Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, around March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. She escaped slavery and then made about 13 trips to rescue around 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends. She used the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she worked as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, she was active in the movement for women's suffrage.

Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a child, she was beaten and whipped by enslavers. Early in life, she suffered a serious head wound when an angry overseer threw a heavy metal weight at another enslaved person but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of very deep sleepiness, known as hypersomnia, which happened throughout her life. After this injury, she began having strange visions and vivid dreams, which she believed were messages from God. These experiences, along with her upbringing in the Methodist church, made her very religious.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, but soon returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives out of the state, guiding dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Tubman, who was called "Moses," traveled by night and in great secrecy. She later said she "never lost a passenger." After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide escapees farther north into British North America (Canada) and helped newly freed people find work. In 1858, she met John Brown and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. She guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which freed more than 700 enslaved people. She is widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. After the war, she retired to her family home in Auburn, New York, on property she had bought in 1859, where she cared for her aging parents. She remained active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her. She then lived in a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped establish years earlier. Tubman is commonly viewed as an icon of courage and freedom.

Birth and family

See also: Harriet Tubman's birthplace and Harriet Tubman's family

Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Ben was enslaved on a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland. No one knows the exact year or place of her birth. Her own reports, her death certificate, and her gravestone all give different years. Kate Larson, a historian, found the year to be 1822 in her 2004 biography, and more recent biographies have accepted March 1822 as the most likely date.

Tubman's grandmother, Modesty, had come to the United States on a slave ship from Africa. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person, but no evidence has confirmed or ruled this out. Tubman's family was often under threat. Her mother's owner sold three of her daughters, and her mother hid her youngest son for a month when a trader wanted to buy him. Other enslaved people and freedmen in the community helped her. Stories about this event within the family shaped Tubman's belief that resistance was possible.

Childhood

Tubman's mother worked in "the big house" and had little time for her own family, so young Tubman cared for a younger brother and a baby, as was common in large families. When she was about five or six, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan." Tubman had to rock the baby's cradle, and when the baby cried, she was whipped. She later recalled being lashed five times before breakfast on one day, and she carried the scars for the rest of her life. She resisted in small ways, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing to protect herself from beatings, and fighting back. She was also sent to work for a planter named James Cook, checking muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after she caught measles. When she became very sick, Cook sent her back to Brodess, and her mother nursed her back to health. Later, she spoke of her strong homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River," a reference to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home."

As a teenager, Tubman suffered a severe head injury. An overseer threw a two-pound (1 kg) metal weight at a man who had left work without permission, and it struck Tubman instead. She said it "broke my skull." She was left without medical care for two days before her mother was allowed to tend to her, and she stayed in a comatose state for weeks. Afterward, she had painful headaches and seizures. Larson suggests she may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, possibly caused by a brain injury, while Clinton suggests her condition may have been narcolepsy or cataplexy. The condition stayed with her for the rest of her life. After her injury, she also began having visions and vivid dreams, which she understood as revelations from God. Although she could not read, her mother told her Bible stories, and she likely attended a Methodist church with her family. Her faith guided her throughout her life, and she rejected the teachings of white preachers who urged enslaved people to accept their situation. Instead, she found guidance in the stories of freedom in the Old Testament.

Family and first husband

Anthony Thompson promised to set free Tubman's father when he reached age 45. After Thompson died, his son kept that promise in 1840. Tubman's father kept working for the Thompson family as a timber estimator and foreman. Later in the 1840s, Tubman paid a white lawyer to look into the legal status of her mother, Rit. The lawyer found that Rit and her children were supposed to be set free under the will of an earlier owner, but the families who inherited them ignored this. Taking legal action to enforce the promise was not possible for Tubman.

Around 1844, Tubman married John Tubman, a free Black man. Little is known about him or their time together. Their marriage was complicated because of her enslaved status. The mother's status decided the status of children, so any children born to Harriet and John would have been enslaved. Marriages like theirs, between free people of color and enslaved people, were not unusual on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where half of the Black population was free at that time. Larson suggests that the couple may have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Soon after the wedding, Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet, though the exact timing is unclear. Clinton suggests the change came at the same time as her plans to escape slavery. She took her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion or to honor another relative.

