This is the author’s posthumous work, left in manuscripts to a few of his private pupils in Occultism and is a valuable addition and a library in occult subjects. Spiritual astrology and the “Zodiacal Signs” are especially elaborated. Alchemy, Talismans, Magic, the Magic Wand, Symbolism, Correspondence, Penetralia, etc-, etc., are a few of the subjects created fn a scholarly and masterly manner, showing the author to be familiar with his subjects.
Thomas Henry Burgoyne (born Thomas Dalton) 1855 – 1894 was a Scottish occultist and astrologer. He was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in Britain and was an editor of the The Occult Magazine. Burgoyne moved to America, wrote The Light of Egypt, and founded the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light in America.
“In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.” — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
You don’t expect moral leadership from mice. And yet, in a recent study, rodents showed more empathy, urgency, and compassion for strangers than the men currently shaping our nation’s future. While lab mice display empathy by resuscitating unconscious cage-mates, Trump and Musk gleefully slash food aid, housing support, and global relief efforts — all cheered on by a right-wing movement that now sees empathy as a fatal weakness.
Frankly, I couldn’t avoid them; at least half the parents of the kids in our care were easily identified as psychopaths or diagnosable with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Watching today’s GOP I’m getting flashbacks.
And this embrace of psychopathy isn’t something new for Republicans; their disdain for empathy has deep roots that reach back a half-century or more.
Most recently, this broke into public consciousness when Elon Musk trash-talked empathy in an interview with Joe Rogan:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through, and not just be programmed like a robot.”
The “they” who are “exploiting” the “bug” of empathy are, of course, Democrats who believe one of the jobs of government is to provide for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And average Americans who think we should help the helpless, feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, provide a safety net for our elders, and care for and educate our children.
You know, like Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25.
That, in fact, is what’s normal not just for humans but for all mammals; empathy is one of the universal characteristics across our class of animals, as any pet owner can tell you. In a remarkable study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science last month, researchers knocked out mice with anesthesia and let them be found by other mice.
Even when they’re total strangers, the conscious mice did everything they could — including a mouse-like form of CPR — to revive their companions. They felt empathy and acted on it.
Contrast this with Republicans who shrug when told that millions will die because of the cutoff of USAID assistance to poor nations that cost a mere .3% of our federal budget. Or who sneer at people who need Medicaid, school lunches, or Social Security Disability aid.
Just during the past few weeks, Trump has cancelled a billion dollars worth of support to food banks here in America, another billion to help low-income people pay for housing, and is taking an axe to Social Security. And he and Musk are gleeful about it.
How did it get this bad?
The Republican embrace of apathy/cruelty/antipathy/sociopathy really began to take form in the late 1970s and early 1980s as what became the Reagan movement enthusiastically embraced the writings and teachings of Ayn Rand and her Objectivist/Libertarian worldview.
Ayn Rand’s novels have informed libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
“Many among the Silicon Valley ultra-rich dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popularpress with frequentreference to Rand.”
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”
Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”
Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite.
Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and the leading male characters in so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:
“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
“…has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.
Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”
After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Pressdetailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”
Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: like Rand, he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”
“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.
But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.
Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.
Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see strongman saviors in Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.
“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:
“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him.
Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.
“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.
Nobody knows for sure what causes a lack of empathy — or even a disdain for empathy — in people like Hickman, Rand, and across today’s GOP. There’s been a debate for decades in the psychological community about whether it’s nature or nurture, its association with some aspects of the autism spectrum, or if it’s even a “war winning” gene we inherited from our chimp ancestors that helped us destroy the Neanderthals and conquer the planet.
Like Trump, Musk, Johnson and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s psychopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly damaged president.
The result so far is over a half-million Americans who unnecessarily died from Covid, an epidemic of homelessness, and the ongoing collapse of the governmental institutions undergirding this nation’s social safety net.
While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarians who control the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.
Maybe it’s time we stop looking to billionaires and strongmen for salvation — and start learning from the mammals who still know how to care for their own. Because if mice can show more humanity than our political and corporate overlords, what’s our excuse?
I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We’re in the worst national emergency of our lives.
It is not coming directly from threats we should be coping with — climate change destroying our planet, another pandemic threatening millions of lives, artificial intelligence taking over our jobs and brains, nuclear proliferation threatening the future of life on earth.
No. This national emergency is coming from a madman determined to turn America into a dictatorship and from his crazed assistants, including the richest person in the world.
What can I say that’s even remotely encouraging at this point?
Six things.
1. Voters are furious.
On Tuesday, Democrats flipped a Trump-voting seat in the Pennsylvania state Senate. James Malone defeated a well-funded and well-known Republican, Josh Parsons, in Lancaster County. Malone openly campaigned against Trump and Musk and made sure his opponent was tied to them.
