harriet tubman character biography

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Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman has been known by many names—Araminta, Moses, conductor, daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt. All encompass the intersecting identities and experiences that Harriet Tubman encompassed over her lifespan. In March 2022, on the bicentennial of her birth, we look beyond these names to capture not only Harriet Tubman the icon, but Harriet the woman, and Harriet’s legacy of care, activism and bravery that influenced Black women across time.

Objects related to Harriet’s life highlight her impact on her contemporaries—such as the shawl gifted to her by Queen Victoria to acknowledge her international impact. Personal objects like her hymnal reveal her domestic life as a wife and mother, and the devout religious beliefs that inspired her to “conduct” hundreds of African Americans to freedom from bondage.

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In the years after her death in 1913, Harriet became a feminist icon for Black women’s organizations, and Black women artists including Betye Sarr, Alison Saar, Bisa Butler, Faith Ringgold and Elizabeth Catlett saw in Harriet the inspiration for the courage and creativity to document the struggle for equality as Black and as women. A pioneer in what it means to be regarded as an icon, Harriet Tubman served as a physical manifestation of liberation for many. On the bicentennial of her birth, this dynamic woman of many trades continues to be revered as an American hero and a symbol of freedom.

Portrait of Harriet Tubman seated with her right arm resting on the back of a chair and her left arm in her lap.

Carte-de-visite portrait of Harriet Tubman, 1868–69. Photograph by Benjamin F. Powelson.

Best known as the enslaved woman who brought emancipation to anyone who crossed her path, the legacy of Harriet Tubman’s lifework has inspired countless people across generations and geographic locations. Tubman was born into chattel slavery as Araminta “Minty” Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822. Tubman was put into labor at an early age, and by the age of ten, she was hired out as a woodcutter, pest trapper and field worker. She preferred these jobs over domestic tasks in the “big house” under the scrutiny of her white mistress. Tubman’s strength of character was visible at this early stage. At age twelve, her intervention in a violent exchange between an overseer and a fugitive slave left her with substantial injuries.

After being struck on the head with a large iron weight, Tubman began suffering from severe headaches and a chronic sleep disorder called narcolepsy. In addition to her sudden attacks of sleep, she also experienced vivid religious dreams and hallucinations throughout her life. This injury left her anything but impaired.

In her final years on the plantation before escaping, Tubman became a familiar figure in the fields. A primed field hand, she was described as a “small, muscular woman” standing at 4’11”, yet carrying half cords of wood like any other man in the fields. She was often seen with her skirt looped around her waist and a vividly colored bandanna tied around her head.

This black and white linocut depicts Harriet Tubman directing a group of individuals.

In Harriet Tubman I Helped Hundreds to Freedom , 1946–47; printed 1989. Created by Elizabeth Catlett. 2017.21.7

In Harriet Tubman I Helped Hundreds to Freedom

This 1946–47 linocut expresses the major themes that connect the large body of work Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) produced during her lifetime: race and feminism. Her medium of choice changed from sculpture to printmaking after moving to Mexico to join the leftist art collective, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). Catlett’s artistry and politics inspired her linocuts featuring prominent Black people and themes. Much of the work she produced during her time in Mexico reflected the radical, worker-centered activism of the TGP and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

This linocut of Harriet Tubman from the series " The Black Woman (formerly the Negro Woman) " reveals Catlett’s desire to explore these major issues through the lens of Black women. We see Tubman in the simple attire that reflects the homespun clothing of enslaved women and the Black women sharecroppers of the 1940s, which collapses the historical narrative to show how long Black women have struggled against oppression. Tubman’s sinewy arm points towards freedom for the hundreds of Black people who come behind her, pointing to her strength and the weariness of the labor of this long journey.

God’s time [Emancipation] is always near. He set the North Star in the heavens; He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free. Harriet Tubman to Ednah Dow Cheney New York City, ca. 1859

During this period, the dream of freedom had spread across antebellum plantations and Tubman’s visions were no different. First, her father was set free when she was about eighteen, and then she also learned that the last will of her previous owner manumitted Tubman’s family. However, her new owner refused to acknowledge this and Tubman’s mother, Tubman herself and her siblings remained in bondage.

Her desire for freedom only grew over the years, particularly after marrying John Tubman, a freedman. The threat of her family’s separation and her difficult marriage forced Tubman to take action. On September 17, 1849, Tubman and her two brothers set out to escape the plantation, heading north. Her brothers soon turned back, and Tubman completed her journey alone with the help of the Underground Railroad on the nearly hundred-mile journey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But her dreams of flying over corn and cotton, the North Star beckoning, did not end with her finding liberty.

Between 1850 and 1860, Tubman made over a dozen journeys across the Mason-Dixon line, guiding family and friends from slavery to freedom. During this time, her captaincy earned her the nickname “Moses," after the religious leader. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress created a more dangerous journey for any enslaved person traveling northbound. With the government compelling northern law enforcement to now capture free Black Americans, Tubman’s strategies as a conductor became more militant and she began carrying a firearm for protection.

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger. Harriet Tubman Suffrage Convention, New York, 1896

A cover of a comic book with a depiction of Harriet Tubman holding a rifle.

Golden Legacy Illustrated History Magazine: The Saga of Harriet Tubman, "The Moses of Her People," Vol. 2, 1967. Published by Fitzgerald Publishing Co. 2019.22.12

The Saga of Harriet Tubman, "The Moses of Her People"

The Golden Legacy Illustrated History Magazine is a graphic novel series published by Bertram A. Fitzgerald. These graphic novels were produced between 1966 and 1976 to “ implant pride and self-esteem in black youth while dispelling myths in others. ” “We believe this can be accomplished through our visual presentation of worldwide achievements in an effortless and enjoyable manner with a magazine which can be widely distributed.”

This issue about Harriet Tubman was written by Joan Bacchus Maynard , an artist, community organizer and preservationist who was a member of the grassroots organization to save Weeksville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, founded by free African Americans. Tubman is depicted on the cover as a fierce and courageous figure, and the danger of her work as conductor is palpable in the rifle she carries to protect herself and those she leads to freedom.

Through her friendship with fellow abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Tubman created her own network within the Underground Railroad. After a decade as a conductor, Tubman was called to action when the American Civil War began in 1861. She proved herself resourceful as a nurse, and she treated Union soldiers and fugitive African Americans alike using the medicinal value of native plants, a skill she learned as a young, enslaved woman working in the woods. After just two years of service, Harriet was tasked with moving behind enemy lines to gather intelligence from a web of informants. First a nurse, laundress and cook, now a spy and scout, Harriet Tubman also became the first woman in US history to lead a military expedition when she led Black troops in the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina in 1863.

I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me. Harriet Tubman to Sarah Bradford Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886)

Despite her renown and her heroism, Tubman was only paid $200 for the entirety of her service—less than half of what her white male counterparts received monthly. Additional compensation from the government came several decades later in the form of a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis, a Black union soldier she married after the war rather than for her own service. After the introduction of a bill by a Republican congressmember to grant Tubman a pension, President William McKinley later signed a bill granting Tubman a pension for her role as an Army nurse. Financial issues throughout the remainder of her life did not stop Tubman from lending her service to anyone in need. In 1896, on the land adjacent to her home, Harriet’s open-door policy flowered into the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent Colored People, where she spent her remaining years until her death in 1913. This home, located in Auburn, New York, a city about an hour outside of Syracuse and near Seneca Falls—the recognized birthplace of American feminism and women’s rights—became a site of pilgrimage for African Americans.

Angela Tate, Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture gives a deeper look into objects related to Harriet Tubman's life.

A postcard depicting a home and a manicured yard in front.

Postcard for the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged

Pinback button with a photo of Harriet Tubman and an American flag ribbon hanging below.

Pinback button for the Harriet Tubman Home

Brick from the Harriet Tubman Home

The NMAAHC bridges the connection between emancipation and modern-day freedom struggles in the collection of Harriet Tubman’s personal effects. In 2009, Charles L. Blockson, a historian and expert on the Underground Railroad, donated to the Museum a collection of items relating to Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy that were collected and given to him by Tubman’s descendants. Items such as a fork and knife from the Tubman household demystify and ground Tubman, giving her a sense of personhood.

Knife and fork from the Tubman household, 1870s.

Apron owned by Harriet Tubman, 1870–1913.

Handkerchief owned by Harriet Tubman, 1870s–1913.

The legacy of Harriet Tubman holds multitudes. Myths and legends about her acts of valor on the Underground Railroad have inspired artists to retrace her courage and skill in works of art. Tubman’s name readily evokes the image of strength (as seen in the christening of a cargo ship named after her in World War II ) and the complexities of being a Black woman—a pillar of courage to the public and a place of refuge for one’s family, friends and community.

Gospel Hymns No. 2 , 1876. Personal hymnal of Harriet Tubman. 2009.50.25

Harriet Tubman was a hero and icon during her lifetime and afterwards. Objects in the Museum's collection tell the story of her life at home with family and the accolades she received from the public. Her personal piety formed the basis of her pursuit of freedom and to go back and conduct others to freedom. Tubman’s small 8 x 5 inch hymnal is inscribed with the names of its two owners: Harriet Tubman and her great-niece Eva Northup. Though Tubman never learned to read, her spiritual beliefs were strengthened by the hymns and spirituals associated with African American uplift and freedom. Tubman’s favorite hymn was “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a hymn associated with the hidden messages between conductors on the Underground Railroad and the bondspeople traveling through it. The importance of this hymn to Tubman’s legacy is present in Alison Saar’s sculpture titled after the song.

A bronze sculpture featuring Harriet Tubman coming out of the ground, held by roots.

Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, 2007. Created by Alison Saar. 2011.63

Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial

Alison Saar (b. 1956), is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and mixed media artist who focuses on women and the African diaspora. This sculpture is titled after a Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which expresses a longing for a return to heaven. But it could also be a song of liberation, where the lyrics held coded messages that told of when Underground Railroad conductors like Harriet Tubman would arrive to assist in stealing away to freedom. This is a small-scale version of Saar’s 13 feet tall monument to Harriet Tubman that stands in Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza, in south Harlem at St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at West 122nd Street. Saar depicts Tubman "not as the conductor of the Underground Railroad, but as the train itself, an unstoppable locomotive.” Tubman’s forward motion tears up the roots of slavery. The skirt of her dress holds chains, knives, glass bottles and the faces of those she led to freedom.

Interview with Alison Saar, the artist who created "Swing Low: A Memorial to Harriet Tubman" at West 122nd Street, St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

The back page of a photo album featuring an image of Harriet Tubman.

Photograph album owned by Emily Howland showing the last page featuring a photograph of Harriet Tubman.

In 2017, the common image of Harriet Tubman—that of an elderly woman in a white shawl—was forever changed with the discovery of a never-before-seen photograph of Tubman from the late 1860s at the back of a photo album owned by Emily Howland. Howland was a philanthropist, suffragist and educator who was also active in abolitionist circles. In 2017, her photo album was acquired jointly by the NMAAHC and the Library of Congress. Of the nearly fifty photographs of abolitionists, educators and statesmen included in the albums pages, there was the newly discovered photograph of Harriet Tubman. The carte-de-visite portrait of Harriet Tubman was taken in Auburn, New York, when Tubman was in her mid-forties. This image of Tubman at the height of her powers is especially interesting when noting how stylish she appears to be. She drapes her ruffled arm gracefully across a chair and the other rests on her checked skirt and she appears solemn yet assured.

A quilted and appliqued textile portrait of Harriet Tubman

I Go To Prepare A Place For You , 2021. Created by Bisa Butler. 2021.38

I Go To Prepare A Place For You

Bisa Butler, an artist who uses textiles and quilting to share stories of African American history and culture, used Benjamin Powelson's portrait of Tubman from the Howland Album to recreate her vibrancy and strength. The quilt’s symbolism displays Tubman's need to conceal herself, her personality, and to express her religious beliefs. According to Butler , the sunflower motif is intended to “acknowledge Harriet Tubman’s reliance (and that of many people escaping slavery) on the North Star to help point the way towards freedom. The sun is also a star, and the sunflower symbolizes that guiding light. The sunflower is known as a spiritual and devotional flower because they follow the sun as it moves from East to West in the sky. The sunflowers appear to worship the sun and I use that to indicate Tubman’s devout faith.”

Portraits of Harriet Tubman in the NMAAHC collection document her as a woman, as a wife and mother, and as a caretaker. Observing these images of Tubman at different stages of her life provides further context for her story and legacy. These images give the famed Underground Railroad conductor a more tangible connection to the significant role of Black women’s activism and highlights the way images shape how we remember important Black women.

Harriet Tubman, 1871–76; printed later. Photograph by Harvey B. Lindsley.

Postcard of Harriet Tubman, Nelson Davis, and daughter Gertie, ca. 1887; printed later. Photograph by William Haight Cheney.

Albumen print of Harriet Tubman, ca. 1908; printed ca. 1920. Photograph by Tarby Studios.

Photographic postcard of Harriet Tubman, 1911–12; printed 1917–30.

The NMAAHC shares the story of Harriet Tubman through its collections relating to her life, her activism, her strength and her community. The materials here provide a second glance at what we think we know and celebrate about Tubman on the 200th anniversary of her birth.

Browse Objects in the NMAAHC Collection Relating to Harriet Tubman

Written by Angela Tate, Curator of Women’s History, and Romya-Jenevieve Jerry, Annie Bell Shepherd Curatorial Intern in African American Women’s History Published on March 4, 2022

https://www.militarytimes.com/military-honor/black-military-history/2018/02/07/general-tubman-female-abolitionist-was-also-a-secret-military-weapon/

http://www.harriet-tubman.org/

https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/news/album-previously-unknown-photo-young-harriet-tubman-go-public-view-first-time

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/combahee-ferry-raid

Historical graphic image of Harriet Tubman with a purple background and flowers

Share Your Story

Because of Harriet, we understand there is always a path forward. Because of Harriet, we are empowered to be bold and confident against all odds. As you reflect on Tubman’s life and legacy, share who you are because of Harriet on social media using #HiddenHerstory.

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Harriet Tubman's Life and Impact on the Underground Railroad

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Harriet Tubman stood just 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall; never learned to read or write; and spent her childhood and young adulthood as another person's property. She suffered most of her life from brutal headaches and seizures as the result of a beating. She never made much money in her lifetime, and lived humbly, eating food that she grew in garden.