Escape from slavery

In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which made her less valuable to slave traders. Her owner, Edward Brodess, tried to sell her but could not find a buyer. After his death, which made it more likely that Tubman would be sold and her family separated, as in many estate settlements, his widow Eliza began selling the people her family enslaved. Tubman decided not to wait. On September 17, 1849, she and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped. Tubman had been hired out to a man on a large plantation in neighboring Caroline County, so her family's absence was not noticed right away. Eliza later posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward for their capture. The brothers soon turned back, and Tubman had to return with them. Sometime in October or November, she escaped again, this time without her brothers, after singing a farewell song to a trusted friend. She used the Underground Railroad, a network of free and enslaved Black people, white abolitionists, and other activists. In Maryland at the time, the most prominent of these were Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck probably served as an early stop.

From there, Tubman likely followed a common escape route northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware, and north into Pennsylvania. The journey of nearly 90 miles (145 km) on foot would have taken several days to weeks. She traveled at night, guided by the North Star, and tried to avoid slave catchers hunting fugitive slaves for rewards. The helpers on the Underground Railroad used clever tricks to protect her, such as hiding her in a cart. When she crossed into Pennsylvania, Tubman felt relief and awe, and she later remembered that moment as feeling like she was in Heaven.

Nicknamed "Moses"

After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman worried about her family in Maryland and wanted them to be free too. She saved money from odd jobs in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey. In 1850, the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made officials help catch escaped slaves, even in states that had outlawed slavery. Many more escapees fled to Southern Ontario, where slavery had ended. Racial tensions also grew in Philadelphia as poor Irish immigrants competed with free Black people for work. In December 1850, Tubman learned that her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's children would soon be sold in Cambridge, Maryland. She went to Baltimore and waited there. Kessiah's husband, John Bowley, won the bid for his wife. While the auctioneer had lunch, the family escaped to a nearby safe house. That night, Bowley sailed them 60 miles (97 km) to Baltimore on a log canoe, and Tubman took them to Philadelphia.

In December 1851, Tubman guided a group of 11 escapees north, and she may have stopped at the home of Frederick Douglass, who admired her work. He later wrote that, apart from John Brown, no one had faced more danger to help enslaved people than she had. From 1851 to 1862, Tubman made about 13 trips back to Maryland's Eastern Shore and rescued some 70 enslaved people, including her brothers. People nicknamed her "Moses" after the biblical prophet who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. In 1857, she brought her parents to St. Catharines, Canada. On her trips she relied on helpers. In an 1897 interview with historian Wilbur Siebert, she named people who helped her, such as Sam Green, a free Black minister in East New Market, Maryland. Her routes passed through Sandtown, Willow Grove, Delaware, the Camden area, Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, and crossed the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. Quaker Thomas Garrett helped arrange travel to William Still, who helped hundreds escape to New York, New England, and Southern Ontario. A 2024 commemorative coin shows Tubman using the North Star to guide escapees. Her faith guided her too, and she sang versions of "Go Down Moses" with coded changes to warn others. She carried a revolver for protection.

John Brown and Harpers Ferry

Main article: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

In April 1858, Tubman met the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who believed violence was needed to destroy slavery in the United States. Tubman had not taken part in armed fighting before, but she agreed with his direct action and supported his goals. Brown called her "General Tubman" as he gathered supporters for an attack on enslavers. Her knowledge of helpers and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was very valuable to him. Brown asked her to gather former slaves in Southern Ontario who might join his fight, and she did. On May 8, 1858, Brown revealed his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia at a meeting in Chatham, Canada. When the government learned of the plan, Brown delayed it and raised more money.

The raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, 1859, and it failed. Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. Many abolitionists saw his actions as a symbol of proud resistance. Tubman praised him highly and later told a friend, "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."