This was a red Republican area that went +15 for Trump in 2024. The last time a Democrat won this seat was in 1889.
Other state and federal districts are showing the same trajectory — away from Trump and Musk.
2. Bernie and AOC are drawing record crowds.
Some 34,000 people turned out at Civic Center Park in Denver to hear Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” As Bernie said: “We will not allow America to become an oligarchy. This nation was built by working people, and we are not going to let a handful of billionaires run the government.”
It was the biggest rally of Bernie’s entire career, including his presidential races. Hours later, the two spoke before a crowd of about 11,000 at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
According to YouGov, Sanders is the most popular politician in the country, with a +7 favorability. (Trump is -5, Vance is -8, Musk is -12, GOP is -15. Schumer is -33, and the Democratic Party as a whole is -35.)
3. April 5 protests are planned everywhere.
On April 5, 2025, Americans are hitting the streets. The “Hands Off!” movement — in response to Trump’s and Musk’s devastation — is the product of a large coalition. You can find the action nearest you by typing in “April 5 demonstration near me” on your browser. General information from one of the sponsoring organizations can be found here.
4. Trump is fumbling on all fronts.
— “Signalgate” — the group chat scandal — isn’t just an embarrassment for Trump and his regime. It also demonstrates that they cannot govern. They can’t even manage the most elementary of steps, like making sure they’re meeting secretly and securely.
At best, both Pete Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — not to mention the White House comms operation — are damaged goods. There is no administration in the world, beyond this one, where a blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns.
Leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) — have sent a letter to the Pentagon’s acting inspector general requesting a formal investigation over “the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
— The economy is in deep trouble. Consumer confidence continues to plummet amid growing worries about inflation and recession. Trump’s tariffs — both those already implemented and those proposed — are already raising prices across the board.
— The Trump-Musk DOGE is threatening popular programs. DOGE cuts caused the Social Security website to crash four times in 10 days, leaving millions of recipients unable to log in. Office managers are answering phones instead of receptionists because so many Social Security employees have been laid off. Phone services have been eliminated. Field offices are being cut.
Meanwhile, Trump-Musk DOGE cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency are already causing thousands of Americans who have lost their homes in floods and fires to do without any aid.
5. Trump’s polls are plummeting.
As a result of all of the above, Americans are turning on Trump. Although I’m not a huge believer in individual polls, I pay attention when every major poll shows the same thing:
YouGov poll taken 3/22 to 3/25, Trump’s disapproval (49 percent) exceeds approval (48 percent).
Reuters/Ipsos taken 3/21 to 3/23 is even worse. His disapproval is 51 percent and approval only 45 percent.
Morning Consult poll taken 3/21 to 3/23 shows his disapproval at 50 percent and approval at 47 percent.
American Research Group poll taken 3/17 to 3/20 shows his disapproval at 51 percent and approval at 45 percent.
An NBC News poll taken 3/7 to 3/11 shows that a majority of Americans (52 percent) are disappointed with Trump’s appointees — a higher percentage than at the start of Trump’s first term, or at the start of Obama’s, George W. Bush’s, or Clinton’s.
6. The courts continue to hold Trump and Musk in check, but for how long?
Federal judges are requiring that Trump reinstate 25,000 federal workers he fired; blocking the Trump regime from banning transgender people from the military; stopping ICE and the Department of Homeland Security from detaining several international graduate students for participating in demonstrations or adding their names to dissenting publications; and stopping ICE from deporting people without due process of law.
All told, over 60 federal courts have halted or pushed back against the Trump-Musk onslaught. Only three have found Trump and/or Musk to be following the law.
The massive pushback from the federal courts has led Trump to threaten federal judges. It has also led Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to suggest potentially defunding, restructuring, or eliminating the federal courts altogether. “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said.
***
These six morsels of hope are small relative to the damage Trump and Musk are doing, but I wanted to let you know that all is not lost; there is push-back against them.
The damage is likely to accelerate in weeks to come.
Trump is gearing up his attacks on lawyers and law firms that during Trump’s first term challenged him or offered pro bono services to nonprofits that challenged him.
His Justice Department is just beginning to target his enemies.
His mass raids on alleged undocumented workers and deportations are just getting started.
His (and RFK Junior’s) campaign against vaccinations is already costing lives, including those of children who were not vaccinated against measles.
America has never been subject to this degree of cruelty, incompetence, and disregard for democratic norms.
My hope is that this horrific experience will lead to a new era of fundamental reform — of our economy, our democracy, and our commitment to social justice and the rule of law.