But despite all that, Harriet Tubman became one of the most famous civilians and admired African-Americans in U.S. history. After escaping from slavery in 1849, she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad , bravely venturing back into the slave state of Maryland 13 times during the 1850s to help numerous other runaway enslaved people find their way north to freedom. During the Civil War, Tubman traveled south again to Fort Monroe to work as a spy, scout, nurse and cook for the Union Army. After the conflict, she established the first nursing home for elderly African-Americans [source: Larson ].

Tubman has grown into such an American icon that her legend sometimes obscures the person behind it. In this article, we'll look at the facts of her life and misconceptions about it, as well as how she became such an enduring symbol of freedom.

Early Life and Escape From Slavery

Harriet tubman and the underground railroad, secret agent for the union, a humble philanthropist and advocate for the elderly, after her death.

Tubman's Family & Birth

Harriet Ross Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 in Dorchester County Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The fifth of nine children of two enslaved parents, Benjamin Ross or Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green. Her mother was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess and Tubman's father by Anthony Thompson. Her parents gave her the name Araminta, and called her "Minty" for short [source: Allen ].

As with most enslaved people, Tubman's existence was harsh and full of brutality. As her 1860s biographer Sarah Hopkins Bradford wrote , "Tubman was put to work at an early age as a field hand, following the oxen and loading and unloading wood — labor so grueling that she developed muscles that made her as powerful as some male laborers, despite her lack of stature. Her owners eventually converted her into a house maid, and she endured whippings from her mistress if her dusting and dish-washing was deemed inadequate."

Harriet Tubman as a Teenager

As a teenager, she suffered a fractured skull when an overseer hit her with an iron weight intended for another slave, and the injury caused her to suffer headaches and seizures for the rest of her life [source: Larson ].

In 1844, Araminta Ross married a free African-American named John Tubman . Though the marriage wouldn't last, she kept his surname and began using her mother's first name as her own, and became Harriet Tubman [source: Allen ]. Though her John was not an enslaved man, because she was the law at the time dictated that any children born to them would be enslaved people as well.

In March 1849, Tubman's legal owner Edward Brodess died, leaving behind an estate deeply in debt. Tubman, who'd already seen three of her sisters auctioned off, feared being sent off to an even crueler household. When her husband John refused to go along, she and her brothers Ben and Henry ran away together. After a few weeks, the two young men lost their nerve and forced her to return with them. But Tubman refused to give up. Instead, she slipped off again, this time alone.

She traveled by night, using the north star to guide her, and sought refuge during the day with Quaker families who were so opposed to slavery that they were willing to break Maryland law and help fugitives [source: Allen ]. She made her way through Delaware, and eventually crossed into free Pennsylvania. "There was such a glory over everything," she later recalled. "The sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven" [source: Bradford ].

But Tubman's joy at escaping slavery was muted, because her family had remained behind in servitude. "I was free, and they should be free," she later recalled thinking. She was determined to help them escape, too [source: Bradford ].

After settling in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that had existed since the 1820s. It was a highly dangerous mission, since "slave stealers," as the Southern states called them, faced the risk of being publicly branded and jailed — and in Tubman's case, enslaved once more. And in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made such efforts a federal crime [source: Allen ].

That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back into Maryland and helped her niece and her two children escape. Over the next decade, she repeated that mission a dozen more times, cautiously confining her efforts to farms that she knew on Maryland's Eastern Shore [source: Larson ].

Tubman followed elaborate procedures to maintain stealth. She wore disguises, communicated with would-be escapees through third parties, and arranged for them to meet her miles away from their cabins, to reduce the chances that they would lead pursuers to her. And if all else failed, she carried a pistol. She warned her escapees that if they tried to turn back, she would shoot them to prevent them from betraying her and the rest [sources: Allen , Quinn ].

As word got around of Tubman's successful missions, she became a sought-after speaker at abolitionist movement fundraising meetings. She also became a target of mercenary slave catchers. But their failure to apprehend her only added to her legend [source: Allen ]. Her admirers naming her "General Tubman" for her heroic deeds.

An 1849 newspaper advertisement offered $50 for Tubman's capture in Maryland and $100 for her capture outside the state. The ad described her as "of a chestnut color, fine looking, and about five feet high" [source: Larson ]. Escaping slavery became even more challenging in 1850, with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law . This law stated that any escaped enslaved people could be captured in the North and returned to enslavement.

In 1860, Tubman pulled off an even more daring feat, by thwarting federal marshals in Troy, New York, who were attempting to send a captured slave named Charles Nalle back to Virginia. Tubman disguised herself as an elderly woman and slipped into a government building. When Nalle and his captors stepped out into the street, Tubman shouted a signal from an upper-story window, and a mob of abolitionists converged on them and seized Nalle, who was spirited away to a waiting riverboat [source: Winkler ].

Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 authorized biography of Tubman claimed that she had helped more than 300 enslaved people to freedom. She claimed, "I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." But according to contemporary biographer Kate Clifford Larson's research, Tubman actually led about 70 to freedom, and provided instructions that enabled another 70 or so to flee on their own.

After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Massachusetts Gov. John A. Andrew, a fervent abolitionist, contacted his friend Tubman and told her that the Union forces needed her help. He arranged transportation for Tubman to travel to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she went to work for Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Ostensibly, her mission was to help provide food and clothing to escaped enslaved people who were flocking to the Union Army's camps, but that seems to have been a cover story for her real work in gathering intelligence. With a budget of $100 in "secret service money," she recruited a small team of escaped enslaved people who were experienced riverboat pilots and knew every inch of the South Carolina coastline, and put them to work as scouts for the Union forces [sources: Winkler , Quinn ].

After President Abraham Lincoln authorized the recruiting and deployment of African-American troops in the summer of 1862, Tubman and her spies provided intelligence for the new units. In January 1863, her team's spying helped Union forces evade Confederate guards and stage a nine-day covert operation to seize needed supplies. As historian H. Donald Winkler describes it , Tubman's scouts "evolved into a kind of special-forces operation for the Black regiments," sneaking into enemy territory to gather information on their troop movements and fortifications.

In June 1863, according to Winkler, Tubman accompanied Union Col. James Montgomery and his forces up the Combahee River in the southern low country of South Carolina and helped lead a crucial raid. Tubman and her scouts sailed upriver and stealthily went ashore to talk to the enslaved who'd placed mines in the water for Confederate forces, so they could map the locations, and locate the storehouses where the enemy kept their supplies. Then she helped guide the Union craft around the deadly mines. The resulting raid not only struck a devastating blow to the Confederate forces, but also resulted in freedom for 700 enslaved people — many of whom subsequently were recruited by Tubman to serve in the Union forces.

After the Civil War ended in a Union victory in 1865, Tubman left her position and set out for the town of Auburn, New York, where she and her family had settled on property that the state's former governor, William H. Seward, had sold her on generous terms. But on the way, she got a rough reminder that the struggle to achieve freedom for African-Americans was just beginning.

According to Tubman biographers James A. McGowan and William C. Kashatus, Tubman was accosted by a train conductor, who refused to honor her soldier's pass for a train ticket. They got into an argument, and he and several passengers threw her into the baggage car, breaking her arm and three ribs. She was unable to work for months, and the woman who'd helped to defeat the Confederacy was compelled to accept handouts from neighbors and local grocers to feed her family and elderly parents [source: NPS ].

But Tubman was too tough to despair. Once she healed, she began growing vegetables and raising chickens, worked as a domestic and took in boarders. She fell in love with one of her guests, a former enslaved man and Union Army veteran named Nelson Davis , who was 22 years her junior, and the two married in 1869. In 1874, the couple adopted a baby girl named Gertie .

But Davis' ill health and some other setbacks meant that Tubman continued to struggle to make ends meet for the next several decades [source: McGowan and Kashatus ]. While the federal government wouldn't give her a pension for her wartime service as a spy, after Davis's death in 1888, she was able to collect a widow's stipend, and eventually got a pension for having worked as a nurse in the latter part of the war [source: Larson ].

Despite her own humble circumstances, Tubman was determined to keep helping others as well. In 1896, she scraped together enough money to buy a second plot of land alongside her Auburn property, where she started a home for elderly African-Americans. Seven years later, as Tubman aged, she turned the property over the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, of which she was a member, with the understanding that the church would continue to run the home. Tubman continued to live next door until her own health began to decline, at which point she became one of the residents at the home she had founded. She passed away there in 1913, at the age of 90 [sources: NPS , Larson ].

Abolitionist insurrection leader John Brown met and became friends with Tubman in the late 1850s. He was so in awe of her toughness and courage that he insisted upon using male pronouns to describe her, saying that she was "the most of a man naturally that I ever met with" [source: Allen ]. In fact, Tubman's friends included many famous people like Frederick Douglass, William Henry Seward, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Garrett, and Susan B. Anthony

After Tubman was buried with military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York, her fame continued to grow. The city of Auburn commemorated her legacy with a plaque on the courthouse. During World War II, after a successful war bond drive by the National Council of Negro Women, a Liberty ship was christened the SS Harriet Tubman in her honor [source: Larson ]. She became the subject of numerous biographies and children's books, and the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged was recognized as a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Four years later, she became the first African-American woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp [source: Larson ].

Abolitionist journalist William Lloyd Garrison nicknamed Tubman "Moses," an analogy to the Biblical Moses who led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. But the name also fit, because the deeply religious Tubman used the title of a familiar spiritual, "Go Down, Moses," as a coded message to fugitives to stay hidden [sources: Winkler , Harriet Tubman Historical Society ].

Harriet Tubman FAQ

When did harriet tubman die, how many slaves did harriet tubman save, where was harriet tubman was born, what states did harriet tubman free slaves from, did harriet tubman ever get caught, lots more information, author's note: how harriet tubman worked.

Before I took on this assignment, I knew about Harriet Tubman mostly only in the context of the Underground Railroad. It was uplifting to learn about her courageous work as a Union spy during the Civil War, and about her tireless efforts afterward to help the poor and the elderly. To me, her story really exemplifies the true greatness of America — the ordinary people who, throughout American history, have taken it upon themselves to fight against injustice and work for the good of us all.

How the Underground Railroad Worked
How the Emancipation Proclamation Worked
John Brown's Failed Raid on Harper's Ferry Was a Major Impetus for the U.S. Civil War

Harriet Tubman

Character, Courage and Commitment

As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman made several trips into slave-holding states, leading dozens of individuals to freedom in the North. During the Civil War, she further risked her life and safety to work first as a nurse and then as a spy for the Union Army. Afterwards, she became an outspoken advocate for African American and women's rights, insisting that all be afforded dignity, treated with respect and granted equality.

Araminta Ross was born in Dorchester County, Maryland in or around 1822 on Anthony Thompson's plantation. Araminta grew up to be known as Harriet Tubman. By 1840, Harriet, her mother and several siblings had been relocated from a plantation in Bucktown back to Thompson's farm.

The young girl would grow up to become one of the most celebrated figures of her time. Her legacy of steadfast courage and commitment to justice would endure more than 100 years after her death.

Today, no trace of Tubman's birthplace remains. Though, a historical marker notes the location.

Cambridge, Maryland. Dorchester County. Site of Harriet Tubman's birth

Tubman worked as a field hand for many years -following the oxen loading and unloading wood and carrying heavy burdens -all along developing great strength and determination.Later, she was hired out to perform housework and child care where the plantation mistress proved capricious and cruel, employing frequent beatings for the most minor of offenses.

The Bucktown Village store still stands in Bucktown, Maryland. It was here that 12-year-old slave Araminta Ross was shopping with the plantation cook when an overseer entered, pursuing an escaped slave. The overseer ordered Araminta to assist with tying the man up, which she refused to do. As the escaping slave bolted for the door, the overseer swept up a two-pound scale weight up from the counter and threw it after him. The weight missed its mark, hitting Araminta instead. The blow knocked her unconscious.

It was not her first experience with the violence of slavery, but it would have the most lasting effect as she suffered from severe headaches for the rest of her life.

Bucktown Village Store historic site, Cambridge, Maryland.

Araminta married a free black named John Tubman in 1844, taking his last name. She changed her first name, adopting her mother's name, becoming Harriet. In 1849, worried that she and the other slaves on the plantation where she lived were going to be sold, Tubman decided to run away. Her husband refused to go with her, so she set out with her two brothers. Her brothers turned back, but Tubman persevered to freedom, settling in Philadelphia.

Tubman could not be happy in freedom knowing that her relatives and friends remained enslaved. She made the dangerous decision to return to Maryland to secure their freedom as well.

Linchester Mill was the hub of Underground Railroad activity in the area. Whites and blacks, free and enslaved, had regular contact here at the general store or the post office. Free and enslaved African Americans worked side-by-side, providing a constant flow of information and support to freedom seekers. Quakers and free blacks who lived near the mill secretly helped fleeing slaves pass through the area.

The mill dam created a spot to cross Hunting Creek. Such crossing points helped freedom seekers avoid unwanted attention.

Linchester Mill historic site, Preston, Maryland.

Harriet Tubman’s parents were active in the Underground Railroad, and she most likely made her first escape from their home near Choptank Landing.

On Christmas Day 1854, Tubman led her three brothers to freedom from nearby Poplar Neck. Robert, Ben and Henry, as well as several others, hid in a corn crib until dark, when they could begin their journey north.

At nightfall, Harriet safely led them on their journey towards freedom, traveling through Delaware, Pennsylvania, and across upstate New York to St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Choptank River, Preston, Maryland, near site of Tubman's parents' home.

The forests, marshes, and waterways that characterized Tubman's home territory are largely unchanged from the time that she made her home in Dorchester County.

Knowledge of the terrain was vital to survival while hiding and trying to flee. Tubman and others had to successfully navigate the land and waterways, trap and forage for food, and hide from their pursuers. Understanding the tides, knowing how to find food and fresh water, and following the North Star were all skills that later proved vital as she guided her charges north along the Underground Railroad to freedom.

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Cambridge, Maryland

As part of the Underground Railroad network, Tubman successfully employed a variety of escape and evasion methods to help aid fleeing slaves. Disguise was a favorite. If it was announced that a group of male slaves had bolted from a plantation, she dressed the fugitives as women for the trip north.

On another occasion, Tubman came dangerously close to being identified during a stopover at a train depot. To confuse her pursuers, she quickly purchased a ticket for the southbound train, correctly believing, that as it turned out, few would expect an “outlaw” of her notoriety to venture further into Dixie in such a public manner. For one of her more brazen missions, she convinced a light-skinned fugitive to pose as a white master transporting a group of slaves to a town further up the road.

