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When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.

Harriet Tubman (Sarah H. Bradford, 1869)

History

The story behind the card

Tubman is describing her arrival in the free state of Pennsylvania in 1849. She told the story to Sarah Hopkins Bradford, a writer from Geneva, New York, who published it in 1869 in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, partly to raise money for her. Tubman never learnt to read or write, so her words reach us through such interviews. Fearing she would be sold, she had fled Maryland on foot, about 145 km (90 miles), mostly by night and guided by the North Star.

Türkçe oku
O çizgiyi geçtiğimi anlayınca, hâlâ aynı insan mıyım diye ellerime baktım. Her şeyin üzerinde öyle bir görkem vardı! Güneş ağaçların arasından, tarlaların üstünden altın gibi süzülüyordu; kendimi cennetteymişim gibi hissettim.
Harriet Tubman (Sarah H. Bradford, 1869)

Tubman burada, 1849'da köleliğin yasak olduğu Pennsylvania eyaletine vardığı anı anlatıyor. Bu anıyı New York eyaletinin Geneva kasabasından yazar Sarah Hopkins Bradford'a aktardı. Bradford da onu 1869'da, kısmen Tubman'a para toplamak amacıyla yayımladığı “Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman” adlı kitabına aldı. Tubman hiç okuma yazma öğrenmediği için sözleri bize bu tür görüşmeler aracılığıyla ulaştı. Satılmaktan korktuğu için Maryland'den yürüyerek kaçmış, yaklaşık 145 kilometrelik yolu çoğunlukla geceleri, Kutup Yıldızı'nı izleyerek almıştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Harriet Tubman
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The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

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‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ is often credited to Thomas Jefferson, but it has never been found in his writings. The saying goes back to the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, who said in a 1790 speech in Dublin that liberty is given to people on condition of eternal vigilance.

Curran spoke in 1790 in a dispute over the right to elect the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He warned that the idle usually see their rights taken by the active, and that God gives liberty on condition of eternal vigilance: break that condition, and servitude follows as both result and punishment. The short modern form was used by the American anti-slavery campaigner Wendell Phillips in a speech in Boston on 28 January 1852. In 1879 Phillips himself wrote that the line had been credited to Jefferson but that no one had found it in his works, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs his home at Monticello, lists it as spurious. Curran (1750–1817) was an Irish barrister and member of the Irish Parliament, famous for defending people accused of rebellion against the Crown.

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Some Great Basin bristlecone pines in the western United States are more than 4,800 years old, older than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.

The oldest known living one, nicknamed Methuselah, grows in the White Mountains of eastern California; counting its growth rings shows it is more than 4,850 years old, and its exact location is kept secret to protect it. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE, a few centuries after Methuselah sprouted. Bristlecones grow extremely slowly on thin, dry dolomite soil, a rock similar to limestone, where few other plants survive, which spares them competition and fire. Their dense, resin-filled wood resists insects, fungi and rot, and dead trees can stand for thousands of years. In 1964 a researcher in Nevada cut down one tree, later called Prometheus, and counted at least 4,862 rings, making it the oldest tree then known.

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