Harriet Tubman

March 1, 1822 – March 10, 1913

Escaped slave who led hundreds to freedom on the Underground Railroad and served as a Union spy.

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Harriet Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 on a plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and named Araminta 'Minty' Ross. Enslaved from birth, she was hired out and beaten as a child, and as a teenager she suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw an iron weight that struck her instead of another enslaved person. The wound caused seizures and sleeping spells for the rest of her life. Deeply religious, she came to see her visions as guidance from God. In 1849, fearing she was about to be sold away from her family, she escaped alone to Pennsylvania, later recalling that when she crossed into a free state she felt as if she had entered heaven. Tubman could have simply enjoyed her own freedom, but instead she risked it again and again for others. Over roughly a decade she made about 13 secret trips back into the slave states and guided some 70 enslaved people, including her own parents and siblings, north to freedom along the Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses that helped people escape slavery. Traveling by night, using disguises, spirituals as coded signals, and sheer nerve, she was so successful that she proudly claimed she 'never lost a passenger.' Slaveholders offered rewards for her capture, and admirers began calling her 'Moses,' after the biblical leader who led his people out of bondage. She worked alongside other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who praised her courage. When the Civil War came, Tubman threw herself into the Union cause. She served as a cook and nurse, then as a scout and spy, using her knowledge of secret routes and networks of informants behind Confederate lines. In June 1863 she helped guide the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, becoming the first woman known to lead an armed military expedition in the war; the raid freed more than 700 enslaved people in a single night. Her wartime service pointed toward the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, where she cared for family and the poor, spoke out for women's right to vote, and eventually opened a home for elderly and needy African Americans. She struggled financially for much of her life and waited years for a government pension for her service. She died in 1913, around the age of 91. Tubman is remembered as one of the great moral heroes of American history, not because she held office or commanded armies, but because, having won her own freedom, she repeatedly risked everything to bring freedom to others.

Harriet Tubman

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