For all the recriminations directed at her by displeased plantation owners throughout the South, Tubman was never caught and never lost a “passenger.”

Moving “passengers” along the Underground Railroad, Tubman became very familiar with the different towns and transportation routes characterizing the South. This information proved extremely valuable to Federal military commanders after the Civil War began in 1861.

Poorly drawn and outdated maps, coupled with soldiers who had little knowledge of the United States beyond their own village, made individuals like Tubman vitally important to the Union war effort. Utilizing the extensive knowledge of the South she had obtained while working for the Underground Railroad, Tubman was able to provide accurate intelligence data to Northern troops.

Tubman also served as a spy, seeking and delivering intelligence from behind enemy lines. At the war's conclusion, she was granted a military pension of $20 per month, the first African American woman to receive one.

After the war, Tubman retired to a piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York where she lived surrounded by family. She cared for her parents and other relatives, becoming a stalwart of the community. She was famous in her own lifetime for her accomplishments, was sought after as a speaker, and collaborated on a biography of her life story.

Tubman died in 1913 and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

Tubman's legacy lives on in the hearts and spirit of every American. She has been honored with monuments and statues, schools bear her name, and thousands of Americans daily travel along Harriet Tubman roads, streets, and avenues.

Harriet Tubman Elementary School, Washington, DC.

Tubman has been honored on a United States postage stamp.

She has been celebrated as an enduring Civil Rights icon by contemporary artists and activists.

In April 2016, the US Treasury announced that she would become the first American woman pictured on currency in over 100 years.

Soon, Tubman will take her place in history on the new twenty dollar bill.

Quote Describing Harriet Tubman as Inspiration

Harriet Tubman: Timeline of Her Life, Underground Rail Service and Activism

In addition to freeing slaves, Tubman was also a Civil War spy, nurse and supporter of women's suffrage.

Wanting to bring an end to slavery, Tubman also coordinated with abolitionists. During the Civil War , she became a nurse and a spy for the Union. And despite her ongoing financial struggles, she continued to fight for equality and justice by speaking out against prejudice and advocating women's suffrage. It's clear Tubman led a momentous life that made the world a better place.

c. 1822: Tubman is born as Araminta "Minty" Ross in Maryland's Dorchester County

Her parents, Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green, are both enslaved, meaning Ross had the same status at birth.

Though her birthdate has often been listed as around 1820, a record from March 1822 lists that a midwife had been paid for tending to Green, which suggests the birth may have taken place in February or March of that year.

c. 1828: Tubman is about five or six years old when her enslavers hire her out to tend to an infant. She is whipped for any perceived mistakes.

c. 1829: Around the age of seven, Tubman is again hired out. Her duties include walking into wet marshes to check muskrat traps. She becomes ill with measles and returns to her mother to recover.

c. 1834-36: An overseer throws a two-pound weight at another slave but hits Tubman's head. She barely survives the devastating injury and experiences headaches for the remainder of her life. It's possible this injury led to her suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy , which could explain her visions and sleeping spells.

c. 1835: Tubman works as a field hand, which she prefers to inside tasks.

c. 1830s: Two of Tubman's older sisters are sold and transported out of Maryland.

1840: Tubman's father is freed from slavery.

1844: She weds John Tubman, a free Black man, though her status as a slave means the union is not legally recognized. Upon marriage, Tubman adopts her mother's name of Harriet.

March 7, 1849: Tubman's owner dies, which makes her fear being sold.

September 17, 1849: Tubman heads north with two of her brothers to escape slavery. However, the men become nervous and convince their sister to return.

October 1849: Tubman runs away

She follows the North Star and makes it to Philadelphia. As Pennsylvania is a free state, she has escaped enslavement.

September 18, 1850: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passes. It requires all parts of the United States, even states that had outlawed slavery, to participate in the return of runaway slaves.

December 1850: Tubman helps rescue a niece and her niece's children after learning they are supposed to be sold at auction.

1851: Tubman tries to bring her husband north, but he decides to remain with his second wife, a free Black woman. Tubman instead guides another group to Canada, where they will be outside the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act.

December 1854: Tubman helps a group that includes three of her brothers travel to Canada.

READ MORE: How Harriet Tubman and William Still Helped the Underground Railroad

June 1857: Tubman brings her parents from Maryland to Canada

Her father is in danger because he has been helping the Underground Railroad.

April 1858: In Canada, Tubman meets abolitionist John Brown . She learns of his plans to spark a slave rebellion in the United States and agrees to gather recruits for the cause.

October 16, 1859: Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia) takes place. Tubman does not participate, perhaps due to illness.

1859: Tubman purchases a property in Auburn, New York, from antislavery politician William H. Seward . Having been unhappy in Canada, her parents join Tubman there.

Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn, New York, 1940

April 27, 1860: In Troy, New York, Tubman helps former slave Charles Nalle elude the U.S. marshals who intend to return him to his enslaver.

December 1860: Tubman makes her last trip on the Underground Railroad

1862: Following the start of the Civil War, Tubman joins Union troops in South Carolina. She becomes a nurse, while also running a wash house and working as a cook to earn money.

c. 1863: Tubman serves as a spy for the Union

She coordinates with former slaves from the area to gather information about the opposing Confederate forces.

READ MORE: Harriet Tubman's Service as a Union Spy

June 1-2, 1863: Tubman leads an armed raid up the Combahee River raid in South Carolina. The mission destroys Confederate supplies and frees more than 700 enslaved people. Tubman is the first woman to head a military expedition in the United States.

July 1863: After the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, whose soldiers were African American volunteers, suffers devastating losses during a bloody battle at Fort Wagner, Tubman helps bury the dead and aids survivors.

June 1864: Tubman is granted a furlough and goes to Auburn to visit her parents.

1865: Tubman nurses Black soldiers at Fort Monroe in Virginia. After the Civil War ends, she visits Washington, D.C., and informs the surgeon general that Black soldiers are experiencing harsh conditions in military hospitals.

READ MORE: Inside Harriet Tubman's Life of Service After the Underground Railroad

July 1865: Tubman asks Seward, who is secretary of state, to help her receive payment for her work during the war. She is not successful, due in part to the turmoil of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination and Seward's ongoing recovery from stab wounds suffering during an assassination attempt.

October 1865: Tubman is traveling home by train when a conductor orders her, using a racial slur , to go to a different car. She defends her rights but is forcibly removed.

December 1868: Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman , a biography by Sarah Bradford is published (though the official publication date is listed as 1869). The book has multiple inaccuracies but sales raise approximately $1,200 for a financially struggling Tubman.

March 18, 1869: Tubman weds Nelson Davis, a 25-year-old former slave and Civil War veteran.

1873: Tubman is robbed by men who trick her into believing they could provide her with Confederate gold.

1874: Tubman and her husband adopt a daughter, whom they name Gertie Davis.

June 1886: Tubman buys 25 acres of land next to her home in Auburn to create a nursing home for Black Americans.

October 1886: A revised Tubman biography, Harriet, the Moses of Her People , is published.

October 18, 1888: Tubman's husband dies after suffering from tuberculosis.

1890s: Tubman becomes more involved in the movement for women's suffrage.

June 1890: Tubman applies for a pension as a Civil War widow.

October 16, 1895 : Tubman is approved for a war widow pension of $8 a month .

July 1896: Tubman speaks at the founding conference of the National Association of Colored Women.

November 1896: Tubman is introduced by Susan B. Anthony at a suffrage convention in Rochester, New York.

1897: Queen Victoria sends Tubman a shawl and a medal in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee. The queen also invites Tubman to visit England to celebrate her birthday, but Tubman's straitened finances make this an impossibility.

Harriet Tubman Lace Shawl Queen Victoria Photo

Late 1890s: Tubman undergoes brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in an attempt to alleviate her painful headaches.

1899: Congress raises Tubman's pension to $20 per month, but the increase is for her services as a nurse instead of her military work.

June 23, 1908: Tubman attends the opening ceremony for the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. It will be operated by AME Zion Church, which has taken over the deed to the property.

May 19, 1911: An ailing Tubman becomes a resident of the Harriet Tubman Home. Supporters raise funds to finance her care.

March 10, 1913: Tubman dies following a battle with pneumonia

March 13, 1913: Tubman is buried with military honors.

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Harriet Tubman

Known as the “Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is considered the first African American woman to serve in the military.

Tubman’s exact birth date is unknown, but estimates place it between 1820 and 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Born Araminta Ross, the daughter of Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, Tubman had eight siblings. By age five, Tubman’s owners rented her out to neighbors as a domestic servant. Early signs of her resistance to slavery and its abuses came at age twelve when she intervened to keep her master from beating an enslaved man who tried to escape. She was hit in the head with a two-pound weight, leaving her with a lifetime of severe headaches and narcolepsy.

Although slaves were not legally allowed to marry, Tubman entered a marital union with John Tubman, a free black man, in 1844. She took his name and dubbed herself Harriet.

Contrary to legend, Tubman did not create the Underground Railroad; it was established in the late eighteenth century by black and white abolitionists. Tubman likely benefitted from this network of escape routes and safe houses in 1849, when she and two brothers escaped north. Her husband refused to join her, and by 1851 he had married a free black woman. Tubman returned to the South several times and helped dozens of people escape. Her success led slaveowners to post a $40,000 reward for her capture or death.

Tubman was never caught and never lost a “passenger.” She participated in other antislavery efforts, including supporting John Brown in his failed 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia arsenal.

Through the Underground Railroad, Tubman learned the towns and transportation routes characterizing the South – information that made her important to Union military commanders during the Civil War. As a Union spy and scout, Tubman often transformed herself into an aging woman. The she would wander the streets under Confederate control and learning from the enslaved population about Confederate troop placements and supply lines. Tubman helped many of these individuals find food, shelter, and even jobs in the North. She also became a respected guerrilla operative. As a nurse, Tubman dispensed herbal remedies to black and white soldiers dying from infection and disease.

After the war, Tubman raised funds to aid freedmen, joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in their quest for women’s suffrage, cared for her aging parents, and worked with white writer Sarah Bradford on her autobiography as a potential source of income. She married a Union soldier Nelson Davis, also born into slavery, who was more than twenty years her junior. Residing in Auburn, New York, she cared for the elderly in her home and in 1874, the Davises adopted a daughter. After an extensive campaign for a military pension, she was finally awarded $8 per month in 1895 as Davis’s widow (he died in 1888) and $20 in 1899 for her service. In 1896, she established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on land near her home. Tubman died in 1913 and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

Edited by Debra Michals, Ph.D.

The original version of this article was excerpted from “Clandestine Women: The Untold Stories of Women in Espionage” Exhibition, Annandale, Virginia: NWHM, 2002.
Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom . New York: Time Warner Book Company, 2004.
Horton, Lois E. Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.
Maxwell, Louise P. "Tubman, Harriet." Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History . Ed. Colin A. Palmer. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 2210-2212. U.S. History in Context . Accessed April 2, 2015.
"Tubman, Harriet." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences . Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 464-465. U.S. History in Context . Accessed April 22, 2015.
PHOTO: Library of Congress

MLA - Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-tubman.

Harriet Tubman, National Women’s History Museum

National Geographic

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/harriet-tubman.html

http://www.nps.gov/hatu/index.htm

http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/tubman/

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/harriet/support1.html

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/ny1.htm

Bradford, Sarah, H. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman . Auburn: W.J. Moses, Printer, 1869. (Available online: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bradford/bradford.html )

McGovern, Ann. Wanted Dead or Alive: The True Story of Harriet Tubman . Scholastic Paperbacks, 1991. [for ages 4-8]

McMullan, Kate. The Story of Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad . New York: Parachute Press, 1991. [for ages 9-12]

Petry, Ann. Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad . Harper, 1996. [for ages 9-12]

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HISTORY & CULTURE

Why Harriet Tubman risked it all for enslaved Americans

Known as "Moses of Her People" on the Underground Railroad, Tubman’s life was marked by stunning cruelty and supreme courage.

Harriet Tubman's courageous work along the Underground Railroad and her activism afterwards has made her one of America's most well-known historical figures.

She is among history’s most famous Americans—a woman so courageous, she sought her own freedom from slavery twice and so determined, she inspired scores of other enslaved people to flee, too. Revered by some of her era’s most influential minds and given nicknames like “Moses” and “General,” she brought hope to generations of Americans, enslaved and free. She was Harriet Tubman, and her life contained both astonishing cruelty and unlikely success.

Born Araminta “Minty” Ross in Maryland around 1820, she was the daughter of enslaved parents. As a child, her labor was rented out by slaveholder Edward Brodess. When she was 13, an overseer threw a metal weight at an enslaved man in an attempt to make him return to work; it hit her instead, causing a traumatic brain injury . She began to have vivid dreams and symptoms similar to temporal lobe epilepsy; she interpreted her visions as divine symbols and became deeply religious.

As a young woman, she married John Tubman and changed her name. John was free, but his status was not enough to protect his new wife, now named Harriet, from being arbitrarily sold. In 1849, Brodess attempted to sell her but could not find a buyer due to her health. After he died, it looked certain that her other family members would be separated. So Harriet tried escape for the first time, along with her brothers. The attempt failed when her brothers returned to the Brodess household. Soon after, she decided to go it alone. ( Explore the Underground Railroad's "great central depot" in New York .)

A drawing of Harriet Tubman on the underground railroad

A painting of Harriet Tubman, armed with her revolver, guiding formerly enslaved people into Canada.

Tubman made her way from Maryland to Pennsylvania with the help of the Underground Railroad. Once there, she attempted to guide other family members out of slavery. She would return to Maryland 13 times to rescue them. Along the way, she gave other enslaved people information to help their own flight. Armed with a revolver and her faith, she led at least 70 slaves to freedom.

Illiterate and without formal schooling, she nonetheless used her experiences with enslavement to aid the abolitionist cause. She befriended prominent abolitionists and intellectuals, white and black, and leveraged those sympathetic bonds into financial support for her cause. As the Underground Railroad’s most famous “conductor,” she earned the nickname Moses, a reference to the biblical figure who led his people from slavery. During the Civil War, she assisted escaped slaves in Union camps, acted as a nurse, and worked for the Union Army as a scout and spy . In 1863, she led an armed expedition into Confederate territory.

After the Civil War, Tubman continued her activism, agitating for women’s suffrage and advocating for newly free black Americans. Though she was impoverished and in poor health during her later years, she never stopped that advocacy. In 1896, she bought a 25-acre property in upstate New York that later became the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes . She died there in 1913.

