Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross (“Minty”) in March 1822 to a couple on the eastern shore of Maryland who had nine children. Minty felt the edge of slavery young. Though her father was a free man, her mother (Harriet Snr) was still a slave – and so, in line with American law, all their children remained slaves.
The enslaver of the Rosses, a man named Edward Brodess, separated the father, Benjamin, from the rest of the family while Minty was still a child. When she was six, Brodess began to hire her out to other white families to work as a nanny.
In 1835, running errands in town, 13-year-old Minty witnessed a slave trying to escape. When she did not intervene to help the white owner catch the fugitive, the slaver threw a two-pound weight at the slave to stop him. It missed the intended target, hitting Minty on the back of the head and fracturing her skull. For the rest of her life, she suffered from headaches, seizures, hallucinations and blackouts.
Minty was forced back into work on the fields with no time to recover. She decided there must be a way to make life better, and negotiated a deal with Brodess where – in return for a yearly fee – she would only work on tasks with which she could cope.
She gained some freedom of movement, reconnecting with her father, learning the landscape from black sailors and meeting her future husband, a free man named John Tubman. She changed her name to Harriet (after her mother) Tubman. But when Brodess experienced financial difficulties, and then died, Harriet realised she might be sold again and separated from her family.
To the promised land
In 1849 she made her break for the Mason-Dixon Line. Once north of that border, she might find safety and freedom in Pennsylvania or even farther away: anywhere south of it would be a death sentence.
It took days but she succeeded … and returned more than a dozen times over the next decade to rescue over 70 other enslaved people, or instruct them how to find their way to freedom.
There began the famous “Underground Railroad”. Tubman, Moses to black folk in the South, refined the tricks it took to get people, including her own parents, from bondage to a new life at a first berth in Canada.
She did not, however, succeed in rescuing her husband, John. Believing her dead after she escaped, he remarried and refused to leave when she returned and tried to help him out of Maryland.
She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and rallied support for the Underground Railroad from well-known white abolitionists such as John Brown, the suffragist Susan B Anthony and writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
“I had reasoned this out in my mind;
there was one of two things
I had the right to, liberty or death;
if I could not have one, I would
have the other”Harriet Tubman, 1886
During the American Civil War, Harriet Tubman became a scout, spy, nurse and advisor to Union forces.
She was commonly known as “General Tubman”, training other former slaves to assist the northern troops.
She personally assisted Colonel James Montgomery to carry out the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina which freed roughly 750 enslaved black people.
While serving as a spy and scout, Tubman met her second husband, Nelson Davis. They married in 1869 and adopted a little girl, Gertie.
After the Civil War, Tubman became involved in various philanthropic and charitable causes besides abolition: she was an ardent suffragist and campaigner for social reform.
Tubman bought a small farm in Auburn, New York State around 1858, settled her rescued parents on it, and moved in after the war.
She began to care for other older adults and orphans, opening the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes on the farm after the war.
Tubman became a patient at the home in 1911 and died there in 1913. Her grave is at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
She is revered for her courage, her persistence and her commitment to social reform and generous support for her community.
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