VATICAN CITY—With many remarking that they’d had their eyes on the holy artifacts since they first saw them, cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church reportedly began placing stickers this week on the Vatican relics they wanted when Pope Francis dies. “I’ll take these fragments of the true cross, I’ll take St. Peter’s bones, and before someone else claims it, I’ll take the Shroud of Turin,” said His Eminence Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, who placed an adhesive red dot onto the Veil of Veronica and remarked that it would bring a much needed pop of color to his otherwise drab bedroom. “Honestly, Pope Francis and I already talked about my inheritance, but I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff like I did when John Paul died. There’s no way Cardinal Mamberti is getting his grubby little hands on my crown of thorn fragments. Or my favorite, the holy foreskin.” At press time, Cardinal Re was kicking himself after a fellow prelate had beaten him to the punch and placed a sticker on the Holy Lance.
Briana Manning, community healing program coordinator for the Oakland-based nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, sits in the “Audre Lorde Room,” a prayer and meditation space inside the nonprofit’s downtown Oakland office. Credit: Roselyn Romero
When people talk about violence and its impact on Oakland residents, the focus is usually on shootings, assaults, and other crimes one person commits against another.
But Briana Manning says it’s important to conceptualize violence in broader terms.
“Homelessness, food insecurity, lack of mental health services, and communities not being invested in for generations — these are all forms of violence systematically,” she said.
Since July 2020, Manning has worked as the community healing program coordinator for Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based nonprofit that supports communities of color and provides leadership opportunities to youth disproportionately impacted by violence and mass incarceration.
The community healing program uses what Manning calls a “holistic healing” model, which aims to address a person’s basic and psychological needs. That might look like connecting people to food, housing, or jobs; counseling them through their grief; or referring them to therapy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and other alternative healing modalities.
“Being able to address their immediate needs, like mental health needs, housing needs — all of those things are forms of healing,” she told The Oaklandside in a recent interview.
And these kinds of healing that address forms of systemic violence can play a role in reducing interpersonal violence, the thinking goes.
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Most of the community members Manning and Urban Peace Movement serve have been impacted by gun violence, whether that means they lost a loved one to homicide or have been victimized themselves. Many of them are Black and Latino.
Most perpetrators of gun violence, Manning said, “are operating from a place of hurt; there’s a need that has not been met.” A 2018 study from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform found that victims of gun violence are more likely to engage in retaliatory shootings.
Holistic healing “not only disrupts violence but helps people face themselves,” she said, adding that healing also acts as a form of violence prevention. “Some people have not had the chance to pause and ask themselves, ‘How has this impacted me?’”
In addition to organizing vigils for individuals and families, Manning provides a meditation and prayer space at Urban Peace Movement’s office in downtown Oakland. The “Audre Lorde Room” is equipped with sage, candles, a singing bowl, incense, coloring books and pencils, tarot cards, and framed photos honoring deceased community members.
Personal experiences have convinced Manning of the need for ‘holistic healing’ work
An altar inside the Audre Lorde Room features a singing bowl, candles, framed photos of deceased loved ones, and other items. Credit: Roselyn Romero
Born in Sacramento, Manning was adopted at age 3 after being in an abusive foster home. She re-entered the foster care system shortly after, moving back and forth between California and Texas until ninth grade. She emancipated from the foster care system at 18.
“I am very lucky that I was able to get into housing specifically for people with disabilities,” said Manning, who has cerebral palsy. “There are so many kids that slip through the cracks or don’t get the proper care they need to become an adult.”
After graduating with degrees in sociology and criminal justice from Sacramento City College and Sacramento State University, respectively, she worked at a high school in Sacramento for two years as a mentor to foster youth. Afterward, she worked as a youth employment specialist at a nonprofit for four years, helping teens and young adults who have dropped out of high school get their diplomas, find jobs, and connect to community resources.
In 2019, Manning moved from Sacramento to Oakland to work for MISSSEY, a nonprofit that supports survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. As she counseled children and teen survivors — many of whom were in the foster care system — she witnessed firsthand what she calls the “CPS-to-prison” pipeline, a trend in which those who have entered the child welfare system are disproportionately likely to become involved in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.
“When people’s needs are not met, they move in survival mode,” she said. “When people are in survival mode, they’re unpredictable.”
Later, while working at Bay Area Community Services, a local nonprofit that helps place people in temporary and permanent housing, Manning saw how the needs of people with disabilities were often neglected, particularly at the start of the COVID pandemic. As part of Contra Costa County’s COVID-19 hotel shelter program, she delivered three meals a day to unhoused people quarantining in Richmond hotels. She grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of support for people after they tested negative for COVID and had nowhere else to go.
“That gap in services is also a form of violence,” Manning said.
Heal-R-Town and other programs aim to bring communities together and improve public safety
A boy gets a free haircut at Scratch & Fade, a wellness festival hosted by Urban Peace Movement. Credit: Celeste Hamilton Dennis
As part of her work at Urban Peace Movement, Manning and her colleague Tenika Blue co-facilitate intergenerational group healing circles called “Heal-R-Town.” Typically held on Zoom every third Friday and in person once a quarter, the healing circles use a “popular education” approach in which everyone shares their experiences and learns from one another.