At age 74, Tubman purchased property in Auburn, New York with hopes of turning it into a home for the poor and elderly. With help from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes opened in 1908.

Much of Tubman’s story is shrouded in myth , but she is still revered for the courage that helped her not just escape, but evade potential capture while helping others. For a while, she was even destined for U.S. currency through a planned redesign that would replace Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill with hers. Those plans are now on hold , stymied by an administration change and purported technical challenges. Harriet Tubman may never receive that symbolic nod, but she remains one of American history’s most well-known figures.

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Harriet Tubman Library Guide: Biographies of Tubman

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Harriet Tubman

"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." - Harriet Tubman

Perhaps one of the best known personalities of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman was born into slavery as Araminta Ross, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, sometime in 1820 or 1821. As a child, Tubman was “hired out” to various masters who proved to be particularly cruel and abusive to her. As a result of a head injury caused by one of these men, she suffered from seizures and “visions” for the rest of her life, which she believed were sent from God.

In 1840, Tubman’s father was freed as a result of a stipulation in his master’s will, but continued to work for his former owner’s family. Although Tubman, her mother, and her siblings were also supposed to be freed, the law was ignored and they remained enslaved. Tubman married a free black in 1844, and changed her first name from Araminta to Harriet.

In 1849, Tubman became seriously ill with complications from her head injury, and her owner decided to sell her, but could not find a buyer. After her owner’s sudden death, the family began selling off all of the slaves. Not wanting to have her family separated, Tubman was determined to escape. A first attempt, in which Tubman was accompanied by her brothers, was aborted when they had second thoughts. Tubman decided to try again on her own, and she escaped via the Underground Railroad into Pennsylvania.

Tubman settled in Philadelphia and was able to support herself doing odd jobs. But in 1850, word came that her niece and her two children were to be sold. Tubman was determined to help, and went back to Maryland. With the assistance of her brother-in-law, Tubman was able to bring her niece and the two children back safely to Philadelphia. This was the first of many trips that Tubman would make to lead family members and others to freedom. On one expedition, Tubman contacted her husband in the hopes that he would follow her to Pennsylvania, but he had remarried and preferred to remain in Maryland.

Over the course of 11 years, Tubman rescued over 70 slaves from Maryland, and assisted 50 or 60 others in making their way to Canada. During this time, her reputation in the abolitionist community grew, and she became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and John Brown . She also moved her base of operations to Auburn, New York, closer to the Canadian border. Tubman conducted her last rescue mission in November 1861, as the Civil War enveloped the nation.

Tubman offered her services to the Union Army, and in early 1862, she went to South Carolina to provide badly needed nursing care for black soldiers and newly liberated slaves. Working with General David Hunter, Tubman also began spying and scouting missions behind Confederate lines. In June of 1863, she accompanied Colonel James Montgomery in an assault on several plantations along the Combahee River, rescuing more than 700 slaves. Her deed was celebrated in the press and she became even more famous.

With the end of the war, Tubman returned to Auburn, NY and married a Civil War veteran. Although her service in the Union Army was much publicized, she had great difficulty in getting a pension from the government, but was eventually awarded a nurse’s pension in the 1880s. She did not stay idle in her later years, taking on the cause of women’s suffrage with the same determination she had shown for abolition.

Tubman established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on a property adjacent to her own. After undergoing brain surgery to try to alleviate the symptoms from the head injury that had plagued her since childhood, and being essentially penniless, Tubman was forced to move into the home herself in 1911. She died there on March 10, 1913, surrounded by family and friends. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." ~Harriet Tubman

Sarah Osborn Benjamin

Thomas Carney

Harriet Tubman: Facts & Related Content

The Information Architects maintain a master list of the topics included in the corpus of Encyclopædia Britannica , and create and manage the relationships between them.

Also Known As	Araminta Ross
Born	c.1820 • •
Died	March 10, 1913 • •
Notable Family Members	daughter of Benjamin Ross • daughter of Harriet "Rit" Green • married to John Tubman (1844–1849) • married to Nelson Davis (1869–1888)
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Did You Know?

Slave catchers knew Harriet Tubman was illiterate, so she escaped capture by pretending to read a book.
Harriet Tubman co-led a military raid during the Civil War.
In 2016, the U.S. announced plans to display Harriet Tubman's portrait on the twenty dollar bill.

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Biography of Harriet Tubman: Freed Enslaved People, Fought for the Union

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Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–March 10, 1913) was an enslaved woman, freedom seeker, Underground Railroad conductor, North American 19th-century Black activist , spy, soldier, and nurse known for her service during the Civil War and her advocacy of civil rights and women's suffrage.

Tubman remains one of history's most inspiring African Americans and there are many children's stories about her, but those usually stress her early life, escape from enslavement, and work with the Underground Railroad. Less known are her Civil War service and her other activities in the nearly 50 years she lived after the war.

Fast Facts: Harriet Tubman

Known For : Participation in the North American 19-century Black activist movement, Civil War work, civil rights
Also Known As : Araminta Ross, Araminta Green, Harriet Ross, Harriet Ross Tubman, Moses
Born : c. 1820 in Dorchester County, Maryland
Parents : Benjamin Ross, Harriet Green
Died : March 10, 1913 in Auburn, New York
Spouses : John Tubman, Nelson Davis
Children : Gertie
Notable Quote : "I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive."

Tubman was enslaved from birth in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1820 or 1821, on the plantation of Edward Brodas or Brodess. Her birth name was Araminta, and she was called Minty until she changed her name to Harriet—after her mother—as an early teen. Her parents, Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green were enslaved Africans who saw many of their 11 children sold into the Deep South.

At age 5, Araminta was "rented" to neighbors to do housework. She was never good at household chores and was beaten by her enslavers and "renters." She wasn't educated to read or write. She eventually was assigned to work as a field hand, which she preferred to housework. At age 15, she suffered a head injury when she blocked the path of the overseer pursuing an uncooperative enslaved person. The overseer flung a weight at the other enslaved people, hitting Tubman, who probably sustained a severe concussion. She was ill for a long time and never fully recovered.

In 1844 or 1845, Tubman married John Tubman, a free Black man. Shortly after her marriage, she hired a lawyer to investigate her legal history and discovered that her mother had been freed on a technicality upon the death of a former enslaver The lawyer advised her that a court wouldn't likely hear the case, so she dropped it. But knowing that she should have been born free led her to contemplate freedom and resent her situation.

In 1849, Tubman heard that two of her brothers were about to be sold to the Deep South, and her husband threatened to sell her, too. She tried to persuade her brothers to escape with her but left alone, making her way to Philadelphia and freedom. The next year, Tubman decided to return to Maryland to free her sister and her sister's family. Over the next 12 years, she returned 18 or 19 times, bringing more than 300 people out of enslavement.

Underground Railroad

Tubman's organizing ability was crucial to her work with the Underground Railroad, a network of opponents of enslavement that helped freedom seekers escape. Tubman was only 5 feet tall, but she was smart and strong and carried a rifle. She used it not only to intimidate pro-enslavement people but also to keep enslaved people from backing out. She told any who seemed ready to leave that "dead Negroes tell no tales" about the railroad.

When Tubman first reached Philadelphia, she was, under the law of the time, a free woman, but the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made her a freedom seeker again. All citizens were obligated to aid in her recapture, so she had to operate quietly. But she soon became known throughout the North American 19th-century Black activist circles and freedmen's communities.

After the Fugitive Slave Act passed, Tubman began guiding her Underground Railroad passengers to Canada, where they could be truly free. From 1851 through 1857, she lived parts of the year in St. Catherines, Canada, and Auburn, New York, where many North American 19th-century Black activists lived.

Other Activities

In addition to her twice-yearly trips to Maryland to help freedom seekers escape, Tubman developed her oratorical skills and began speaking publicly at anti-enslavement meetings and, by the end of the decade, women's rights meetings. A price had been placed on her head—at one time it was as high as $40,000—but she was never betrayed.

Tubman freed three of her brothers in 1854, bringing them to St. Catherines. In 1857, Tubman brought her parents to freedom. They couldn't take Canada's climate, so she settled them on land she bought in Auburn with the aid of North American 19th-century Black activists. Earlier, she had returned to rescue her husband John Tubman, only to find he'd remarried and wasn't interested in leaving.

Tubman earned money as a cook and laundress, but she also received support from public figures in New England, including key North American 19th-century Black activists. She was supported by Susan B Anthony , William H. Seward, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Horace Mann, the Alcotts, including educator Bronson Alcott and writer Louisa May Alcott , William Still of Philadelphia, and Thomas Garratt of Wilmington, Delaware. Some supporters used their homes as Underground Railroad stations.

In 1859, when John Brown was organizing a rebellion he believed would end enslavement, he consulted Tubman. She supported his plans at Harper's Ferry , raised funds in Canada, and recruited soldiers. She intended to help him take the armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia to supply guns to enslaved people they believed would rebel against their captivity. But she became ill and wasn't there.

Brown's raid failed and his supporters were killed or arrested. She mourned her friends' deaths and continued to hold Brown as a hero.

Tubman's trips to the South as "Moses," as she'd become known for leading her people to freedom, ended as the Southern states began to secede and the U.S. government prepared for war. Once war started, Tubman went South to assist with "contrabands," freedom seekers attached to the Union Army. The next year, the Union Army asked Tubman to organize a network of scouts and spies among Black men. She led forays to gather information and persuade enslaved people to leave their enslavers. Many joined regiments of Black soldiers.

In July 1863, Tubman led troops commanded by Col. James Montgomery in the Combahee River expedition, disrupting Southern supply lines by destroying bridges and railroads and freeing more than 750 enslaved people. Gen. Rufus Saxton, who reported the raid to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton , said: "This is the only military command in American history wherein a woman, Black or White, led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted." Some believe Tubman was allowed to go beyond women's traditional boundaries because of her race.

Tubman, believing she was employed by the U.S. Army, spent her first paycheck on building a place where freed Black women could earn a living doing laundry for soldiers. But she wasn't paid regularly or given rations she believed she deserved. She received only $200 in three years of service, supporting herself by selling baked goods and root beer, which she made after she completed her regular duties.

After the war, Tubman never got her back military pay. When she applied for a pension—with the support of Secretary of State William Seward, Colonel T. W. Higginson, and Rufus—her application was denied. Despite her service and fame, she had no official documents to prove she had served in the war.

Freedmen Schools

After the war, Tubman established schools for freedmen in South Carolina. She never learned to read and write, but she appreciated the value of education and supported efforts to educate formerly enslaved people.

She later returned to her home in Auburn, New York, which was her base for the rest of her life. She financially supported her parents, and her brothers and their families moved to Auburn. Her first husband died in 1867 in a fight with a White man. In 1869 she married Nelson Davis, who had been enslaved in North Carolina but served as a Union Army soldier. He was often ill, probably with tuberculosis, and frequently couldn't work.

Tubman welcomed several children into her home, raising them as her own, and supported some impoverished formerly enslaved people, financing her efforts through donations and loans. In 1874, she and Davis adopted a baby girl named Gertie.

Publishing and Speaking

To finance her life and her support of others, she worked with historian Sarah Hopkins Bradford to publish "Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman" in 1869. The book was initially financed by North American 19th-century Black activists, including Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith, the latter a supporter of John Brown and first cousin of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton . Tubman toured to speak about her experiences as "Moses."

In 1886, Bradford, with Tubman's help, wrote a full-scale biography of Tubman titled "Harriet Tubman: Moses of Her People." In the 1890s, she finally was able to collect a pension as Davis' widow: $8 a month.

Tubman also worked with Susan B. Anthony on women's suffrage. She attended women's rights conventions and spoke for the women's movement, advocating for the rights of Black women. In 1896, Tubman spoke at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women .

Continuing to support aged and poor African Americans, Tubman established a home on 25 acres next to her home in Auburn, raising money with help from the AME Church and a local bank. The home, which opened in 1908, initially was called the John Brown Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People but later was named for her.

She donated the home to the AME Zion Church with the proviso that it would be kept as a home for the elderly. She moved into the home in 1911 and died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913.

Tubman became an icon after her death. A World War II Liberty ship was named for her, and in 1978 she was featured on a commemorative stamp. Her home has been named a national historic landmark.

The four phases of Tubman's life—an enslaved person; a North American 19th-century Black activist and conductor on the Underground Railroad; a Civil War soldier, nurse, spy, and scout; and a social reformer—are important aspects of her dedication to service. Schools and museums bear her name and her history has been told in books, movies, and documentaries.

In April 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew announced that Tubman would replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill by 2020, but the plans were delayed.

" Timeline of the Life of Harriet Tubman ." Harriet Tubman Historical Society.
" Harriet Tubman Biography ." Harriettubmanbiography.com.
" Harriet Tubman: American Abolitionist ." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
" Harriet Tubman Biography ." Biography.com.
Harriet Tubman
Biography of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman Picture Gallery
Harriet Tubman on the 20 Dollar Bill
Black American History and Women Timeline: 1800–1859
African American History Timeline: 1840 to 1849
The Underground Railroad
Top 9 Events That Led to the Civil War
5 Classic and Heartbreaking Narratives by Enslaved People
Slavery in 19th Century America
The Christiana Riot
Philosophies of the North American 19-Century Anti-Enslavement Activist Movement
Fugitive Slave Act
American Civil War: Causes of Conflict
Biography of Lydia Maria Child, Activist and Author
John Mercer Langston: Anti-Enslavement Activist, Politician, and Educator

Biography Online

Harriet Tubman biography

Tubman was born Araminta Ross, to slave parents who lived on plantations in Maryland. Little is known about her family background and ancestry, but her maternal grandmother came to the US on a slave ship from Africa (possibly from modern-day Ghana).

Her parents Rit and Ben Ross had nine children together, but three of Harriet’s sisters were sold at an early age by their owners and she never saw them again.

Even as a young child Harriet was responsible for looking after her younger siblings because her mother was too busy working as a cook. Harriet was also hired as a nursemaid to a “Miss Susan”. She was frequently whipped by her overseers – leading to scars which would last all her life. For periods of time, she was also sent out to work for a planter – checking muskrat traps – and later farming tasks, such as ploughing and moving logs.

On one occasion, Tubman was hit in the head by a stone thrown by a slave owner. The slave owner was aiming at another slave, but the stone hit Tubman in the back of her head – cracking her skull and leading to lifelong headaches, epileptic seizures and dreams or visions. Tubman later attributed her bushy unkempt hair for reducing the impact of the stone and saving her life.

