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On 20 April 2016, the Facebook page The Common Sense Conservative published an image macro identifying African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman as a gun-toting, Democrat-shooting Republican: The text included in the macro was vaguely rooted in truth: Tubman reportedly carried a gun during her trips on the Underground Railroad. But it's unlikely she was using a gun to shoot Democrats (other than in the vague sense that if someone threatened her efforts to the point of requiring an armed response, that opponent was probably more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican given the alignments of the major political parties at the time). According to a PBS biography of the abolitionist, Tubman used her gun to threaten the fugitives who grew tired or afraid on their journey to the north (people who were unlikely to be Democrats, given that slaves weren't able to vote at all, and runaway slaves certainly wouldn't have been Democratic Party members even if they could): The assertion that Tubman was a Republican is also something of a stretch. While Tubman fought against slavery and political oppression and thus would have been more politically aligned with the Republican Party platform, she couldn't actually vote (since women's suffrage legislation had been passed in only a few states prior to her death). Regardless, the biggest piece of misinformation included in this image macro is the photograph. The woman pictured is not abolitionist Harriet Tubman but rather Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, the first African-American mail carrier employed by the United States Post Office: This item was published amidst a steady stream of backlash regarding the announcement that an portrait of Tubman would be replacing that of Andrew Jackson on the front of the U.S. $20 bill.
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