Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross on a plantation in Dorchester County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, in the early 1820s. Enslaved people rarely had their births recorded, and her own accounts pointed to 1821 or 1822 ^[1]. Her parents, Harriet "Rit" Green and Ben Ross, were both enslaved, and the family lived under constant threat of separation. Three of Araminta's sisters were sold to distant buyers, a loss that marked her for the rest of her life ^[2].

Her childhood was one of hard labor and violence. Hired out as a young girl, she checked muskrat traps in cold marshes, minded infants, and worked as a field hand. Around the age of twelve or thirteen she suffered a severe head injury when an overseer hurled a two pound weight at another enslaved person and struck her instead. The blow fractured her skull and left her with lifelong seizures, sudden episodes of sleep, and vivid dreams and visions that she interpreted as messages from God ^[1][3].

Her faith, shaped by the Bible stories her mother told and by the religious culture of the Eastern Shore, became the anchor of her life. Any full Harriet Tubman biography has to reckon with that faith: she credited divine guidance for her survival and later for the success of her rescue missions ^[3].

In 1844 Araminta married John Tubman, a free Black man, and around that time she took her mother's first name, becoming Harriet Tubman ^[2]. Freedom papers meant little in her situation. When her enslaver Edward Brodess died in 1849, rumors spread that his widow would sell members of the Ross family south to settle debts. That fall, Tubman fled alone, traveling by night roughly ninety miles through Maryland and Delaware to Philadelphia, helped along the way by Quakers and other members of the Underground Railroad ^[1][4].

Freedom for herself was not enough. Beginning in December 1850, Tubman made the return journey into slave territory, first to rescue a niece and her children, then repeatedly over the following decade. Historians who have studied the documentary record, most carefully the biographer Kate Clifford Larson, conclude that she made about thirteen trips and personally guided roughly seventy people out of bondage, while giving instructions that helped dozens more escape on their own ^[1][4].

The work grew more dangerous after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern officials to return escapees, so Tubman extended her routes all the way to St. Catharines in Canada. She traveled in winter, used disguises, carried a pistol, and relied on a network of safe houses. She later said, in a claim repeated by early biographers, that she never lost a passenger ^[3][5]. Admirers began calling her Moses, after the prophet who led his people out of Egypt.

When the Civil War began, Tubman saw it plainly as a war over slavery long before the federal government did. In 1862 she traveled to Port Royal, South Carolina, in the Union occupied Sea Islands, where she nursed sick and wounded soldiers and freedpeople, treating dysentery and smallpox with remedies made from local roots ^[2][6].

Her most remarkable wartime role was military. Tubman organized and led a ring of scouts who mapped terrain and gathered intelligence from enslaved people behind Confederate lines. On the night of June 1 to 2, 1863, she guided Colonel James Montgomery and about 150 Black soldiers of the Second South Carolina Volunteers up the Combahee River. The raid destroyed plantations supplying the Confederacy and carried more than 700 enslaved people to freedom aboard Union gunboats ^[4][6]. She is often described as the first woman in United States history to plan and lead an armed military operation.

Despite this record, the government treated her poorly. She received irregular pay, supported herself partly by selling pies and root beer, and after the war fought for decades to obtain a pension. Congress eventually granted her twenty dollars a month, and only in part for her own service; much of it came through her second husband's veteran status ^[1][6].

Tubman's first marriage did not survive her escape. John Tubman stayed in Maryland, remarried, and refused to join her when she returned for him in 1851. He was killed in a roadside dispute in 1867 ^[1].

In 1859 the abolitionist senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small farm on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, on generous terms, and Auburn remained her home for the rest of her life ^[2][5]. She filled the house with family and strangers alike: her aging parents, whom she had rescued from Maryland in 1857, boarders, orphans, and anyone who needed shelter. In 1869 she married Nelson Davis, a Black Union Army veteran more than twenty years her junior, and in 1874 the couple adopted a baby girl named Gertie ^[1].

Money was a constant struggle. To raise funds, Tubman cooperated with the Auburn teacher Sarah Hopkins Bradford, whose 1869 book Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman brought in badly needed income and preserved many of the stories, told in Tubman's own voice, on which later historians have drawn ^[5].

The last four decades of Tubman's life were spent in activism and charity rather than retirement. She became a familiar figure in the women's suffrage movement, appearing at meetings alongside Susan B. Anthony and speaking about women's rights to audiences in New York, Boston, and Washington. When asked whether women deserved the vote, she answered that she had suffered enough to believe it ^[2][7].

Her largest project was a home for elderly and indigent African Americans. In 1896 she bought twenty five acres adjoining her farm at auction, and in 1903 she deeded the land to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in 1908 ^[2][6]. Weakened by age and by the head injury that had troubled her since childhood, she underwent brain surgery in Boston in the late 1890s, reportedly declining anesthesia and biting on a bullet instead, as she had seen wounded soldiers do ^[1].

Tubman spent her final years as a resident of the home she had founded. She died of pneumonia in Auburn on March 10, 1913, surrounded by family and friends, and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery ^[1][7].

Few nineteenth century Americans have grown larger in national memory. Harriet Tubman achievements once known mainly through Bradford's little book are now taught in every American school: the escapes she led, the Combahee River Raid, the decades of care for the poor. Serious scholarship, beginning with Larson's 2004 biography Bound for the Promised Land and Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, has replaced legend with documented history, correcting inflated numbers while confirming the substance of her courage ^[1][4].

Her name is attached to schools, streets, ships, and public monuments across the United States. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, both established in 2017 by the National Park Service, preserve the landscapes of her early life and her later years ^[6][8]. In 2016 the United States Treasury announced plans to place her portrait on the front of the twenty dollar bill, replacing Andrew Jackson, a redesign that remains in progress ^[7].

Beyond the memorials, the basic Harriet Tubman facts explain her endurance as a symbol: an illiterate, disabled, formerly enslaved woman who repeatedly risked execution to free others, served her country in war, and asked little in return. Frederick Douglass wrote to her in 1868 that, excepting John Brown, he knew of no one who had willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve enslaved people ^[5].