Around 1844, Harriet married John Tubman. Around this time, she adopted her mother’s maiden name, Harriet, in place of her childhood name Araminta.

In 1849, Tubman’s slave owner, Edward Brodress, died. This raised the likelihood Tubman would be sold, and the family split up. With her two brothers, Ben and Henry, she decided to escape from the large plantation in Caroline County where they lived and worked. The escape was successful, but after a few weeks, her brothers had misgivings because they wanted to return to their children; Tubman was forced to return with them.

harriet_tubman_with_rescued_slaves_new_york_times

Harriet Tubman far left, at her home in Auburn, NY. Source: Bettman/Corbis, New York Times photo archive.

However, soon after, Tubman escaped for the second time. With the help of the Underground Railroad, she took a 90-mile route northeast along the Choptank River towards Pennsylvania. The journey on foot could have taken a couple of weeks, with great care being needed to avoid slave catchers, who could gain a bounty for catching any escaped slaves. After reaching Pennsylvania, she expressed her tremendous joy.

“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.”

In Philadelphia, Tubman took on odd jobs to earn some money, but she wanted to return to Maryland to rescue the rest of her family. In her own words:

“I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in de old cabin quarter, wid de ole folks, and my brudders and sisters. But to dis solemn resolution I came; I was free, and dey should be free also; I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere.”

This task of retrieving slaves was made more complicated by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished anyone helping slaves to escape – even in states which outlawed slavery.

Map of key places in Tubman’s life

However, with the aid of other abolitionist activists, such as Thomas Garrett, she made repeated trips to Maryland to rescue different members of her family. Because of her exploits, she earned the nickname “Moses” referring to the Biblical character who escaped slavery.

Reward for Harriet Tubman (using birth name – Minty)

However, her husband chose not to escape with Tubman, because in her absence he had married another woman, named Caroline. Over the next decade, Tubman helped rescue over 70 slaves, in about 13 expeditions (and offering advice to many more). She often travelled in the darker winter months, making it easier to travel incognito by night. Because of the dangers on the road, she always took a revolver with her. She was also willing to use it to threaten any escaped slave who wished to go back because she knew returning would endanger all the escapees. She was proud never to lose an escaping slave on her expeditions.

“I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” – Harriet Tubman

Given the growing racial tension and the stricter laws regarding escaped slaves, many sought to escape the US altogether, moving to Southern Ontario in Canada. Tubman took part in such travels, helping guide parties of former slaves north.

Frederick Douglass , who was a noted activist against slavery, praised Tubman for her role in helping slaves. In particular, he praised her courage and willingness to work without recognition. He said of Tubman:

“Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.”

Information from Library of Congress

A significant element of Tubman’s life was her strong religious faith. From her childhood, she had learnt aural biblical stories, and although she couldn’t read, she felt a strong faith in the presence and guidance of God. She related receiving intense visions and clear messages coming from God, and on the dangerous missions, she trusted in the direction and protection of God to succeed in her mission.

In 1858, she met the radical abolitionist John Brown, who advocated violence to promote the ending of slavery. Although Tubman never promoted violence herself, she was sympathetic to the aims of John Brown and assisted him in finding willing volunteers. Brown’s raid on Harper Ferry, Virginia failed and he was executed, but Tubman praised his courage in death for trying to fight the institution of slavery.

At the outbreak of the civil war, Tubman saw a Union victory as a way to advance the cause of abolition. She served as a nurse in Port Royal, treating soldiers suffering dysentery and small pox.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation , and Tubman became more involved in the efforts of the northern forces. She offered her services as a guide for scouting trips in South Carolina – using her skills to travel undetected. She also became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War, when she guided three steamboats to an assault on plantations on the Combahee River. The raid was a great success with around 750 slaves escaping onto steamboats; later, encouraged by Tubman, many of the liberated men went on to join the Union army – forming the first all-black corps. For her courageous efforts, she received favourable press coverage, though as a black woman she received no regular pay or pension (until 1899). During the war, she had to supplement her income by selling pies and root beer.

After the civil war, Tubman returned to Auburn where she continued to look after her family and other ex-slaves. She also remarried (Nelson Davis, 20 years her junior). They adopted a child Gertie.

Denied a pension, her financial situation was poor, but friends in the abolitionist movement helped raise funds. An authorised biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman was written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford. Over the next few years, Tubman often gave speeches on both slavery and women’s rights. She was an excellent storyteller who could capture the imagination of the audience. Kate Clifford Larson writes on Tubman:

“A great storyteller she was… She moved her audiences deeply. Plainly dressed, very short and petite, quite black-skinned, and missing front teeth… Tubman shocked her audiences with stories of slavery and the injustices of life as a black woman. Black men dominated the antislavery lecture circuit. Tubman and Sojourner Truth stood for millions of slave women whose lives were marred by emotional and physical abuse at the hands of white men.”

– Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

Tubman also began supporting the women’s suffrage movement, supporting the work of Susan B. Anthony and others. Tubman spoke of her experiences and suffering in the war and railroad movement as proof that women were the equal of men. This brought her wider national recognition.

She donated her property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn to be converted into a home for aged and coloured people.

After becoming increasingly frail, in 1913, she died of pneumonia, surrounded by friends and family. Her last words were:

“I go to prepare a place for you.”

She was buried with semi-military honours at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Harriet Tubman has become an iconic symbol of courage and resistance to injustice, inspiring many generations of civil rights activists.

In April 2016, it was announced she would figure on the US $20 bill.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. “ Biography Harriet Tubman” , Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net – 12th Dec. 2016, Updated 26 June 2017

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom at Amazon

Including Harriet Beacher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and William Wilberforce.

African American Heritage

Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822 - March 10, 1913)

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, was one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad, an abolitionist, suffragist, activist, and served in the Civil War as leader, nurse, cook, scout, and spy. Tubman was arguably the most successful individual who personally led enslaved people to freedom through her service on the Underground Railroad, and during the Civil War, she was given the moniker "Moses."

Tubman's early life was spent enslaved in the Eastern Shore region of Maryland, where she was made to do various tasks including childcare, plowing, and working on the wharf. Three of her sisters were sold and separated from the family during her childhood, but her parents, Rit and Ben Ross, continued to resist and keep the remaining family together. In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, but would return to Maryland many times to recover her family and reunite them in freedom.

During the Civil War, Tubman served in South Carolina as a nurse, cook, and spy. She also became the only woman to lead a military action during the War when she led Black troops in the Combahee River Raid on June 2, 1863. The raid involved small ships and troops who destroyed roadways, and burned plantations, and collected supplies of livestock and crops. As a result of the raid, 750 enslaved people were liberated.

Records in the National Archives relating to Harriet Tubman include documents relating to her Civil War pension claims, military service records of her husband Nelson Davis (Charles), legislation establishing and images from dedicating the Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad National Parks, images from the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, and applications for designating places and areas for the National Register of Historic Places related to Tubman.

Search the Catalog for records relating to Harriet Tubman Social Networks and Archival Context - Harriet Tubman

Photograph shows a full-length portrait of Harriet Tubman (1820?-1913) looking directly at the camera with folded hands resting on back of an upholstered chair.

Harriet Tubman, after the Civil War ( NAID 7718799 )

Underground Railroad Resources

National Park Service: What is the Underground Railroad?

The Underground Railroad Byway

Digital Public Library of America: Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery Project

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Harriet Tubman Resources

DocsTeach: Key Figures Who Worked to End Slavery

DocsTeach: Documents relating to Harriet Tubman

Legislative Archives: Congress and Harriet Tubman's Claim for Pension

Library of Congress: Harriet Tubman Resource Guide

National Park Service: Harriet Tubman sites

US House of Representatives: The "Very Deserving Case" of Harriet Tubman

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Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman) was born enslaved in 1822 in Maryland's Eastern shore in Dorchester County. Harriet Tubman’s parents, Harriet “Rit” (mother) and Ben Ross (father), had nine children. As a child, Tubman did not have the opportunity to spend time with her family. She was separated from her father when her slaveholder, Edward Brodess, moved only Tubman, her mother and siblings to his farm in Bucktown. Also, three of her older sisters were sold into slavery in the Deep South. By age six she was separated from her mother when she was rented out and forced to work for other masters to care for their children, and catch and trap muskrats in the Little Blackwater River. Tubman remembered the emotional pain being separated from her family, which she never wanted to experience again.

In March of 1849, Tubman’s enslaver, Edward Brodess, died. Tubman knew that in order for Brodess’s wife to pay her husband’s debts, she needed to sell some of her slaves. Tubman did not want to be sold away from her family and into the even more brutal conditions of slavery in the deep South. In the fall of 1849, she escaped from slavery alone, and found freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Tubman made connections and found support among other black and white abolitionists. Although Harriet Tubman found her freedom, she was separated from her family. Between 1850 and 1860, Tubman returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland 13 times and freed more than 70 family and friends so that they could be free together.

Tubman’s work as a liberator continued into the Civil War (1861-1865). Before the war started, Tubman caught the attention of several white politicians because of her contacts with well-known black and white abolitionists in the North. Massachusetts Governor, John Andrew, heard of Tubman’s successes freeing slaves on the Underground Railroad out of Maryland, and taking them North into Philadelphia and St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Andrew believed the knowledge and skills that Tubman gained traveling the marshlands in Maryland’s Eastern Shore would be useful in the marshlands on the coastal region of South Carolina, since the two landscapes were similar.

Tubman arrived in Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862 to help Union generals recruit black troops, serve as a Union spy, and nurse wounded soldiers. Perhaps her most dramatic effort to weaken the Confederacy came on June 1, 1863, when she planned and led an armed raid along the Combahee River, becoming the first woman to do so in U.S. military history. Tubman, Colonel James Montgomery, and the 2nd Carolina Colored Infantry burned several plantations, destroyed Confederate supply lines, and freed more than 750 people from slavery.

In 1859, Harriet Tubman bought a house in Auburn, New York from Senator William H. Seward to serve as a home for her family. After the war, women and African Americans continued their fight for equality and voting rights. Tubman became a co-founding member of the National Association of Colored Women that demanded equality and suffrage for African American women. After 1869, Harriet married Civil War veteran Nelson Davis, and they adopted their daugher Gertie. On March 10, 1913, Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia and was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Throughout her life, Harriet Tubman was a fighter. Tubman’s legacy continues in society years after her death. During World War II a ship was named in her honor. Aburi, Ghana features a statue of Tubman, and her image appeared on U.S. postage stamps. She is scheduled to appear on the new twenty dollar bill in the year 2020. Tubman’s story speaks compassion and courage that continue to touch the lives of people.

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At the Smithsonian | October 30, 2019

The True Story Behind the Harriet Tubman Movie

“Harriet,” a new film starring Cynthia Erivo, is the first feature film dedicated solely to the American icon

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

Harriet Tubman’s first act as a free woman was poignantly simple. As she later told biographer Sarah Bradford, after crossing the Pennsylvania state boundary line in September 1849, “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.”

The future Underground Railroad conductor’s next thoughts were of her family. “I was free,” she recalled, “but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there.”

Tubman dedicated the next decade of her life—a period chronicled in Harriet , a new biopic starring Cynthia Erivo as its eponymous heroine — to rescuing her family from bondage. Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to Maryland some 13 times, helping around 70 people —including four of her brothers, her parents and a niece—escape slavery and embark on new lives. Of her immediate family members still enslaved in the southern state, Tubman ultimately rescued all but one —Rachel Ross, who died shortly before her older sister arrived to bring her to freedom. This failure, says Mary N. Elliott , curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), was a source of “lingering heartbreak” for Tubman. The abortive attempt, undertaken in late 1860, marked her last rescue mission on the Underground Railroad.

Despite the fact that she looms large in the public imagination, Tubman has rarely received the level of scholarly attention afforded to similarly iconic Americans. Catherine Clinton, author of the 2004 biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom , tells the New York Times she has even encountered people “who were not sure if [Tubman] was even a real person, or if she was a figure from folklore, like Johnny Appleseed.”

Director Kasi Lemmons says the new movie, which opens in theaters November 1 and is the first feature film dedicated solely to Tubman, aims to present a well-rounded portrait of the oft-mythologized figure, revealing “her courage and her womanhood so that [viewers] feel like you’ve actually spent time with this beautiful person.”

Lemmons adds, “I want you to feel like you had lunch with her.”

Previously, the abolitionist, suffragist and activist was immortalized mainly through children’s books and cameo appearances in dramas centered on other Civil War era figures. Her life has been reduced to broad strokes—escaped from slavery, helped others do the same, advocated for underrepresented groups’ rights—and her individual character overlooked in favor of portraying an idealized superhuman. What’s missing, says Elliott, who co-curated NMAAHC's “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition, is a sense of Tubman’s humanity: in other words, who she was “as a woman.”

Born Araminta “Minty” Ross between 1820 and 1825, the future Harriet Tubman came of age in antebellum Dorchester County. Headstrong even as an adolescent, she defied orders and was soon relegated from domestic work to more punishing labor in the fields. This familiarity with the land would prove helpful down the line, according to Beverly Lowry’s Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life , providing a “steady schooling” in nature that proved much more advantageous than the “dead-end day-in-day-out tedium of domestic work.”

When Tubman was around 13 years old, she sustained a life-changing—and nearly life-ending— injury . Caught in a violent disagreement between another enslaved individual and his overseer, the young girl inadvertently bore the brunt of the latter’s anger: Although he had flung a two-pound lead weight across the room in hopes of stopping the male, the overseer missed his target and delivered a “ stunning blow ” to Tubman’s head.

Three days later, she was back in the fields. The wound eventually healed, or at least as much as can be expected without adequate medical treatment, but Araminta herself was forever changed. As Lowry notes, the teenager “began having visions and speaking with God on a daily basis, as directly and as pragmatically as if he were a guardian uncle whispering instructions exclusively to her.” Later in life, those who met her spoke of how she would fall asleep in the middle of conversations, dozing off before continuing as if nothing had happened.

A defining moment in Tubman’s pre-escape life was the sale of three of her sisters to unknown slaveholders in the Deep South. Here, Lowry writes, the enslaved were not even given a last name; separated from their loved ones, they were harshly exploited as cotton workers and risked losing their sense of identity entirely. Once the sisters—Linah, Soph and Mariah Ritty—were sold, their family members never heard from them again.

