Up from the underground

The Harriet Tubman statue in Boston's South End, near the corner of Columbus Avenue and Pembroke Street, is about 8 feet tall, about 3 feet taller than the real Tubman. The scale is fitting, since the great conductor on the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad was truly a monumental figure. And yet, strange as it sounds, Tubman is only now, for the first time, getting the full attention of historians.

For more than half a century, Tubman's life has been treated as an inspirational story in dozens of children's books, while historians of slavery and the Civil War looked elsewhere. Why that was so is a mystery, since Tubman is one of the most recognized names in American history. "She's almost mythic," says William L. Andrews, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a specialist in African-American autobiography. "It's remarkable how many people know her name, even if they don't know that much about her."

Whatever the reason, that obscurity has ended. In the past month, three new biographies of Tubman have been published, believed to be the first book-length adult treatments in 61 years. They are "Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero," by Simmons College historian Kate Clifford Larson; "Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories," by Jean M. Humez, professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston; and "Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom," by Catherine Clinton, visiting professor of history at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Larson's biography, seven years in the making, grew out of her doctoral dissertation at the University of New Hampshire. She had originally planned it as a master's thesis but was amazed at the absence of recent scholarship. All she could find were largely fictionalized children's books, 19th-century accounts, and a 1943 biography by journalist Earl Conrad.

"Once I began to follow the trail," she says in an interview at her Winchester home, "I realized there was an enormous amount of information, in libraries and courthouses and archives." During her research, she discovered that Humez was also working on a book, with a different approach. The two became friends and shared their findings.

According to Larson's research, Tubman was born in early 1822 near Harrisville Road in Dorchester County, Md., on the eastern Chesapeake shore, one of nine children. Three of her siblings had been sold, and when she heard in 1849 that she, too, was in danger of being sold, she ran away and made her way to Philadelphia.

She was determined to rescue her family from slavery. Working with antislavery supporters in Maryland and the North -- the Underground Railroad -- she made about a dozen clandestine trips back to Dorchester County, leading most of her family, including her aged parents, to freedom. They traveled by night and hid by day, and sometimes actually did use railroads. Usually armed, Tubman made one rule plain: Go on or die.

She was driven by a powerful religious faith and believed that God was sending, leading, and protecting her on her missions. In all she led, by Larson's count, between 70 and 80 slaves to freedom, most of them family members or people she knew, directly or indirectly. Despite her exploits, she was always nearly destitute, and whatever money she could raise by speaking or through direct appeals she used to finance her expeditions.

Tubman met and was lionized by the great names of the abolition movement: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Lucretia Mott, and many others. They were in awe of her -- Brown called her "General Tubman." Though she was illiterate, she had complete self-confidence among the elites. She electrified audiences.

"We have had the greatest heroine of the age here," Boston abolitionist Thomas W. Higginson wrote in 1859, "Harriet Tubman, a black woman, and a fugitive slave, has been back eight times secretly and brought out in all sixty slaves with her, including all her own family. . . . Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction and her ingenuity and generalship extraordinary."

War came in 1861, and the Underground Railroad ended. This is where most children's books end, too. But Tubman's career was not over. During the Civil War, she became a US Army nurse, scout, and spy, and in 1863 she guided a gunboat raid up the Combahee River in the South Carolina low country, in which about 730 slaves were evacuated.

After the war, settled in Auburn, N.Y., Tubman went to Boston and New York City to speak to woman suffrage meetings. Now her admirers included feminist leaders such as Susan B. Anthony. Later, when African-American women were increasingly excluded from the movement, she spoke before newly formed black woman suffrage organizations. In her last years, she raised funds for and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes, in Auburn. She died in 1913.

It's an astonishing tale, with many other dramatic events, and the puzzle is why it has long been thought suitable mainly for children. "People assumed that I was writing another children's book," Clinton says in a telephone interview. "There were 21 such books between 1990 and 2000, and 20 in the last three years."

