding pursuit of social holiness revealed in unequivocal opposition to black enslavement. While Turner revered Methodist piety, he was troubled that these same Wesleyan adherents tolerated slavery and the attendant physical violence that enforced black subjugation. He and other black Methodists abhorred this declension in Wesleyan fealty to its antislavery origins.
These compromised white Methodists left Turner and other free and enslaved blacks to envisage themselves as African Methodists and to develop another version of Methodist belief and practice, just as Harriet Tubman had done. Their hermeneutical and ecclesial constructions drew from their experiences of living in the existential realities of the transatlantic and domestic slave trade, the cruel and unpredictable conditions of enslavement, and the uncertainties embedded in other forms of unfreedom. These circumstances determined how Methodism was integrated into the tumult surrounding their dehumanization and their concomitant search for freedom. Within this dynamic environment, they constituted African Methodism as a distinct and diverse body of Christians, whether in their own ecclesial space, mainly in the Northeast, or as loosely organized practitioners in southern spheres of black enslavement.
Kaye and Downs insightfully connect Turner’s Methodist milieu to broader developments in that sect’s tense and troubled relationship with black assertions of religious autonomy. Methodism, after English itinerant clergy arrived in New York in 1766, unleashed a successful evangelism among African Americans in the Northeast that led to an ample harvest of new members and the licensing of preachers. These developments spurred the founding of separate congregations that white Wesleyan racism spurred.
In this atmosphere of Wesleyan evangelicalism, blacks were unwittingly nurtured as independent religious thinkers, with religious autonomy and spiritual authority. Bolstered by the freedom rhetoric of the American Revolution and by actually fighting to attain his manumission was Moses Wilkinson, an enslaved Methodist preacher and veteran of Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. He and other Virginia slaves, buoyed by the promise of emancipation from Great Britain, joined the military to oppose the independence of the rebellious British North American colonies. Blacks, some of whom were Methodists, after the British lost, escaped to New York City with them, searched for “visions to reveal the will of God, divine the sure road to eternal salvation,” and located safe environs to realize their freedom. Despite being plagued by the effects of smallpox, Wilkinson departed with other blacks and the British for Nova Scotia, where Wilkinson continued to preach. Eventually, he led 514 followers to Sierra Leone. He and other Wesleyan black preachers not only fashioned their own version of Methodism, but they also sought self-determination within their own ecclesial space. In these theological and ecclesiastical assertions, they reflected the same African Methodism that characterized their contemporary, Richard Allen, in founding the diasporic African Methodist Episcopal Church. Turner was an heir to this history, and Wilkinson, the authors suggested, was for Turner a specific model of religious self-determination.
The intersection between Wesleyan spirituality and religiously inspired freedom pursuits was foundational to the “faith force” that motivated Nat Turner. From these roots, Turner delved into spheres of visions and revelations that leavened an already solid grounding in evangelical Protestantism. Most importantly, Turner’s understanding of the Hebrew Bible was built on these foundations and expanded his understanding of his religious mission to emancipate fellow slaves. Both historical realities and Biblical narratives pertaining to freedom and deliverance constructed Turner as a warrior and prophet.
The experience of enslaved Virginians fighting in the American Revolution, coupled with knowledge of similar armies of slave warriors in Cuba, Florida, and Haiti, alerted Turner to these black uprisings as a normative reality in the quest for freedom. The existence of black warriors willing to undertake the dangers and barbarities involved in insurrection educated Turner about the bloodiness of antislavery warfare. Turner’s understanding of biblical texts sacralized these seemingly secular rebellions. With reinforcement from divine revelations and other Godly communications, Turner, like so many historic and contemporary religious figures, received a Biblical warrant to fashion himself into a prophet and warrior for black liberation. Because the Bible narrated carnage that provided no exemption either for women or children, Turner’s Biblical literalism took up the sword during 4 days in August 1831 in the literal environs of Jerusalem to slay slaveholders and their households to effect black freedom. While aided by fellow insurrectionists and helped by knowledge of his immediate geography, Turner’s insurrection of a few dozen fellow warriors killed 55 whites before a state militia subdued the uprising and later lynched Turner and other righteous rebels.
Miles on Tubman and coauthors Kaye and Downs on Turner agree that these subversives against black enslavement were hardly exceptional among their contemporaries in drawing upon compelling religious resources to energize their onslaughts against black bondage. They and their contemporaries deepened their spirituality through a capacious embrace of God’s creation and what it manifested to believers in the spheres of nature and divine revelation. These religious experiences, understood through the prism of a broadly construed African Methodism, provided spiritual autonomy and authority in interpreting scripture and discerning how the Bible empowered and guided them in achieving black deliverance from enslavement. These authors, with stunning clarity and intellectual rigor, respectively define Tubman and Turner as singular figures who should be explained within a religious framework.