Tubman’s decision to run stemmed in large part from a fear of sharing her sisters’ fate. Although she had successfully commissioned a lawyer to comb through an old will and prove that her mother, Harriet “Rit” Ross, should have been freed upon reaching age 45 , Rit’s current owner, Edward Brodess, had opted to ignore his grandfather’s wishes. Rather than freeing Rit, who was now some 15 years past the stated deadline, Brodess illegally kept her—and by extension her children—in bondage.

On March 1, 1849, Tubman heard a rumor suggesting Brodess was preparing to sell her and multiple siblings to slaveholders in the Deep South. She started praying , offering up a dark plea to God: “Oh, Lord,” she said, as recounted by Bradford . “If you ain’t going to change that man’s heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.”

This “profane request” contradicted all of Tubman’s values, but as Lowry writes, “She prays it, and in years to come is willing to repeat that petition to a fellow Christian, word for word. Not only because in truth she spoke them, but also because she knows their shock value and understands the need to shock in order to re-create the time and the situation and the extremes to which it drove people.”

One week later, Brodess died, leaving Rit and her children at the mercy of his widow, Eliza. Faced with an increasingly uncertain future, Tubman prepared to flee.

By this point, she had married a free man named John and was perhaps considering starting a family of her own. Since children’s status mirrored that of their mother, all of the couple’s offspring would have been born into slavery—a fate Tubman probably tried to avoid by drawing Brodess’ attention to his grandfather’s will. Relationships between free and enslaved individuals were not uncommon, but as evidenced by a scene in the film in which Tubman’s owner warns John to stay away from his property, constraints imposed by slaveholders rendered such relationships tenuous at best.

In mid-September, Tubman convinced several of her brothers to join an escape attempt. Before making much progress, however, the brothers decided to turn back, fearful of the dangers awaiting them. Their sister, it seemed, would have to make the journey alone.

And so she did.

The film emphasizes its protagonist’s ability to commune with God to an extreme degree, attributing much of her multiple north-bound missions’ success to directions conveyed by a higher power. Reach a crossroads, for example, and Tubman pauses, listening for a moment before deciding where to go next.

“She has a fluid conversation [with God]; that’s the way she describes it,” Lemmons explains to Variety . “If you’re cynical and don’t believe that, you could say she has perfect instincts.”

Elliott says Tubman likely navigated through a mixture of instinct, careful assessment of her surroundings and “unyielding faith.” She also benefitted from her previous experience as an outdoor laborer.

“People did just pick up and run,” Elliott says. “But here’s this woman who had some degree of insight on how to navigate. . . . She may have had to figure out where to go, but [at least] she had some sense of the landscape.”

Guided by the North Star and aided by conductors on the Underground Railroad, Tubman traveled north to Philadelphia—an immensely impressive trek that cemented her standing in the city’s abolitionist circles. ( Hamilton alum Leslie Odom Jr. appears in Harriet as abolitionist William Still , but many of the movie’s secondary characters, including Walter, a reformed bounty hunter who helps guide Tubman; Gideon, the slaveholder who owns the Ross family; and Marie Buchanon , a free woman and entrepreneur portrayed by singer Janelle Monáe , are fictionalized.)

Erivo’s Tubman has an “air of a superhero nature,” according to Elliott, but as she points out, “How can you get around it? Because that was a tiny [5-foot-tall] woman who traveled [nearly] 100 miles by herself.”

Following Tubman’s successful escape, the film shifts focus to its subject’s rescue missions, exploring such threads as her attempts to reunite the Ross family in freedom, the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act ’s passage in 1850 and the Underground Railroad’s little-known network of black maritime workers .

A particularly poignant moment centers on Tubman’s reunion with her husband John, who married a free woman following his wife’s departure. But while the film portrays him as a sympathetic character who hoped to join Tubman on her journey north and only remarried after hearing an unsubstantiated rumor that she had died during the escape attempt, the real John appears to have been decidedly less supportive , even threatening to betray his wife if she followed through on plans to flee.

When Tubman returned to Dorchester County in the fall of 1851, she found her husband comfortably settled in a new life . He declined to journey north with her, preferring to remain in Maryland with his new wife. Still, the trip wasn’t a complete disappointment: Eleven enslaved individuals joined Tubman as she wound her way up the East Coast, eventually finding safety in Canada—the only viable option for escaped slaves after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave bounty hunters unchecked power within the United States.

Elliott says Tubman’s tangible heartbreak upon learning of her husband’s actions offers a powerful example of her humanity. “She was a woman who loved,” the curator notes. “She love[d] deeply, obviously, and she had passion.”

Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter , Harriet director Kasi Lemmons adds, “Harriet was motivated by love of her family. That transcends race and boundaries.”

In popular lore, Tubman is often portrayed as a benign, grandmotherly “ Moses ” figure. The fact that she was a young woman when she escaped bondage is overlooked, as is a sense of her fierce militant nature. According Kate Clifford Larson’s Bound for the Promised Land , Tubman carried a pistol during rescue missions, “telling her charges to go on or die, for a dead fugitive slave could tell no tales.” But this aspect of the trips is rarely highlighted, particularly in the children’s books where Tubman is most often placed front and center.

“These books defanged her, declawed her, to make her more palatable,” Lemmons tells the New York Times . “Because there’s something quite terrifying about the image of a black woman with a rifle.”

At the same time, Elliott explains, Tubman had a taste for the “delicate things” in life, including fine china and refined clothing.

“I always call her an iron fist in a velvet glove,” Elliot adds. She wanted to love and be loved and “appreciated looking pretty,” but she “had no problem with getting dirty if it meant saving a life.”

The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, just months after Tubman’s final rescue mission in late 1860. The film speeds through this period, pausing briefly in June 1863 to reference the Combahee River Raid —a military expedition that freed around 750 enslaved people and was the first of its kind to be led by a woman—but focusing largely on the decade between its heroine’s escape and the end of her Underground Railroad days.

Tubman died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913, around the age of 90. Given the constraints imposed by its 10-year timeline and two-hour runtime, the movie does not address the bulk of this long life, instead opting to retrace the most well-known sequence of events. Among the chapters missing from the film: Tubman’s time as a Union spy , her 1869 marriage to Nelson Davis —a soldier some 20 years her junior—and the couple’s 1874 adoption of a baby girl named Gertie, her work as a suffragist , neurosurgery undertaken to address her decades-old brain injury, financial hardship later in life, and the opening of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Elderly in 1908.

Larson, a Tubman biographer and one of the film’s historical advisers, tells the New York Times she wishes Harriet was “completely, totally accurate.” Still, she adds, “It’s Hollywood. And they got Tubman. Kasi Lemmons really got her, and made her this militant radical, while also conveying her love for her family. And that’s who Tubman was.”

Ultimately, Elliott says, “I hope that viewers seek more information on those different aspects of slavery and freedom,” from marriage between enslaved and free people to the terrifying reality of leaving one’s home and living among people who were born free.

Going forward, Elliott concludes, “There is a lot of material out there for Hollywood to tell the unvarnished truth and to humanize the experience of African-Americans.”

Many artifacts from the life of Harriet Tubman, including her hymnal and her shawl, are on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The film Harriet will be screened at the museum Thursday, October 31, at 7 p.m.

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Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.

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Harriet Tubman: 8 Facts About the Daring Abolitionist

By: Barbara Maranzani

Updated: January 4, 2023 | Original: May 31, 2013

Her admirers called her “Moses” or “General Tubman,” but she was born Araminta Ross.

It’s unclear exactly when the woman who would be known as Harriet Tubman was born, with dates ranging from 1815 to 1822. Historians do know that she was one of nine children born to Harriet “Rit” and Ben Ross, enslaved people owned by two different families on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

With her parents separated, Tubman’s mother struggled to keep her family together, and three of Tubman’s sisters were sold to other plantation owners. Tubman’s owners, the Brodess family, “loaned” her out to work for others while she was still a child, under what were often miserable, dangerous conditions.

READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom

Sometime around 1844, she married John Tubman, a free Black man. Though Tubman remained enslaved, mixed marriages were not uncommon in the region, which had a large percentage of formerly enslaved people who had received (or bought) their manumission. Shortly after her marriage, Araminta, known as “Minty” to her family, changed her name to Harriet to honor her mother.

Tubman suffered lifelong pain and illness due to her mistreatment while enslaved.

From an early age Tubman was subjected to the beatings and abuse that were commonplace in many slave-owning homes. Already frail and small (she was likely no more than 5 feet tall), Tubman’s health began to deteriorate, decreasing her value to her owners and limiting her prospects for work.

When she was in her early teens, Tubman was badly injured when an owner, trying to stop the escape attempt of another enslaved person, threw a large weight across a room, striking Tubman in the head. Tubman was given little medical care or time to recuperate before she was sent back out to work. She never recovered from the damage done to her brain and skull, suffering periodic seizures that researchers believed may have been a form of epilepsy.

Tubman herself used the Underground Railroad to escape slavery.

In September 1849, fearful that her owner was trying to sell her, Tubman and two of her brothers briefly escaped, though they didn’t make it far. For reasons still unknown, her brothers decided to turn back, forcing Tubman to return with them.

A few months later, Tubman set off again, this time on her own, leaving her husband and family behind as she made her way north through Delaware and Pennsylvania, stopping periodically at a series of hideouts along the Underground Railroad, before settling in Philadelphia. In late 1850, after hearing of the upcoming sale of one of her nieces, Tubman headed back down south, embarking on the first of nearly two dozen missions to help other enslaved people escape as she had.

It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in Tubman’s life.

One of the most complicated myths about Tubman is the claim (first mentioned in a 19th-century biography) that she escorted more than 300 enslaved people to freedom over the course of 19 missions. Tubman herself never used this number, instead of estimating that she had rescued around 50 people by 1860—mostly family members.

Historians now believe that it’s likely that she was personally responsible for ushering around 70 people to freedom along the Underground Railroad in the decade before the Civil War . It’s also unlikely that there was ever a substantial bounty offered for Tubman’s capture during her years as an undercover operator, let alone one worth tens of thousands of dollars, as some publications claimed.

It’s unlikely that Tubman’s former owners or the owners of the enslaved people she rescued ever realized that it was the woman formerly known as Minty Ross spiriting their enslaved people away. The only known “reward” offered for Tubman’s capture was a newspaper ad that her owner, Eliza Brodess, published in a Maryland paper after Tubman’s first escape attempt in September 1849. Brodess offered $300 for the capture and return of Tubman and two of her brothers.

Tubman’s “niece” may have actually been her biological child.

Tubman’s first husband, John, had stayed behind in Maryland rather than follow his wife north, eventually remarrying. After the Civil War ended, Tubman was also remarried, to a war veteran named Nelson Davis who was 22 years her junior. The couple later adopted a daughter, Gertie, but it is Tubman’s relationship to her another girl that has puzzled historians for more than a century.

Shortly after Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, in 1859, she travelled once again to Maryland on a rescue mission, this time returning with a young girl named Margaret, who Tubman referred to as her niece. Tubman claimed that Margaret was the daughter of a moderately comfortable family of freed Black people, leaving many to wonder why she would have uprooted the child from a stable home. Margaret’s resemblance to Tubman, and the pair’s unusually strong bond has led to the belief among historians that Margaret was Tubman’s own daughter, though her paternity remains unknown.

The Combahee Ferry Raid was one of her greatest achievements.

Shortly after the war broke out in 1861, Tubman joined a group of other abolitionists who headed south to assist enslaved people who escaped to safety behind Union lines. Working in a series of camps in Union-held portions of South Carolina, Tubman quickly learned the lay of the land and offered her services to the army as a spy, leading a group of scouts who mapped out much of the region. Tubman’s reconnaissance work laid the foundation for one of the more daring raids of the Civil War, when she personally accompanied Union soldiers in their nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863.

After guiding Union boats along the mine-filled waters and coming ashore, Tubman and her group successfully rescued more than 700 enslaved people working on nearby plantations, while dodging bullets and artillery shells from slave owners and Confederate soldiers rushing to the scene.

The success of the raid, which had also included the brave service of African-American soldiers, increased Tubman’s fame, and she went on to work on similar missions with the famed Massachusetts 54th Infantry before spending the final years of the war tending to injured soldiers. One hundred years after Tubman’s successes in South Carolina, a recently formed Black feminist group took the name Combahee River Collective in her honor, also paying honor to Tubman’s work later in her life as a powerful advocate for women’s suffrage.

READ MORE: After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid

It took years for the U.S. government to pay Tubman for her Civil War work.

Despite her contributions to the war effort, Tubman received little compensation, likely earning less than $200 during the war itself. Compounding the issue was Tubman’s clandestine work as a spy, making it difficult for the federal government to formally recognize her work. For years, Tubman repeatedly requested an official military pension, but was denied. Two decades after the wars end, a U.S. congressman went so far as to introduce legislation calling for Tubman to receive a $2,000 pension, but the bill was defeated. In the end, Tubman received some military benefits, but only as the wife of an “official” veteran, her second husband, Nelson Davis.

Despite her fame and achievements, Tubman died in near poverty.

Tubman’s lifelong charity and generosity towards her family and fellow formerly enslaved people, coupled with a series of financial reversals late in her life left her in desperate straits. She struggled to pay off the purchase of a plot of land in Auburn, New York, that soon became home to her extended family and in 1873 she fell victim to a vicious fraud that saw her swindled and robbed of more than $2,000 and physically beaten by the conmen.

Tubman’s supporters desperately tried to alleviate her financial suffering, holding benefits and writing newspaper reports to raise funds. Tubman also agreed to work with a biographer, Sarah Bradford, on two books about her extraordinary life, with the proceeds used to support Tubman. Bradford, a fellow abolitionist and Tubman admirer, undoubtedly had good intentions, but it was her work that created many of the fallacies and inconsistencies with the historical record that has left much of the true nature of Tubman’s important work unclear.

Though Tubman never managed to truly escape her dire financial straits, she continued to donate her money to various causes, donating a parcel of land near her Auburn, New York, home for the creation of what became known as the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, which was to be open only to impoverished Black people. When Tubman’s own health began to fail in 1911, she herself entered the home she had helped create, dying there of pneumonia on March 10, 1913.

READ MORE: 6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad

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The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman

By Casey Cep

Image may contain Clothing Dress Formal Wear Person Art Painting Face Head Photography Portrait Fashion and Gown

Just how far down did Moses go? The spiritual does not say, but one of the prophet’s namesakes—the woman who sang “Go Down, Moses” along the rivers and roads of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as she helped some seventy people escape slavery via the Underground Railroad—went as far south as she could. Harriet Tubman returned not only to the border state from which she herself had escaped; defiantly courageous, she ventured deeper into the land of bondage to liberate hundreds of others during the Civil War.