“I think youth can teach our elders a thing or two, and our elders can teach the youth a thing or two,” she said. “You can’t heal in isolation.”
Heal-R-Town meetings are free and open to the public, with previous sessions having some attendees from out of state. In-person healing circles typically see between 20 and 30 participants. Virtual meeting attendance varies widely.
The meetings, which usually last about an hour and a half, typically begin with a check-in question for all attendees, followed by a grounding exercise, discussion questions based on a particular topic, and an activity. During the healing circle, attendees are asked to chime in and jot down any insights that jump out to them.
“It’s a community effort,” said Manning. “Healing is not just about the individual — it’s also about the community and taking things back to the people they know and love.”
At the most recent Heal-R-Town last Friday on Zoom, Manning led community members through a series of prompts on physical wellness — namely, how rest, nourishment, and movement can be acts of healing. Last month, she facilitated a self-love-themed healing circle where she guided participants in making bouquets and writing love letters to themselves. Those letters, she said, will be mailed to participants at a later date.
Heal-R-Town is just one of the programs Urban Peace Movement offers. The nonprofit also hosts Scratch & Fade, a wellness festival in Oakland where community members can get free haircuts, manicures, massages, acupuncture, and other services.
“It may not look like it, but those are all forms of healing,” Manning said.
On top of her work for Urban Peace Movement, she offers life coaching, tarot card readings, Reiki, and mediumship through her business Evolving Soul Healing & Wellness. She’s also the author of a poetry book, “Deep Down in My Soul,” and will release her own deck of tarot cards later this year.
“I love using my own magic to help people access theirs,” she said, “because we all have it.”
Roselyn Romero covers public safety for The Oaklandside. She was previously The Oaklandside’s small business reporter as a 2023-24 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism Fellow. Before joining the team, she was an investigative intern at NBC Bay Area and the inaugural intern for the Global Investigations team of The Associated Press through a partnership with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. She graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2022 with a bachelor’s in journalism and minors in Spanish, ethnic studies, and women’s & gender studies. She is a proud daughter of Filipino immigrants and was born and raised in Oxnard, California.More by Roselyn Romero
Sparse toilet paper supplies in Maryland in April 2020 – Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images)
The U.S. supply of toilet paper may come unspooled. President Donald Trump’s increased tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber could have the unintended effect of disrupting production of the bathroom essential, Bloomberg News reports.
The Trump administration’s plans to jack duties on Canadian softwood lumber to 27% — and possibly to over 50% later — may hit the availability of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp, or NBSK, a key ingredient in toilet paper and paper towels, the news agency said, citing industry participants and observers.
The import taxes on the lumber will eventually put some sawmills out of business, reducing the supply of wood chips to make pulp. That will lead to temporary closures and lower production of the ingredient, which given the finely-balanced nature of the market may result in pandemic-like shortages of the finished products and possibly higher prices.
Trump is scheduled to announce “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign products on April 2, when delayed 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods are also due to come into effect. He’s already announced 25% tariffs on all imported cars, trucks and auto parts, including those made by U.S. companies in Canada.
Import taxes on Canadian softwood lumber, now 14%, are set to rise to almost 27% this year. The 25% tariffs on most Canadian products would bump the duties to about 52% — and a “national security” probe on lumber imports could raise the charges even further.
Replacing the approximately 2 million tons of pulp now imported from Canada won’t be easy. Not only does it constitute most of the American supply, many U.S. paper plants rely on single Canadian mills because their own production processes are attuned to that specific pulp.
“They don’t buy our products for our pretty eyes,” Frederic Verreault, VP of corporate affairs at Les Chantiers de Chibougamau, a Quebec wood processor, told Bloomberg. “They buy our products because they are the best and the most integrated into their factories.”
In the highest spiritual context, the Hierophant represents a human being who has united all aspects of duality within themselves, coming to a point of high level development and growth. More often than not, such people turn up in teaching roles, in the spiritual and occult fields. The student of the Mysteries who is lucky enough to be adopted by a true Hierophant is blessed indeed.Perhaps I might be allowed to digress briefly to talk about spiritual teachers. Eventually most students come to a point where they have learned as much as they possibly can under their own steam. If they want to progress into the deeper realms of the Mysteries, they must find themselves a teacher. This is not as easy as it might seem. Many people profess to have sufficient knowledge to lead newcomers through the sometimes stormy waters of spiritual growth. However, it is important to ensure that the person to whom you trust your future development is exactly what they claim to be. If you are currently seeking a teacher, bear these three things in mind:
1) True Hierophants never tout for business. They trust the Universe to draw to them the students they are charged to teach. 2) True Hierophants assume Karmic responsibility for the student they accept. And they tell you so. 3) By the time you reach the point where you deeply yearn for a teacher, you will already have developed your skills somewhat. Therefore, you can trust your own feeling about a possible teacher. Never, ever, under any circumstances, commit to somebody about whom you have the slightest unease.I’ll get back to the subject now!!!A day ruled by the Hierophant will be one filled with the opportunity to learn. It will be revelational, inspiring and interesting. If you allow yourself to be open to the forces that surround you, you WILL learn something important! So – pay attention!!!
