Everyone in the public eye, from politicians to rappers, depends on self-promotion to keep their image strong. Harriet Tubman was the same way, though she had the facts to back up her reputation. Her efforts to spread her story helped her become one of the most recognized Americans of all time. Tubman played an important role in manufacturing her own legend by retelling her story, but she also set a precedent that invited others to use her memory, leading to widespread recognition and eventual mythical status.

Tubman, both during and after her active years, often accepted speaking engagements in order to retell the stories that made her famous to begin with. Milton Sernett cites a quote by Emma Telford, saying “as a raconteur, Harriet herself has few equals”, and he also discusses her dozens of appearances at abolitionist meetings (49). These accounts were spread mostly by mouth, creating an oral tradition which morphed and slowly grew to enshrine Tubman as the ‘Black Moses’, a term she created for herself (52). These stories morphed in the retelling, as oral traditions tend to do, and the lack of documented sources led to the vagueness that surrounds most legends.

Unlike most legends, however, the myths began to spread while Tubman was alive. Authors like Sarah Bradford, interested in telling Tubman’s tale, often floundered in the lack of verifiable details as early as 1869, a good 40+ years before Tubman’s death. Here is an instance where Tubman influence her own legend by not taking action. Being illiterate, she never read Bradford’s account, and if someone did question Tubman on the specifics (how many people she rescued, for instance), she did not send corrections to Bradford. This let Bradford’s account become standard source material, despite its less-than-stellar credentials.

Another aspect of Tubman’s behavior that accelerated her legendary status was her willingness to play along with whatever angle people demanded of her. As Jean Humez says, she “was a skillful strategist who could and did present herself in a variety of disguises as the situation demanded” (130). If suffragists wanted to praise the way she broke gender molds, she became General Tubman, the only woman to ever plan and lead a military operation (90). If the writers of civic texts needed a hero who exemplified bravery and conscious and the ideals of the American Revolution, she became Black Moses. This quality is a staple of legendary figures; for example Sacagawea experienced similar versatility after her death and John Brown could be described as either a violent abolitionist or a gentle and paternal figure to the slaves. The difference here, however, is that Harriet Tubman cultivated these images herself, and as such, practically invited others to use her in a similar manner. She became such a potent character because although her story was complicated, writers could distill her down into one of her many facets and use her as a symbol for whatever cause they needed.

One of the startling points that Sernett makes is that authors have purposefully manufactured Tubman into a legend in the years between her time and the present. In the first chapter he points out the incredible amount of children’s books written about her, especially in recent years (32). She has been canonized in civic texts aimed at children, with some authors even saying that her history is worthwhile because “she embodied the great affirmations the marked the birth of the republic” (31). Though she never expressed such feelings herself, her oral storytelling and willingness to fit any role made it easy for authors like Bradford to take her story and run with it.

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