Her greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success. For more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory.

On the night of June 1, 1863, five months after the Emancipation Proclamation and a few weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg, Tubman accompanied Colonel James Montgomery and the newly freed men of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers as they boarded three steamboats off the coast of Beaufort. Their paddle wheels turned quietly in the dark as the vessels advanced toward St. Helena Sound. From the pilot house of the lead steamer, Tubman watched a full moon rise, its light a welcome guide for the raiders as they avoided pluff mud and mines, following a serpentine, twenty-five-mile route up the river. By the next morning, Montgomery’s men had landed and driven off the few remaining Confederate pickets, most enemy soldiers having fled the so-called sickly season, when malaria and yellow fever ravaged the coast. Thanks to Tubman’s intelligence, the Union troops faced almost no resistance besides a few skirmishes; after destroying a pontoon bridge they marched on seven plantations, burning whatever they could not confiscate. Millions of dollars in property was left smoldering as soldiers made away with rice, cotton, corn, chickens, pigs, and horses, but the soldiers were soon overwhelmed by a different kind of “contraband.”

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Tubman later remembered how enslaved people of all ages emerged like “startled deer” from the fields and the forests along the shoreline, running for the boats like “the children of Israel, coming out of Egypt.” It was as if a “mysterious telegraphic communication” had gone from one rice field to the next, with laborers sharing the news that “Lincoln’s gun-boats come to set them free,” she said. Hundreds of refugees began rushing the rowboats; once those were filled, the oarsmen, worried about capsizing and afraid of being stranded, began beating people back. Seeing the chaos, Montgomery called out to Tubman for help: “Moses, you’ll have to give ’em a song.”

Above the screaming, the splashing, and the gunfire, Tubman’s voice rang out. “Of all the whole creation in the east or in the west, / The glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best,” she sang. “Come along! Come along! Don’t be alarmed, / Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.” After every verse of the abolitionist anthem, the clamoring crowds let go of the boats, raised their hands, and shouted, “Glory!” The rowboats returned to the steamers, and the three steamships returned to Beaufort, with more than seven hundred newly freed people.

That dramatic scene, with all its danger, grace, and tragedy, is wonderfully staged in Edda L. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War” (Oxford). Where some have seen the raid primarily as Tubman’s story, isolating her from the broader network of Black liberation, Fields-Black powerfully situates the abolitionist among her contemporaries—controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics, and fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose not to flee but to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.

“Combee” is one of two notable books out this year to wrestle with less familiar aspects of Tubman’s legacy. The other is “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (Penguin Press), by Tiya Miles. Fields-Black conveys, in elaborate detail, what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery; Miles addresses the far more elusive question of why she did it.

Neither “Combee” nor “Night Flyer” is a cradle-to-grave biography, though both Fields-Black and Miles are drawn to the cradle that Tubman’s father made for her, from the trunk of a sweet-gum tree. Born Araminta Ross, to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, around 1822, Tubman was first known as Minty. There were tender moments—she recalled being rocked in that hand-carved cradle—but her early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled mostly with physical torture and emotional terror.

Tubman was the fifth of nine children. Three of her sisters were sold and sent to the Deep South. Her parents were owned by two different families who separated them not long after her birth. While still a young girl, Tubman was taken away from her mother and forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand. She was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. Short and frail, she was often debilitated by beatings and was once struck so hard with a two-pound iron weight that she suffered seizures for the rest of her life. What was never beaten out of her was an innate sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage, spiritually as well as literally. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.”

Tubman’s concept of freedom was not only hoped for, like faith; it was something she observed in the world around her. Like Frederick Douglass, born just a few towns away, Tubman saw the reality of liberation early, interacting with formerly enslaved people who had worked to buy their freedom or been manumitted by their owners. In Tubman’s lifetime, the Black population in Maryland was almost evenly divided between enslaved and free; the year before the Civil War started, the state had more free Black people than any other in the country. She married one of those free men, John Tubman, and after taking his name she took her mother’s, too.

But marriage did not make Harriet Tubman free. Owing to the perverse absurdities of antebellum slave laws, she remained enslaved, and any of her children would be as well—born the property of the man who owned her. In 1844, when her wedding is thought to have taken place, that man was Edward Brodess, whose mother had owned Tubman’s mother. Tubman’s father had been manumitted by his owner, but Brodess had inherited Tubman, hiring her and her siblings out to neighbors for seasonal work, whether trapping muskrats or clearing land. Then, struggling with debt, Brodess decided that selling his inheritance would earn him more money than hiring them out.

Fearful that she would be separated from her family, Tubman turned to God. “I groaned and prayed for old master,” she told an early biographer. “Oh Lord, convert master! Oh Lord, change that man’s heart!” Brodess, evidently having as hardened a heart as the one Moses confronted in Exodus, did not relent. Tubman, on hearing that she and her brothers were to be sold into the Deep South, altered her petition. “If you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart,” she remembered pleading, “kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.” Brodess died within the week.

Brodess’s wife, though, still planned to proceed with the sale, and on the night of September 17, 1849, Tubman, who had spent her entire life hearing God’s voice and having visions of God’s mercy, decided to act on her faith, and she fled into the darkness with two of her brothers. The brothers grew frightened and soon persuaded her to turn back, but she set off again later, on her own. “I’m bound for the promised land / On the other side of Jordan,” she sang while leaving, hoping that her friends and family would understand where she was headed.

That promised land was both geographical, the American North, and theological, God’s Kingdom on Earth. Many readers today will find such a concept confounding; some of Tubman’s contemporaries did, too. But resurrecting her spiritual life is the unusual project of Miles’s “Night Flyer.” Noting that Tubman “oriented to the world from a place of immersive religious belief,” Miles argues that we might never understand her if we don’t try to occupy that same “experiential space of integration between what she knew and what she felt, between rational thought, intuition, spiritual sensation, and landscape awareness.”

Abolition was a legal and social movement, but it was also a religious one, populated and promulgated by men and women of faith, who operated out of sincere and sweeping spiritual convictions. Tubman carried a pistol, but when questioned about her safe passage she once declared, “I just asked Jesus to take care of me.” And although she has rightfully been compared to intellectuals such as Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Miles suggests that Tubman should also be considered alongside Black evangelists of the era, including Jarena Lee, the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Zilpha Elaw, a mystic and a minister; Old Elizabeth, a spiritual memoirist; and Julia A. J. Foote, a leader in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement.

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“Night Flyer” is a welcome corrective to the sorts of biographical portraits that reduce religious faith to psychoanalytic case studies or medical mysteries. It takes seriously the spiritual life of a people who, despite their enormous suffering, emerged with a robust and restorative religious tradition all their own. Rather than suggesting that Tubman’s prophetic visions and potent prayers were merely the product of temporal-lobe epilepsy or narcolepsy, Miles explores Tubman’s own explanation for their origin—the Lord God Almighty. Tubman and these other pioneering Black women “came to view themselves as ‘sanctified’ or ‘holy,’ after an emotionally wrought process of spiritual transformation,” Miles writes, and they shared a profound theology of universalism, inspired by St. Peter’s declaration in Acts that “God is no respecter of persons” and St. Paul’s assertion in Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see. Raised in the Baptist Church, Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, studied womanist theology in her early academic career and has lately focussed her scholarship on the environmental humanities, connecting ecology with spirituality in careful, creative studies of nineteenth-century America. One of those studies won the National Book Award, in 2021: “All That She Carried,” a beautiful, braided story of a single South Carolina family, told through a cotton sack passed from one generation to the next.

That book, Miles wrote, “leans toward evocation rather than argumentation and is rather more meditation than monograph.” The same approach serves her well in “Night Flyer,” which portrays Tubman as the living embodiment of an extraordinary faith that helped her escape the estuarine ecology of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and master the salt marshes of the South Carolina Lowcountry. “Among the best preserved of Tubman’s speech acts are her prayers,” Miles notes. She has collected many of them in “Night Flyer,” along with modern poems and contemporary liturgies that give the book a spiritual texture not often encountered in narrative nonfiction. The result, like “All That She Carried,” is not an academic study of nineteenth-century Black history but a moving account of Tubman’s intellectual life—“her belief in God, heaven, and unseen powers” and “her belief in the integrity and import of relationships among all natural beings.”

A flock of Christian witnesses surrounds Tubman in “Night Flyer,” while a different cast of characters joins her in “Combee.” Some readers may balk at the equal attention that Fields-Black gives to Tubman’s many compatriots in the Combahee River Raid and the many South Carolinians liberated by their efforts, but the book’s more than seven hundred pages rescue neglected lives and, in the process, reconstitute an entire society.

For Fields-Black, those people are not just historical figures but family. Like Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home” or Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures,” “Combee” derives some of its power from the author’s personal connection to the national history she recovers. In McWhorter’s magisterial account of the Birmingham campaign of the civil-rights movement, she teased out her own family’s complicity with the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, Shetterly, whose father worked with the “human computers” at NASA ’s Langley Research Center, was surrounded by the pioneering Black engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who later filled her book. Fields-Black, for her part, grew up visiting relatives around the Lowcountry, touring the region with her Gullah Geechee-speaking grandparents. She is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Hector Fields, one of hundreds of men who liberated themselves from the Confederacy and then fought to liberate others in the Combahee River Raid.

Aided by the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum, in Charleston, Fields-Black found military records and plantation archives that helped her plot Hector’s journey from enslavement in Beaufort to enlistment in the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. He was denied a federal pension, but his brother Jonas had a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-page Army pension file that allowed Fields-Black to recover the story of the ancestors whose headstones she still visits at her family cemetery in Green Pond. Hector’s story is as important to Fields-Black as Tubman’s not only because of their family ties but because she understands that without men like him the Combahee River Raid would never have succeeded. As singular as Tubman was, her efforts depended on other freedom fighters.

Already famous for her furtive work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman arrived in Beaufort in the spring of 1862, a few weeks after the Union general David Hunter declared martial law and ordered the emancipation of the local enslaved population. Tubman had the endorsement of Hunter’s friend John Andrew, who was the governor of Massachusetts—and a member of both the Boston Vigilance Committee, which provided assistance to fugitive slaves, and the Free Soil Party, which fought slavery in the Western territories. President Lincoln reversed Hunter’s emancipation order and rebuked him publicly, but Hunter began recruiting Black soldiers anyway.

Like Tubman, these soldiers were anomalous even among abolitionists, risking their freedom and safety by remaining in Confederate states. Thousands of them enlisted all around the country, forming regiments like the 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers, the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, and the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. They soon swelled the ranks of the Bureau of Colored Troops, joined by dozens of Northern regiments. By the end of the war, more than two hundred thousand Black men had volunteered for the Army or the Navy; nearly twenty per cent of them died fighting for the Union.

“Combee” studies the pension files of these veterans to reconstruct their lives before and after the Civil War, paying close attention to the Gullah Geechee people of the Carolina Lowcountry. We meet Old Heads, Prime Hands, and Pikins—what the Gullah Geechee called elders, enslaved laborers, and children—whose work, harvesting billions of dollars of Sea Island cotton and Carolina Gold rice, made the Combahee River one of the most profitable agricultural regions in the country. Some had already escaped to Port Royal in the first year of the war, after the Union Army captured the city and surrounding islands, joining the ten thousand refugees left behind after Confederate forces fled.

It was the Port Royal Experiment, an early attempt at Reconstruction, that drew Tubman to the Deep South, where she worked as a nurse and a cook, then established a kitchen and laundry where refugees could earn a living baking gingerbread and pies, making root beer, and washing clothes. At the same time, she interviewed all the “contrabands” she could, gathering information about the land they’d left behind, recruiting people who could navigate local byways and waterways, and encouraging able-bodied men to enlist. She became one of the Union’s most valuable spies, equipped with “secret service money” for paying informants and official travel papers that read “Pass the Bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go, and give her free passage at all times on Government transports.”

General Hunter had issued Tubman that pass, and he was eventually joined in the Department of the South by other white officers with abolitionist sympathies, eager to expand the use of Black troops. “Combee” celebrates two of these officers in particular, allies of Tubman who offered her opportunities to serve. Both were ministers who left their pulpits to fight for abolition, leading two of the first Black regiments at a time when the Army would not commission Black officers. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hailed from Massachusetts; after studying theology at Harvard Divinity School, he was called to a Unitarian church in Newburyport, then found a more radically abolitionist congregation in Worcester. Although remembered by some today as an early reader and mentor of Emily Dickinson, he was one of the Secret Six, who sent arms to Kansas and funded John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.

Higginson regarded Tubman as the seventh member of Brown’s Secret Six. He’d met her in Boston, before the war, and in a letter to his mother he described her as “the greatest heroine of the age.” “Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction,” he wrote, “and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary.” Higginson commanded the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, and he often led actions with James Montgomery, who commanded the 2nd South Carolina. Montgomery had been raised a Congregationalist, in Ohio, but after moving to the slave state of Kentucky he found himself drawn to a more evangelical faith, the filings of his soul aligned magnetically by the spiritual fervor and social revolution of the Second Great Awakening. He became a Campbellite preacher and moved his family west, to Kansas, where he developed a reputation as one of the most zealous Jayhawkers, attacking pro-slavery households and retaliating against border ruffians. Although Tubman had known Higginson for longer, some sources say she told Hunter that she would accompany troops on the Combahee River Raid only if the fervid Montgomery was in charge.

What Tubman accomplished a hundred and sixty-one years ago deserves to be celebrated in the annals of military history, and Fields-Black argues that it should be celebrated as a revolutionary act in the history of Black liberation, too—as notable as the Stono Rebellion, in South Carolina, or Nat Turner’s revolt, in Virginia. Her characterization of the Combahee River Raid as “the largest and most successful slave revolt in U.S. history” is debatable, given the decisive assistance of the Union Army; other revolutionaries could presumably have succeeded at a similar scale if backed by its might. But it is true, as Fields-Black suggests, that those involved were crucial links in a long chain of brave individuals connecting this country to its most honorable ideals of freedom and equality. And she does not shy away from how often and how cruelly the United States has failed to uphold those ideals, including after the Civil War, when Tubman and countless other Black veterans were denied their pensions outright or had to spend decades fighting for the compensation that they deserved.