Affirmation: “I open myself to the wisdom of the Universe.”
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is. Truth beng all is therefore total, whole, entire, safe, one, united, harmonious, orderly, reasonable. I think, therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I, being, am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore i, being, am total, whole, entire, safe, one, united, harmonious, orderly, reasonable. Since I am mind (self-evident) and since I (being) am Truth, therefore Truth is Mind. (Two things being equal to a third thing are equal to each other.) Since Truth is Mind, therefore Mind is total, whole, entire, one, united, harmonious, orderly, reasonable.
2) Until a trauma is remembered, it cannot be healed.
3) Truth being mind and Truth being all, therefore Truth is all-knowing. Since Truth is all-knowing and since to sense or perceive is to seize completely, all that can be seized completely is the totality of Truth. Since all that can be perceived is the totality (the infinity) of Truth, therefore to have a trauma or an emotional shock or an interruption of Truth is not possible. Therefore the only story (history) that can be remembered is the non-fiction story of Infinite Truth OR The only story (history) that can be brought to mind is the history (the knowing) of infinite, uninterruptible wholeness OR Happy wholeness is always happening.
4) Truth is all-knowing. All that can be seized completely is the totality of Truth. The only story (history) that can be remembered is the non-fiction story of Infinite Truth The only story (history) that can be brought to mind is the history (the knowing) of infinite, uninterruptible wholeness Happy wholeness is always happening.
5) Happy wholeness is always happening.
Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822[1] – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist.[2][3] After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends,[4] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.
Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by enslavers as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight, intending to hit another slave, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Tubman (or “Moses“, as she was called) travelled by night and in extreme secrecy, and later said she “never lost a passenger”.[5] After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide escapees farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. For her guidance of the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people, she is widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement until illness overtook her and was admitted to a home for elderly African Americans, which she had helped establish years earlier. Tubman is commonly viewed as an icon of courage and freedom.
Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet (“Rit”) Green and Ben Ross. Rit was enslaved by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was enslaved by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess’s second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.[6]
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman’s birth is known. Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.[7] Historian Kate Larson‘s 2004 biography of Tubman records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement.[1] Based on Larson’s work, more recent biographies have accepted March 1822 as the most likely timing of Tubman’s birth.[8][9][10]
Tubman’s maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the U.S. on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors.[11] As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage.[12] Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father),[12][13] was a cook for the Brodess family.[14] Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson’s plantation.[12] They married around 1808, and according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.[15]
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever.[16] When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit’s youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community.[17] At one point she confronted Brodess about the sale. Finally, Brodess and “the Georgia man” came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, “You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.”[18] Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman’s biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.[19][20]
Tubman’s mother was assigned to “the big house”[21][7] and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families.[22] When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named “Miss Susan”. Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, Tubman was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life.[23] She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days,[24] wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.[25]
Also in her childhood, Tubman was sent to work for a planter named James Cook.[26] She had to check his muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to “the boy on the Swanee River”, an allusion to Stephen Foster‘s song “Old Folks at Home“.[27] As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.[28]
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a two-pound (1 kg) metal weight at another slave who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said “broke my skull”. Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her enslaver’s house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days.[29] After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches.[30] She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. Larson suggests she may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, possibly as a result of brain injury;[31] Clinton suggests her condition may have been narcolepsy or cataplexy.[32] A definitive diagnosis is not possible due to lack of contemporary medical evidence, but this condition remained with her for the rest of her life.[33]
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman’s personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God.[34] Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family.[35][36]Mystical inspiration guided her actions.[37] She rejected the teachings of white preachers who urged enslaved people to be passive and obedient victims to those who trafficked and enslaved them; instead she found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.[38]
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman’s father at age 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman’s father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family.[39] Later in the 1840s, Tubman paid a white attorney five dollars (equivalent to $170 in 2024) to investigate the legal status of her mother, Rit. The lawyer discovered that Atthow Pattison, the grandfather of Mary Brodess, indicated in his will that Rit and any of her children would be manumitted at age 45, and that any children born after she reached age 45 would be freeborn. The Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved family, but taking legal action to enforce it was an impossible task for Tubman.[40][41]
Around 1844, she married John Tubman, a free black man.[42] Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her enslaved status. The mother’s status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages – free people of color marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman’s freedom.[43]
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding,[42] and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman’s plans to escape from slavery.[44] She adopted her mother’s name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.[42][44]
Escape from slavery
Notice offering a reward of US$100 (equivalent to $3,780 in 2024[45]) each for the capture and return of “Minty” (Harriet Tubman) and her brothers Henry and Ben