Auburn and Margaret

In early 1859, Frances Adeline Seward, the wife of U.S. Senator William H. Seward, who opposed slavery, sold Tubman a seven-acre farm in Fleming, New York for $1,200. The nearby city of Auburn was a center of activism against slavery. Tubman moved her parents from Canada back to the United States, and her farm became a safe home for her family and friends. For years, she welcomed relatives and boarders who wanted a better life in the North.

Soon after buying the farm, Tubman returned to Maryland with an eight-year-old girl named Margaret, whom she said was her niece. Margaret's daughter Alice called the journey a "kidnapping," and historians are unsure about the true relationship. In November 1860, Tubman made her last rescue trip, gathering a group that included the Ennalls family. Slave catchers forced them to hide for weeks, and the Ennalls' infant was quieted with paregoric while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of Martha Wright and her husband David in Auburn on December 28, 1860.

American Civil War

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman believed the war would lead to the end of slavery. Many enslaved people near Union positions escaped. At Fort Monroe in Virginia, General Benjamin Butler called these escapees "contraband" and put them to work. In January 1862, Tubman volunteered to help refugees in the camps at Port Royal, South Carolina. There she worked as a nurse, making remedies from local plants for soldiers with dysentery and other illnesses. General David Hunter freed the people in that area, but President Abraham Lincoln was not yet ready to end slavery and criticized Hunter's actions. Tubman spoke out against Lincoln's response. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman saw it as a good but incomplete step, so she turned to more direct action against the Confederacy.

In early 1863, Tubman led a group of scouts who mapped the unfamiliar land around Port Royal and reconnoitered the people who lived there. The group worked under orders from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. She later worked with Colonel James Montgomery, whose plans were helped by her information, and in March 1863 the Union briefly captured Jacksonville, Florida.

Later that year, Tubman's spy work helped with the raid on Combahee Ferry. She guided steamboats carrying Black soldiers past mines on the Combahee River to attack several plantations. Warned by Tubman's spy network, enslaved people in the area heard the steamboat whistles and understood they were being freed. Tubman helped them onto the boats, singing "Uncle Sam's Farm." More than 750 formerly enslaved people reached Beaufort, and more than 100 of the newly freed men joined the Union army. Newspapers praised her, and she is widely credited as the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault, though her contributions have sometimes been exaggerated. In July 1863, Tubman worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw during the assault on Fort Wagner. For two more years she continued to help the Union, caring for newly freed people, scouting, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia, even for several months after the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865.

Later life

After the Civil War, Tubman received very little pay for her service to the Union Army. She was not a regular soldier, so she was paid only sometimes for her work as a spy and scout, and her nursing was never paid. Over more than three years, she received $200 in total. The government was slow to recognize what it owed her, and her work helping her family and other formerly enslaved people kept her poor. In 1865, a promised job as an official military nurse fell through, so she returned to her home in New York. During a train ride that October, a conductor ordered her to leave her seat for the smoking car. When she refused, he and other men forced her into the car, and she was hurt. Tubman then spent her remaining years in Auburn, caring for her family and others in need. She managed her farm, took in boarders, and worked various jobs to support her elderly parents. One of the people she took in was Nelson Davis, who had served in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment and began working in Auburn as a bricklayer. They married in 1869, and they adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874.

Friends from the days of abolition also helped Tubman. Sarah Hopkins Bradford wrote a book about her life in 1869, which brought Tubman about $1,200, but paying off her farm's mortgage in 1873 still used up her savings. That October, swindlers tricked her into paying for a trunk of gold coins that turned out to be filled with rocks, and they knocked her out with chloroform. Her money troubles led two congressmen, Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin, to propose a payment for her war service in 1874, but the Senate defeated the bill. Her husband died of tuberculosis in 1888. Under the Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890, Tubman became eligible for a widow's pension, which she received in 1895 after she proved her marriage to the Bureau of Pensions. In 1899, Congress approved a monthly payment for her nursing, but it did not recognize her work as a scout and spy, even after Sereno E. Payne proposed a bill for her in 1897. In her later years, Tubman supported women's suffrage. She attended meetings of suffragist organizations and worked with Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. She spoke for women's right to vote in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., and she was the keynote speaker at the first conference of the National Federation of Afro-American Women in 1896. That group later merged into the National Association of Colored Women. The magazine The Woman's Era published a profile of her. In Auburn, Tubman was active in the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church. In 1895, she began planning a Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, and she bought a farm for it in 1896. The church took over the property in 1903, and the home opened on June 23, 1908, with Tubman as guest of honor. By the late 1890s, pain from an old head injury kept her awake, so she asked a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to operate. She reportedly received no anesthesia and bit down on a bullet to get through the pain, as she had seen soldiers do when their limbs were amputated. By 1911, she was too frail to live on her own and moved into the home named for her. She died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913, surrounded by family and friends. Just before she died, she quoted the Gospel of John: "I go away to prepare a place for you." She was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Legacy

