James Fulford writes:
Tubman was said to have led 300 slaves to freedom—McPherson makes it between 57 and 70.
Many of the fugitives Tubman conducted north were her relatives. That would make her the Moses of her family, rather than of her people.
Tubman was said to have had a reward of $10, 000, $12, 000, or even $40, 000 for her recapture—the last figure would be equivalent to more than a million dollars today. The largest reward actually posted was $100.
As a result, again, of the head injury related seizures, Tubman was apparently delusional. (…)
One reason for the Tubman boom: the trend of promoting antiquarian hate against whites for hundred-year-old racism and for slavery abolished a hundred and fifty years ago.
But there’s also another, sad reason: there are so few black heroes and heroines, and they have to take what they can get.
But does the rest of America have to put up with it on the $20 dollar bill? (…)
Milton Sennett’s 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, says that while mainstream publishers “ignored Harriet Tubman, interest in her was being cultivated by left-wing organizations, specifically ones connected with the radical labor movement.”
The “radical labor movement” and “labor activist Earl Conrad” both mean “Communist”, by the way. The Russian-controlled Communist Party of the USA was active in “civil rights” in the old days, for reasons of its own. That’s where the modern Tubman boom started.