Tubman died famous but in near-penury. She received some money as the widow of a war veteran, her second husband—and, belatedly, through congressional appropriation, only a portion of the money she was owed for her service as a scout, a nurse, and a spy. Yet she never lost her faith, in her country or in her Creator. The beauty of “Combee” and “Night Flyer” is that, taken together, they remind us of the redemptive possibilities of patriotism and religious belief, ideologies that today are too often associated with the reactionary rather than the radical. On her deathbed, Tubman invoked the Gospel of John, paraphrasing the promise that Jesus made to his disciples of their place in Heaven, and also echoing her own promise to bring about that Heaven on earth: “I go away to prepare a place for you, and where I am you also may be.” ♦

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Harriet Tubman led such an eventful life — so filled with hardship, extreme peril and close calls — that even an atheist might find it hard to deny that her nine decades of survival on this Earth were nothing short of miraculous.

Tubman herself credited God with guiding her dangerous work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the 1850s; she made an estimated 13 trips below the Mason-Dixon line and spirited as many as 80 souls north, often all the way to Canada. Tubman’s own escape in 1849 was legendary. After a first attempt with her brothers, who were so frightened that they insisted on turning back to their enslaver’s estate near the Chesapeake Bay, an undaunted Tubman made the treacherous 90-mile journey from Maryland to Pennsylvania on her own.

“Where others saw shut doors and unscalable brick walls, she dreamed into being tunnels and ladders,” the historian Tiya Miles writes in “Night Flyer,” a short biography of Tubman that is the first in a new series, called Significations and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., about notable Black figures. For decades after her death in 1913, Tubman’s extraordinary life was mostly relegated to books for children and young adults. Thorough, probing biographies by the historians Catherine Clinton and Kate Clifford Larson were published two decades ago. More recently, Tubman was the subject of a Hollywood biopic and “She Came to Slay,” an illustrated volume by the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, featuring a drawing of a pistol-toting Tubman on the cover.

Perhaps inevitably, all the pop-cultural attention has been double-edged, commemorating Tubman’s formidable accomplishments while also making it harder to discern who she actually was. Miles admits that before she started this project, Tubman “had become a stock figure in my imagination, a known hero in the cast of characters that we might call the abolitionist avengers.” Recognizing Tubman’s idiosyncrasies and physical ailments “resizes Tubman the cultural icon to human scale.”

Miles calls “Night Flyer” a “faith biography,” emphasizing Tubman’s spirituality along with her ecological awareness, expressed as a profound attentiveness to the natural world. Miles also draws on the life stories of “similar women,” such as the preachers Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw , to try to illuminate some of the more interior experiences that Tubman took care to keep hidden.

Such gaps in the historical record are familiar to Miles. Having written about Indigenous people and African Americans, including in the National Book Award-winning “All That She Carried,” she frequently faces what she has called “the conundrum of the archives.” Tubman did not read or write; she dictated her life story to “typically white, middle-class, antislavery women,” like her first biographer, Sarah Bradford. Although usually “well-meaning,” Tubman’s amanuenses sometimes “demeaned” her, casting her as an exotic, almost otherworldly figure.

Not to mention that Tubman herself was a skillful performer, someone whose feats of bravery were made possible by guardedness and caution. “She wanted to control the narrative,” Miles writes. By the end of the 1850s, Tubman was actively shaping her persona in spoken-word performances, “understanding that if she did not, others would make a character of her for their own ends.”

“Night Flyer” briskly narrates the major events of Tubman’s early life. She was born Araminta “Minty” Ross sometime around 1822, to Rit Green and Ben Ross on the eastern shore of Dorchester County, Md. After sustaining a severe head injury at 12 or 13, when she stepped between an enslaved boy in a shop and a two-pound weight that was lobbed by his overseer, Tubman began to have seizures that she associated with religious visions. She changed her name after marrying John Tubman, a free Black man, around 1844. By then, having seen two of her sisters “carried away” to the Deep South on a chain gang, Tubman was already asking herself a question that would animate the rest of her long life: “Why should such things be?”

Using these facts as a trellis, Miles tries to coax out Tubman’s personality. Tubman had always preferred being outside. As a child, in an effort to escape a beating for sneaking a lump of sugar, she hid for five days in a pigpen. In the 1830s, her enslaver hired her out to heavy, outdoor labor — driving oxen, cutting wood and hauling logs. Tubman deemed such work preferable to the domestic chores she hated (even though, after her escape, she would take on domestic work in order to help fund her rescue missions). Recreating the scene of Tubman’s eventual escape from slavery, Miles imagines the spongy soil of the wetland woods and the swamp blackberry she may have eaten.

But it wasn’t all about survival in the woods. Tubman also had a refined sense of style, Miles says — and a sense of humor about it, too. During the Civil War, she worked as a military scout and spy, and accompanied a regiment on the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina. Tubman recalled how her finery was not quite suitable for the occasion: “I started to run, stepped on my dress, it being rather long, and fell and tore it almost off, so that when I got on board the boat there was hardly anything left of it but shreds. I made up my mind then that I would never wear a long dress on another expedition of the kind, but would have a bloomer as soon as I could get it.”

“Night Flyer” includes an insert of color photographs by Amani Willett, of sites connected to the Underground Railroad. The last one shows a marker for the Mason-Dixon line. What’s especially striking is how ordinary it looks — a worn stub of stone, surrounded by overgrown greenery, that once marked an existential division between slavery and freedom.

Tubman lived for nearly half a century after the Civil War ended, sheltering people in her home in Auburn, N.Y., and establishing a care center for the elderly and disabled. Toward the end of “Night Flyer,” Miles admits to struggling with her project — trying to get closer to someone who left such a “murky paper trail.” She derides the as-told-to biographies, explaining that the white women who wrote them, despite their good intentions, “could not have told Tubman’s story with the fullness, clarity and philosophical depth that Tubman would have, had she written it herself.”

The claim is banal in one sense, and unsupported in another. Miles tells us that Tubman always took care not to expose “her own private feelings”; there’s little reason to think that she would have wanted to reveal more of herself to a hungry public. The Tubman who emerges from “Night Flyer” is still extraordinary, and still elusive. As one colleague put it to Miles: “No one could catch her then. It’s going to be hard to catch her now.”

The post Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues. appeared first on New York Times .

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Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (born c. 1820, Dorchester county, Maryland, U.S.—died March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York) was an American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War.She led dozens of enslaved people to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroad—an elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for ...
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 - March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. ... and Anne Parrish, and is a character in novels by Terry Bisson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James McBride. Since Tubman's ...
Harriet Tubman: Facts, Underground Railroad & Legacy
Harriet Tubman was born around 1820 on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Her parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Benjamin Ross, named her Araminta Ross and called her "Minty ...
Harriet Tubman: Biography, Abolitionist, Underground Railroad
How Many Slaves Did Harriet Tubman Free? In an 1868 biography, writer Sarah H. Bradford gave an exaggerated estimate of the number of slaves Tubman directly led to safety via the Underground ...
Harriet Tubman
In 1913, at the age of 91, Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia in the Home for the Aged & Indigent Negroes. In her final words, Tubman called upon her faith and made reference to John 14:3 in the Bible. She stated, "I go away to prepare a place for you, that where I am you also may be" (Larson 2004, p. 289).
Harriet Tubman
The Saga of Harriet Tubman, "The Moses of Her People". The Golden Legacy Illustrated History Magazine is a graphic novel series published by Bertram A. Fitzgerald. These graphic novels were produced between 1966 and 1976 to " implant pride and self-esteem in black youth while dispelling myths in others.
Harriet Tubman: Biography, Facts & Legacy
Harriet Ross Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 in Dorchester County Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The fifth of nine children of two enslaved parents, Benjamin Ross or Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green. Her mother was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess and Tubman's father by Anthony Thompson.
Harriet Tubman
A drawing of Harriet Tubman called "Moses" / Library of Congress (1934/1935) by Bernarda Bryson National Women's History Museum. Araminta married a free black named John Tubman in 1844, taking his last name. She changed her first name, adopting her mother's name, becoming Harriet.
Harriet Tubman: Timeline of Her Life, Underground Rail ...
After escaping slavery on her own in 1849, Harriet Tubman helped others journey on the Underground Railroad. From 1850 to 1860 she made an estimated 13 trips and rescued around 70 enslaved people ...
Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
In 1849 Harriet Tubman learned that she and her brothers Ben and Henry were to be sold. Financial difficulties of slave owners frequently precipitated sale of slaves and other property. The family had been broken before; three of Tubman's older sisters, Mariah Ritty, Linah, and Soph, were sold to the Deep South and lost forever to the family ...
Harriet Tubman
After an extensive campaign for a military pension, she was finally awarded $8 per month in 1895 as Davis's widow (he died in 1888) and $20 in 1899 for her service. In 1896, she established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on land near her home. Tubman died in 1913 and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.
Harriet Tubman—facts and information
Much of Tubman's story is shrouded in myth, but she is still revered for the courage that helped her not just escape, but evade potential capture while helping others.For a while, she was even ...
Harriet Tubman
Auburn, NY. Date of Death: March 10, 1913. Place of Burial: Auburn, NY. Cemetery Name: Fort Hill Cemetery. Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1822, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Ben and Rit Ross. Nearly killed at the age of 13 by a blow to her head, "Minty" recovered and grew strong and determined to be free.
Harriet Tubman Library Guide: Biographies of Tubman
Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the Nineteenth Century by Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel. Call Number: Olin Library E444.T82 O35 2015. Escaped slave, Civil War spy, scout, and nurse, and champion of women's suffrage, Harriet Tubman is an icon of heroism. Perhaps most famous for leading enslaved people to freedom through ...
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman. Date of Birth - Death 1820/1821 - March 10, 1913. Perhaps one of the best known personalities of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman was born into slavery as Araminta Ross, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, sometime in 1820 or 1821. As a child, Tubman was "hired out" to various masters who proved to be particularly cruel and ...
Harriet Tubman Facts
Born. c.1820 • Dorchester • Maryland. Died. March 10, 1913 • Auburn • New York. Notable Family Members. daughter of Benjamin Ross • daughter of Harriet "Rit" Green • married to John Tubman (1844-1849) • married to Nelson Davis (1869-1888) Role In. American Civil War.
Biography of Harriet Tubman, Helped Freedom Seekers
Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-March 10, 1913) was an enslaved woman, freedom seeker, Underground Railroad conductor, North American 19th-century Black activist, spy, soldier, and nurse known for her service during the Civil War and her advocacy of civil rights and women's suffrage. Tubman remains one of history's most inspiring African Americans ...
Harriet Tubman biography
Harriet Tubman biography. Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an escaped slave who became a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. Harriet Tubman also served as a spy for the US army during the civil war and was an active participant in the struggle for women's suffrage. Tubman was born Araminta Ross, to slave parents who lived on ...
Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822
Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822 - March 10, 1913) Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, was one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad, an abolitionist, suffragist, activist, and served in the Civil War as leader, nurse, cook, scout, and spy. Tubman was arguably the most successful individual who ...
Harriet Tubman
Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman) was born enslaved in 1822 in Maryland's Eastern shore in Dorchester County. Harriet Tubman's parents, Harriet "Rit" (mother) and Ben Ross (father), had nine children. As a child, Tubman did not have the opportunity to spend time with her family. She was separated from her father when her slaveholder, Edward ...
10 Interesting Facts about Harriet Tubman
1. Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross. She would later adopt the name "Harriet" after her mother: Harriet Ross. The surname Tubman comes from her first husband, John Tubman, who she married in ...
The True Story Behind the Harriet Tubman Movie
Tubman dedicated the next decade of her life—a period chronicled in Harriet, a new biopic starring Cynthia Erivo as its eponymous heroine — to rescuing her family from bondage. Between 1850 ...
Harriet Tubman: 8 Facts About the Daring Abolitionist
Tubman herself used the Underground Railroad to escape slavery. In September 1849, fearful that her owner was trying to sell her, Tubman and two of her brothers briefly escaped, though they didn ...
Harriet Tubman Biography
Harriet Tubman Biography. Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. Extensive research now reveals that Harriet Tubman was probably born in late February or early March, 1822, in an area south of Madison called Peter's Neck. Harriet herself claimed she was born sometime between 1820-1825. Born Araminta Ross, she was the fifth ...
Harriet (film)
Harriet is a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons, who also wrote the screenplay with Gregory Allen Howard.It stars Cynthia Erivo as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, with Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, and Janelle Monáe in supporting roles. A biography about Harriet Tubman had been in the works for years, with several actresses, including Viola Davis, rumored to star.
Book Review: 'Night Flyer,' by Tiya Miles
Harriet Tubman, circa 1885. Pop-cultural attention to Tubman's extraordinary life has been double-edged, commemorating her accomplishments while also making it harder to discern who she actually ...
Legacy of Harriet Tubman
Tubman's commemorative plaque in Auburn, New York, erected 1914. Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.
Harriet Tubman: 15+ Little-Known Facts About The American Icon ...
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland. However, because she was born into slavery, her exact age is unclear. Some believe that she was born in the early ...
The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman
A flock of Christian witnesses surrounds Tubman in "Night Flyer," while a different cast of characters joins her in "Combee." Some readers may balk at the equal attention that Fields-Black ...
Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues.
Harriet Tubman led such an eventful life — so filled with hardship, extreme peril and close calls — that even ... she dreamed into being tunnels and ladders," the historian Tiya Miles writes in "Night Flyer," a short biography of Tubman that is the first in a new series, ... others would make a character of her for their own ends." ...

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c. 1822: Tubman is born as Araminta "Minty" Ross in Maryland's Dorchester County

October 1849: Tubman runs away

June 1857: Tubman brings her parents from Maryland to Canada

December 1860: Tubman makes her last trip on the Underground Railroad

c. 1863: Tubman serves as a spy for the Union

June 1886: Tubman buys 25 acres of land next to her home in Auburn to create a nursing home for Black Americans.

March 10, 1913: Tubman dies following a battle with pneumonia

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The True Story Behind the Harriet Tubman Movie

Harriet Tubman: 8 Facts About the Daring Abolitionist

Her admirers called her “Moses” or “General Tubman,” but she was born Araminta Ross.

Tubman suffered lifelong pain and illness due to her mistreatment while enslaved.

Tubman herself used the Underground Railroad to escape slavery.

It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in Tubman’s life.

Tubman’s “niece” may have actually been her biological child.

The Combahee Ferry Raid was one of her greatest achievements.

It took years for the U.S. government to pay Tubman for her Civil War work.

Despite her fame and achievements, Tubman died in near poverty.