Harriet Tubman: Moses of Her People and Architect of Freedom

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery, liberated herself through an act of extraordinary personal courage, and then returned to the South again and again — at mortal risk — to lead others to freedom along the network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She never lost a passenger. Her life extended from the plantation fields of Maryland's Eastern Shore to the battlefields of the Civil War, from the suffragist conventions of the Gilded Age to her death in 1913, at which point she was one of the most celebrated women in America. She was, as the abolitionist William Still called her, "a woman of no pretensions," but she was also one of the most consequential figures in American history — a person whose courage, strategic genius, and sheer force of will helped determine the outcome of the country's defining moral crisis.

She was born Araminta Ross, probably in 1822, on the plantation of Edward Brodess in Dorchester County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. She later took the name Harriet — her mother's name — after her escape, and the surname Tubman from her first husband, John Tubman. Like Frederick Douglass, who was born on the same Eastern Shore a few years earlier, she did not know her exact birth date; the denial of this most basic biographical fact was one of the many ways in which slavery stripped the enslaved of the ordinary markers of personhood.

Her childhood was one of unrelieved hardship. She was hired out to neighboring farms from an early age, performing domestic work and field labor under conditions that were brutal even by the standards of American slavery. She was beaten regularly; she bore scars on her body throughout her life. When she was about twelve or thirteen years old, she suffered an injury that would define the rest of her existence: an overseer, aiming a two-pound lead weight at a fleeing enslaved man, struck her in the head instead. The blow fractured her skull and left her with a form of narcolepsy — sudden, uncontrollable episodes of unconsciousness that could last minutes or hours — that she would experience for the rest of her life. She never received medical treatment for the injury.

The injury also brought with it, by her account, the experience of vivid, prophetic visions — she called them visits from God — that sustained her through the trials ahead and that she came to understand as divine guidance. Her profound religiosity was not the passive submission that slaveholders tried to cultivate in the enslaved; it was an active, demanding faith that commanded action, that told her she had an obligation to act on what she knew to be right regardless of the personal cost. "I never ran my train off the track," she said, "and I never lost a passenger." The confidence behind those words was rooted in this faith.

The Escape

In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, a union that gave her hope but not security: her own status as enslaved meant that any children she had would be born enslaved, and she had no certainty that she would not be sold south at any time. When Edward Brodess died in 1849 and there were signs that the estate would be broken up and the enslaved people sold, she decided to act.

In September 1849, she escaped with two of her brothers, Ben and Henry, but the brothers turned back and she returned with them. Shortly afterward, she escaped alone. She made the ninety-mile journey from the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia on foot, following routes through the night using the North Star, the moss on the north side of trees, and the guidance of Black and white helpers who fed her and sheltered her and moved her from station to station on the Underground Railroad. When she arrived in Philadelphia, she later recalled, she looked at her hands to see if she 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."