Main article: Legacy of Harriet Tubman

Tubman was widely known and respected while she was alive. After she died, she became an American icon, and by the 1980s she was one of American history's most famous figures. She inspired generations of African Americans fighting for equality and civil rights, and leaders across the political spectrum praised her. National parks and national monuments related to her include the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, NY. The Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, Canada, where she worshipped, is a National Historic Site of Canada. Auburn, New York, has other sites linked to her, including her gravesite. Other historical sites include the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and the Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden in Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman Museum in New Jersey.

Tubman is the subject of many works of art. Musicians Woody Guthrie, Wynton Marsalis, and Walter Robinson have written songs celebrating her, and she is the subject of operas by Thea Musgrave, Nkeiru Okoye, and Hilda Paredes. Plays about her include works by Carolyn Gage and a collaboration of May Miller and Willis Richardson. Novels about her are written by Elizabeth Cobbs, Marcy Heidish, Anne Parrish, and Bob the Drag Queen, and she appears as a character in novels by Terry Bisson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James McBride. Her life was first shown on television in a 1963 episode of The Great Adventure, and she has since appeared in TV productions such as The Good Lord Bird, Timeless, Underground, and A Woman Called Moses. Cynthia Erivo received an Academy Award nomination for playing Tubman in the 2019 film Harriet. Artists including Fern Cunningham, Jane DeDecker, Nina Cooke John, and Alison Saar have made sculptures of her, and the first statue of her in the region where she was born was unveiled in Salisbury, Maryland, in 2009. Painters who have drawn or painted her include Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold.

In 1978, Tubman became the first African-American woman honored on a U.S. postage stamp, and she appeared on a second stamp in 1995. Starting in 2016, plans called for a portrait of Tubman to be placed on the front of the twenty-dollar bill, with the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, moved to the back. In a July 2026 interview, Scott Bessent, the U.S. secretary of the treasury, said that this plan is no longer planned. In 2024, the United States Mint issued three Harriet Tubman commemorative coins, each showing her at a different stage of her life. Dozens of schools, streets, highways, church groups, social organizations, and government agencies have been named after her. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the SS Harriet Tubman, its first Liberty ship named for a Black woman. On November 11, 2024, Tubman was posthumously commissioned as a one-star general (brigadier general) in the Maryland Army National Guard to honor her military service during the Civil War.

Historiography

Tubman hoped to learn to read and write and to write her own memoirs, but she never did. Instead, she allowed Sarah Hopkins Bradford to combine Tubman's own memories, newspaper accounts, and letters from her friends and supporters into Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, published in 1868. Modern biographers criticized the book for its artistic freedom and very personal point of view, but it still shows how Tubman saw her own experiences. In 1886, at Tubman's request, Bradford released a rewritten book called Harriet, the Moses of her People. Both books hailed Tubman as a later-day Joan of Arc.

The rewritten book had a more moral and literary tone, changed many stories from first person to third person, and placed events in time order. The first full biography of Tubman after Bradford's was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had great trouble finding a publisher, and his search took four years. Although many children's versions of Tubman's life were written, Conrad wrote a more detailed account for adults in an academic style. Another book based on original research did not appear for 60 years, until Jean Humez published one in 2003. In 2024, historian Edda L. Fields-Black published Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, which shed new light on Tubman's military service and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History.