ABSTRACT
Harriet Tubman is intensely admired in one's era for her anti-slavery work and her daring. Her legend is inspirational for many women searching for models for both antiracist and prowoman activism. She was engaged in what can be viewed as an informal, God-guided ministry, which had both activist and spiritual components. This narrative shares significant features with other postslavery 'slave narratives', now acknowledged as important contributions to African-American women's nineteenth-century literary traditions, as well as with the related genre of spiritual autobiography. Tubman's emphasis on the control she could exercise through resistance of various kinds is brought out starkly in the 1863 and 1865 interviews. Tubman herself, at least in the post-Emancipation period, may have been less concerned with the question of how God planned to punish sinning white slaveholders. The Confessions of Nat Turner, mediated text of vital significance to modern students of spirituality and liberation, Tubman's spiritual transformation story is inextricably interwoven with a story of external liberation.