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value to slave traders. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer.[46] Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for God to make Brodess change his ways.[47] She said later: “I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me.” When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, Tubman changed her prayer: “First of March I began to pray, ‘Oh Lord, if you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way’.”[48] A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.[49]
As in many estate settlements, Brodess’s death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart.[50] His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family’s enslaved people.[51] Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband’s efforts to dissuade her.[52] She later said that “there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other”.[53]
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father’s former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County;[54] it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well.[55] Because they were hired out, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the CambridgeDemocrat, offering a reward of up to US$100 each (equivalent to $3,780 in 2024[45]) for their capture and return to slavery.[55] Once they had left, Tubman’s brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have regretted leaving his wife and children. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.[56][57]
Sometime in October or November, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers.[53][58] Before leaving she sang a farewell song to hint at her intentions, which she hoped would be understood by Mary, a trusted fellow slave: “I’ll meet you in the morning”, she intoned, “I’m bound for the promised land.”[59] While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal system was composed of free and enslaved black people, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends). The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman’s escape.[60] From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slavery – northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware, and then north into Pennsylvania.[61] A journey of nearly 90 miles (145 km) by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.[62]
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves.[63] The “conductors” in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house.[64] Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day.[61] The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other escapees from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life.[65] She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.[66]
Nicknamed “Moses”
Tubman sitting (1868 or 1869)
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. “I was a stranger in a strange land,” she said later. “[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free.”[67] While Tubman saved money from working odd jobs in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey,[68] the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced law enforcement officials to assist in the capture of escaped slaves – even in states that had outlawed slavery – and heavily punished abetting escape.[69] The law increased risks for those who had escaped slavery, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario, where slavery had been abolished.[70][a] Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as poor Irish immigrants competed with free blacks for work.[71]
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and Kessiah’s children would soon be sold in Cambridge, Maryland. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah’s husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. While the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe 60 miles (97 km) to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.[72]
Early next year she returned to Maryland to guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her youngest brother, Moses, along with two other men.[73] Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and she became more confident with each trip to Maryland.[73][74]
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. When she arrived there, she learned that John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia.[75][b]
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for those escaping slavery to remain, many escapees began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 escapees, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass.[77] Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. Years later he contrasted his efforts with hers, writing:
Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.[78]
From 1851 to 1862, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions,[4] including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional enslaved people who escaped.[4] Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed “Moses”, alluding to the biblical prophet who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt.[79] One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father purchased her mother from Eliza Brodess in 1855,[80] but even when they were both free, the area was hostile. In 1857, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight people escaping slavery. She led her parents north to St. Catharines, Canada, where a community of formerly enslaved people, including other relatives and friends of Tubman, had gathered.[81]
Routes and methods
Tubman’s dangerous work required ingenuity. She usually worked during winter, when long nights and cold weather minimized the chance of being seen.[79] She would start the escapes on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.[82] She used subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former enslaver, she yanked the strings holding the birds’ legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact.[83] Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as a former enslaver; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.[84]
In an 1897 interview with historian Wilbur Siebert, Tubman named some people who helped her and places she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents’ home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still‘s office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with helping hundreds escape to safer places in New York, New England, and Southern Ontario.[85]
Tubman’s faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of “consulting with God”, and trusted that He would keep her safe.[86] Garrett once said of her, “I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.”[86] Her faith also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of “Go Down Moses” and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed.[87] As she led escapees across the border, she would call out, “Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!”[88]
She carried a revolver as protection from slave catchers and their dogs. Tubman also threatened to shoot anyone who tried to turn back since that would risk the safety of the remaining group, as well as anyone who helped them on the way.[89][90] Tubman spoke of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and said, “Go on or die.”[91] Several days later, the man who wavered crossed into Canada with the rest of the group.[86]
By the late 1850s, Eastern Shore slaveholders were holding public meetings about the large number of escapes in the area; they cast suspicion on free blacks and white abolitionists. They did not know that “Minty”, the petite, disabled woman who had run away years before, was responsible for freeing so many enslaved people.[92] Though a popular legend persists about a reward of $40,000 (equivalent to $1,400,000 in 2024[45]) for Tubman’s capture, this is a manufactured figure: in 1867, in support of Tubman’s claim for a military pension, an abolitionist named Sallie Holley wrote that $40,000 “was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her”.[93] If it were real, such a high reward would have garnered national attention. A reward of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure.[94][95]
Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured.[96] Years later, she told an audience: “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”[5]
Tubman helped John Brown plan and recruit for the raid at Harpers Ferry.