Milton C. Sernett, professor of African-American studies and history at Syracuse University, who is working on a book about the cultural memory of Tubman, says surveys show that "more students recognize Harriet Tubman than Winston Churchill. They know who she was and that she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, but few could name any commanding general in the American Revolution. Yet the disjunction between the popular cultural recognition and historians taking a serious look at her life has struck me as unusual."

"If you brought her to the foreground, she would stand alone," Clinton says. "Perhaps scholars are looking for trends, movements, collective identities."

Research has been published, notably the 1993 Harriet Tubman Journal by James McGowan, an independent scholar in Pennsylvania who was outraged at the errors in the children's books. While it can't be known for certain why no academic historians have written about Tubman, Larson points to a lack of scholarly interest in many other achieving women and adds, "The nation has a difficult time talking about slavery and can talk about it only in childlike terms."

There was also the problem of illiteracy. "She left no written record," Sernett says. "Young scholars working on their dissertations want to go to a ready trove of documents." Nonetheless, she was a powerful storyteller, and many of the details of her career were written down by her admirers and allies.

Humez longed to get behind those mediating voices, many of whom had their own opinions and agendas. In 1994, Humez taught a course on African-American women's spiritual autobiography at the Harvard Divinity School. She used the 1886 biography of Tubman (a revision of an 1869 book) by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, a factually confused and condescending account, based on interviews with Tubman. Humez says her students "were in open rebellion against it because Bradford was such an interfering presence."

"That was my idea at first," she says in an interview at her Somerville home, "to get Bradford out of the way so that we could hear what Tubman had to say herself." The goal was "to let Tubman's own storytelling as reported by others speak for itself, as she might have had she had some control over the editing. I was trying to take out the editorializing and condescending attitudes."

Even so, says Humez, "I felt that no matter how hard I tried, I was still dealing with mediated material. But at least I was getting down to the buried nuggets." Besides Bradford's, she used earlier brief accounts by the Massachusetts abolitionists Franklin Sanborn and Ednah Dow Cheney, both of whom revered Tubman as Bradford seemingly did not. Humez gives greatest credit to letters and memoirs written right after Tubman gave her testimony to friends and allies. Besides a biographical section, her book includes analysis of the problem of mediation and a wide selection of original texts.

Clinton's book is shorter than either Humez's or Larson's, but she has no less esteem for her subject. "My goal," she says, "was to bring life to a character and take her off the children's shelves and put her where she belongs: in the pantheon of American patriots, a warrior as well as a humanitarian."

Legend has long attributed at least 300 and as many as 1,000 Underground Railroad rescues to Tubman's name and has said that Maryland slaveholders placed a $40,000 price on her head. But Larson writes that it's doubtful that Maryland slaveholders ever knew who was spiriting away their slaves, and there's no evidence that a reward higher than $12,000 was ever offered for the person whom the slaves knew as Moses. Despite her heroism, Tubman may not always have behaved admirably. She never explained why she spirited away a little girl named Margaret Stewart, whose parents were evidently free blacks with a good home. Larson writes, "the story of Margaret's `kidnapping' remains one of the most puzzling and troubling stories of Tubman's life."

Yet reduced numbers and unresolved questions don't diminish Tubman's greatness, in Larson's view -- quite the opposite. "She was a real person," Larson says, "with a real family and a real daily life, just like everybody else, with flaws and weaknesses. She had fear, but she also had great genius and could overcome great obstacles. That is what these books bring out, that she was not a mythical character."

Another effect of the books has been a deeper understanding on the part of Tubman's descendants, many of whom had found the children's accounts unsatisfying.

"It's so emotional to read, because it's the story of my family," says Judith Bryant of Auburn, N.Y., the great-great-granddaughter of Tubman's brother William, one of those rescued from slavery. Of Larson's book, she says, "Most of what I'm reading I didn't know before. I wish my mother were alive to read it."

For Bryant, Larson's book reinforces her sense that Harriet Tubman "had no grandiose sense of mission, as it's been mythologized. She was going to be free, and her family was going to be free. A lot of people have trouble with a simple goal. She was an ordinary human being who did extraordinary things."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.