Last updated: February 28, 2022
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Harriet Tubman's Boston: 1886
The following article is part of a series exploring Harriet Tubman's deep connections to Boston, highlighting several key moments, people, and places that illustrate her long relationship with the city and its community. To learn more, visit Harriet Tubman's Boston.
Franklin B. Sanborn, "Recollections of Seventy Years. Volume 1." (The Gorham Press, 1909).
"The race of heroic women still lives in our midst."
Franklin Sanborn Office, 13 Beacon Street
In 1886, Tubman's friend Sarah H. Bradford wrote and published an extended second edition of her biography. Bradford hoped that the sale of this edition would raise money to help alleviate Tubman's chronic financial distress. Tubman came to Boston in the fall to sit for a portrait to sell with the new edition of her biography.1 A local newspaper reported that Tubman "is now visiting friends in this city... She can be heard from at the office of Mr. F.B. Sanborn, No. 13 Beacon Street."2
The Boston-based Woman's Journal, the most widely recognized suffrage journal in the United States, promoted this new edition of Tubman's biography:
This second edition is printed to relieve her from penury and want. The example of this poor slave-woman shows that Judith and Joan of Arc have their parallels among us. The race of heroic women still lives in our midst.3
Footnotes
1. Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: One World, 2005), 269.
2. Boston Herald, October 31, 1886, 12.
3. The Woman's Journal, October 2, 1886, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49687852$323i.