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States.[97] Although she was not previously involved in armed insurrection, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals.[98] Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slavers. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.[99]
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by “General Tubman”, as he called her.[100] Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for those freed from slavery, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, the enslaved would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states.[101] He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.[102]
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Canada, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.[103] When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.[104]
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In early October 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman was ill in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[105] It is not known whether she still intended to join Brown’s raid or if she had become skeptical of the plan,[106][107] but when the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman had recovered from her illness and was in New York City.[108]
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr.[109] Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: “[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living.”[110]
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, Frances Adeline Seward, the wife of abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward, sold Tubman a seven-acre (2.8 ha) farm in Fleming, New York,[111][112] for $1,200 (equivalent to $45,400 in 2024[45]).[113][c] The adjacent city of Auburn was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman took the opportunity to move her parents from Canada back to the U.S.[118] Her farmstead became a haven for Tubman’s family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.[76]
Shortly after acquiring the farm, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret, who Tubman said was her niece.[118] She also indicated the girl’s parents were free blacks. According to Margaret’s daughter Alice, Margaret later described her childhood home as prosperous and said that she left behind a twin brother.[118][119] These descriptions conflict with what is known about the families of Tubman’s siblings, which created uncertainty among historians about the relationship and Tubman’s motivations.[120] Alice called Tubman’s actions a “kidnapping”,[119] saying, “she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her”.[121] After speculating in her 2004 biography of Tubman that Margaret might have been Tubman’s own secret daughter,[122] Kate Larson found evidence that Margaret was the daughter of Isaac and Mary Woolford, a free black couple who were neighbors of Tubman’s parents in Maryland and who had twins named James and Margaret.[123][124]
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel’s two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of $30 (equivalent to $1,050 in 2024[45]). She did not have the money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown.[125] Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north.[126] It took them weeks to get away safely because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The Ennalls’ infant child was quieted with paregoric while slave patrols rode by.[127] They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.[128]
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman had a vision that the war would soon lead to the abolition of slavery.[129] More immediately, enslaved people near Union positions began escaping in large numbers. General Benjamin Butler declared these escapees to be “contraband” – property seized by northern forces – and put them to work, initially without pay, at Fort Monroe in Virginia.[130][131] The number of “contrabands” encamped at Fort Monroe and other Union positions rapidly increased.[132][133] In January 1862, Tubman volunteered to support the Union cause and began helping refugees in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina.[134]
In South Carolina, Tubman met General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the “contrabands” in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering formerly enslaved people for a regiment of black soldiers.[135] U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was not yet prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states and reprimanded Hunter for his actions.[135] Tubman condemned Lincoln’s response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons:
God won’t let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he’s a great man, and I am a poor negro; but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free.[136]
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery and infectious diseases. At first, she received government rations for her work, but to dispel a perception that she was getting special treatment, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.[137]
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it a positive but incomplete step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She turned her own efforts towards more direct actions to defeat the Confederacy.[138][139] In early 1863, Tubman used her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge to lead a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal.[140] Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery and provided him with intelligence that aided in the temporary capture of Jacksonville, Florida in March 1863.[141]
Later that year, Tubman’s intelligence gathering played a key role in the raid at Combahee Ferry. She guided three steamboats with black soldiers under Montgomery’s command past mines on the Combahee River to assault several plantations.[142] Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies.[143] Forewarned of the raid by Tubman’s spy network, enslaved people throughout the area heard steamboats’ whistles and understood that they were being liberated.[144] Tubman went ashore to assist them onto the boats, ruining her dress in the process,[145] and she sang lyrics from “Uncle Sam’s Farm” encouraging them to “come along, come along”.[146] She later described a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents’ necks.[147] Armed overseers tried to stop the mass escape, but their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult.[148] As Confederate troops raced to the scene, the steamboats took off toward Beaufort with more than 750 formerly enslaved people.[149][150]
Newspapers heralded Tubman’s “patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability” in the raid,[151] and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – more than 100 of the newly liberated men joined the Union army.[151] Reports about her involvement in the raid led to a revival of the “General Tubman” appellation previously given to her by John Brown.[152] Although her contributions have sometimes been exaggerated,[d] her role in the raid led to her being widely credited as the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault.[153]
And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.[156]
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated people, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia, a task she continued for several months after the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865.[157]
Later life
