 The biography that Bradford produced in 1869 is a very sketchy work. Bradford produced it in Hays before she herself was heading off on a trip to Europe, and the purpose was to earn money. So the title, which is scenes in the life of Harriet Tubman, it really does capture what the book is. It's bits and pieces, little snippets of aspects of Harriet Tubman's life, of moments in her life, and it's rather disjointed. So we might desire a narrative that kind of goes all the way through connecting different parts of her life, but that's not what this source is. One thing that it does do well, though, is that probably in part because Bradford was so rushed, she includes all kinds of additional information about Tubman. So letters that were written to or about Tubman, quotations from newspaper articles about Tubman, also appear in the book. So it is a collage in many ways of Tubman's life that allows the reader to get beyond Bradford's narrative and to look at some other primary sources from the time also. There are many moving stories in the book, and one of the most moving aspects of the source is that we get these stories more or less in Harriet Tubman's voice. I say more or less because this is an as told to account. We have to trust Sarah Bradford to relate this to us faithfully, and we weren't there, so we don't know if she did. Sarah Bradford also renders Harriet Tubman's stories in Bradford's approximation of a black dialect, which is problematic, I think, for us looking back at the source if we tried to imagine how it was that Harriet Tubman might have really sounded. But that being said, there are some really moving moments in the narrative that help to fill in the picture of Tubman's life and to put flesh on the bones of the myth of her life. So this is the moment where a Tubman first escapes, and Bradford describes this as passing the magic line from slavery to freedom. And this is what Tubman says about that moment. I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven. So this, to me, is such a powerful representation of Tubman's feeling of her emotional life at this incredible turn of her life story. And this is something we don't often get access to when we're trying to think about historical figures, is how what they actually felt about certain moments in their life. I think with Harriet Tubman, we think about her after this moment. We think about her as Moses of her people, who's got that pistol and who's going through the swamps with her long skirts to take 10, 20, 30, 60. And Bradford actually says 300. That's been debated. But to take all those slaves to freedom, we don't see her as the young woman who was first escaping and who felt this incredible sense of joy and relief in the promise of a new kind of life. But even though we get this sense of incredible joy from Tubman at this moment, immediately we see that she's going to face a complicated future. Three paragraphs after she talks about feeling so happy that she is free, she talks about her extreme loneliness in this new state. And she says, I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free, but there was no one to welcoming to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. So in this moment, we get a real sense of a dual emotional response that Tubman is feeling. The joy at freedom and also the despair of loneliness and the despair of knowing that people that she loves are still enslaved. So we look at Harriet Tubman as an example of someone who has been described as this heroic, mythic figure, but who was a real woman who had all kinds of struggles in her emotional life with her first husband, for example, with poverty later on in life, for example. And I think that's one thing the students are surprised about, to think about Harriet Tubman as a real person who had a host of vulnerabilities. But another thing that surprises students about this book and I think that troubles them about this book is that Harriet Tubman was living and working in a particular context. When she first escaped, she was not yet hooked into the Underground Railroad network. But within a couple of years she was. She was working with white abolitionists and black abolitionists to free other slaves. There were a number of relational issues that came into her sort of movement into this new community. And I think one of the things that students are frustrated about is the way that Harriet Tubman talks about white people. The prime audience would have been, people had been involved in the abolitionist movement, especially in Auburn, New York where Harriet Tubman was really beloved and also in the Northeast. And Bradford says that with the first edition of this book she does not have hopes for a wide readership, but she really just wants to sell enough copies so that Tubman can raise money to live on. And with the second edition of the book that was published in 1886, Bradford sort of enlarges her intention for the narrative. And I think you can see that in the changes she makes to the book itself. It's much more organized. She collects many more letters, attests to the importance of Tubman's story. And by the second version in 1886, Bradford seems really committed to the idea that she wants to set Harriet Tubman's story into the memory of the nation. And letter writers whose words are also published in the second edition say the same thing, that they are worried that this woman might actually fall out of memory and that this book is important to keep her in people's minds.