Harriet Tubman

Araminta “Minty” Ross was born into slavery in 1822 in Dorchester County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, one of nine children of Harriet “Rit” Green Ross and Ben Ross; her father was free, but her mother was enslaved, and under slavery’s rules the children were too. From about age six her enslaver, Edward Brodess, hired her out to other households, separating her from her family. At thirteen, in a village store, she refused to help an enslaver catch a man trying to escape; he hurled a two-pound weight that struck her in the head and nearly killed her. For the rest of her life she suffered headaches and sudden “sleeping spells,” during which she had vivid visions that she connected with her faith.

As a young woman she won the right to hire herself out, working in the fields and timber lands where she learned the marshes and woods — and met Black sailors who knew the secret communication networks of the region. In 1844 she married a free Black man, John Tubman, and took the name Harriet. In 1849, when Brodess died and she feared being sold, she set out with two of her brothers; when they turned back, she went on alone, guided by the stars, to Philadelphia. “There was one of two things I had the right to, liberty or death,” she later said; “if I could not have one, I would have the other.”

In Philadelphia she met the Underground Railroad leader William Still, and from 1850 she began returning to Maryland to bring out her family and friends. When she went back for her husband in 1851, she found he had remarried and would not come. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the North unsafe, she guided freedom seekers all the way to St. Catharines, Ontario. Over about ten years she made some thirteen trips and led about seventy people out of slavery, including her elderly parents, and gave instructions to some seventy more who escaped on their own. A reward of $100 had been offered for her own capture. Abolitionists called her “Moses”; John Brown, whom she helped recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, called her “General Tubman.”

During the Civil War she went to South Carolina in 1862 to nurse Black soldiers and refugees, then organized a network of scouts and spies behind Confederate lines. On June 1, 1863, she guided Colonel James Montgomery’s 2nd South Carolina Infantry, a regiment of formerly enslaved men, up the Combahee River; the raid destroyed plantations and freed more than 700 people, many of whom joined the Union army. She is often described as the first woman in U.S. history to plan and lead a military raid.

Tubman’s courage rested on deep Christian faith and on the conviction that freedom was worth any risk. She trusted the visions that came during her seizures, and she relied on her knowledge of the land and of the secret networks of free and enslaved Black people. After the war she carried the same zeal into the campaign for women’s suffrage, working alongside Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.

Tubman’s methods were illegal and dangerous: after 1850, anyone who helped a freedom seeker broke federal law. She also supported John Brown, whose 1859 attempt to start an armed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry ended in failure and his execution. Slavery cost her personally as well — her first marriage did not survive her escape. And she lived for decades with disability: the head injury left her with chronic pain and seizures that historians now believe were narcolepsy, a part of her story that the National Women’s History Museum notes has often been overlooked.

Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, on land she obtained from the family of William H. Seward, married Nelson Davis, whom she had met during the war, in 1869, and founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She died of pneumonia there in 1913, at about ninety-one, and was buried with military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery. Her homes and the landscapes of her escapes are now national historical parks, and in 2024 Maryland posthumously named her a brigadier general.