Formal portrait of Tubman taken after the Civil War and circulated as a carte de visite[158]
Tubman had received little pay for her Union military service. She was not a regular soldier and was only occasionally compensated for her work as a spy and scout; her work as a nurse was entirely unpaid.[159][160] For over three years of service, she received a total of $200 (equivalent to $4,110 in 2024[45]).[161][162] Her unofficial status caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow to recognize any debt to her.[163] Meanwhile, her humanitarian work for her family and the formerly enslaved kept her in a state of constant poverty.[164]
When a promised appointment to an official military nursing position fell through in July 1865, Tubman decided to return to her home in New York.[165] During a train ride to New York in October 1865, Tubman traveled on a half-fare ticket provided to her because of her service. A conductor told her to move from a regular passenger car into the less-desirable smoking car. When she refused, he cursed at her and grabbed her. She resisted, and he summoned additional men for help. They muscled her into the smoking car, injuring her in the process. As these events transpired, white passengers cursed Tubman and told the conductor to kick her off the train.[166][167]
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. In addition to managing her farm, she took in boarders and worked various jobs to pay the bills and support her elderly parents.[76][168] One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Davis. Born enslaved in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865.[169] He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869, they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church.[170][171] They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874.[172]
Tubman in 1887 (far left), with her husband Davis (seated, with cane), their adopted daughter Gertie (beside Tubman), Lee Cheney, John “Pop” Alexander, Walter Green, “Blind Aunty” Sarah Parker, and her great-niece Dora Stewart at Tubman’s home in Auburn, New York
Tubman’s friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income (equivalent to $28,300 in 2024[45]).[161] Even with this assistance, paying off the mortgage on her farm in May 1873 exhausted Tubman’s savings.[173] That October, she fell prey to swindlers. Two black men claimed to know a former slave who had a trunk of gold coins smuggled out of South Carolina, which they would sell for cash at less than half the coins’ value.[173][174][175] She knew white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and black men were frequently assigned to digging duties, so the claim seemed plausible to her.[173] She borrowed money from a wealthy friend and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, they knocked her out with chloroform and stole her purse. Tubman was found dazed and injured; the trunk was filled with rocks.[173][176][177]
The crime brought new attention from local leaders to Tubman’s precarious financial state and spurred renewed efforts to get compensation for her Civil War service.[178] In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill to pay Tubman a $2,000 (equivalent to $55,600 in 2024[45]) lump sum “for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy”,[179] but it was defeated in the Senate.[180] In February 1880, Tubman’s wood-framed house burned down, but with the help of her supporters it was quickly replaced with a new brick home.[181]
Nelson Davis died of tuberculosis on October 14, 1888.[182] The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as his widow. After she documented her marriage and her husband’s service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow’s pension of $8 (equivalent to $300 in 2024[45]), plus a lump sum of $500 to cover the five-year delay in approval.[183][184][185] In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier’s monthly pension of $25 (equivalent to $940 in 2024[45]).[185][186] Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman’s claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier’s pension.[184][187][188] In February 1899, Congress approved a compromise amount of $20 (equivalent to $760 in 2024[45]) per month (the $8 from her widow’s pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy.[184][189][e]
Suffragist activism
Tubman in 1911
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women’s suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: “I suffered enough to believe it.”[191] Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.[5][192]
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., to speak in favor of women’s voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women’s equality to men.[193] When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first conference in 1896.[194] When the Federation was merged into the National Association of Colored Women, Tubman attended that organization’s second conference in 1899.[195]
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman’s Era launched a series of articles on “Eminent Women” with a profile of Tubman.[194] An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.[196]
Church, illness, and death
In the 1870s, Tubman became active in the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Auburn.[197] In 1895, she began discussions with AME Zion leaders and others to create a Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged that would care for “indigent colored people”.[198] Despite her financial limitations, in 1896 Tubman bid $1215 (equivalent to $45,900 in 2024[45]) at auction for a 25-acre (10 ha) farm adjacent to the one she already owned, to use for the new facility.[199] She designated one of the farm’s buildings as its primary residence and named it “John Brown Hall” to honor her late abolitionist ally.[200] However, raising funds for the project was difficult, and attempts to donate the property were complicated by the multiple mortgage loans used to pay for it. After Tubman almost lost the property because of her financial difficulties, AME Zion agreed to take it over in 1903.[201]
The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee (equivalent to $3,500 in 2024[45]). She said: “[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn’t have no money at all.”[202] She was frustrated by the new rule but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the home celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.[203]
As Tubman aged, her childhood head trauma continued to trouble her. Unable to sleep because of pain and “buzzing” in her head, in the late 1890s she asked a doctor at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital to operate. In her words, he “sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable”.[204] She reportedly received no anesthesia and instead bit down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.[205][206]
By 1911, Tubman’s body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as “ill and penniless”, prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations.[207] Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913.[207] Just before she died, she quoted the Gospel of John to those in the room: “I go away to prepare a place for you.”[208] Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.[209]
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died.[211] By the 1980s, Tubman had become one of American history’s most famous figures.[212] She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum.[213]
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