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."

She was free. And almost immediately, she began planning to go back.

She returned to Maryland for the first time in December 1850, leading her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's two children to freedom via a route that took them through Baltimore. She returned again in the spring of 1851, leading her brother Moses and two companions. She returned again and again over the next decade — approximately thirteen missions in all, by her own count, leading somewhere between sixty and seventy people to freedom in the North and Canada. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northern citizens and officials to assist in the return of escaped enslaved people and which made the nominally free Northern states no longer safe, meant that she eventually routed her rescue missions all the way to St. Catharines, Ontario, in Canada, where her passengers would be beyond the reach of American law.

She tried twice to bring her husband John Tubman north, but he had remarried a free Black woman during her absence and refused to come. She brought her aging parents — Benjamin Ross and Rit Green — north in 1856 and 1857 in separate journeys, her father by a route that required him to travel blindfolded for part of the way so that he could truthfully swear he had not seen any freedom seekers. This was characteristic of her operational precision: she thought systematically about risk, about what could be said and what must not be said, about how to maintain plausible deniability for those who helped her while still moving people through. She was, by the measure of any intelligence service, a first-rate operational mind.

The Underground Railroad

The network of routes and safe houses that constituted the Underground Railroad was not a formal organization — it had no central leadership, no membership, no official charter — but a loose coalition of individuals and communities, Black and white, who created a system of mutual aid for freedom seekers moving north. Its participants risked serious legal consequences: the Fugitive Slave Act imposed fines and imprisonment on those who assisted escaped enslaved people, and in the South the penalties for participation were far more severe.

Tubman operated through this network with the discipline of a military commander and the spiritual authority of a prophet. She carried a pistol and was explicit about its dual purpose: to discourage pursuers and to discourage freedom seekers who lost their nerve and considered turning back. "Dead folks tell no tales," she reportedly said, when asked about the threat the pistol posed to her own passengers. Whether or not she ever actually threatened to shoot a wavering freedom seeker — the historical record is mixed — the story conveys something true about her approach: that she understood that a mission half-completed could be worse than no mission at all, and that the safety of those who had gone ahead and of those who remained behind depended on the absolute reliability of the operation.

She typically began her rescue missions on Saturday nights, so that the enslavers could not post advertisements for the runaways until Monday — newspapers did not publish on Sundays. She used coded messages sent through letters to inform those she was coming for that the time had arrived. She moved by night and hid by day, in barns and crawl spaces and the homes of both free Black people and sympathetic whites. She used the swamps and forests of the Eastern Shore as cover, exploiting her intimate knowledge of the terrain she had worked as an enslaved person and her ability — developed over years of outdoor labor — to read weather and landscape.

The rewards posted for her capture were substantial. By the early 1850s, the combined rewards for "Moses" — the name by which she was known to freedom seekers — reportedly reached forty thousand dollars, an enormous sum that testified to how seriously the slave power took her operations. The fact that she was never captured, over more than a decade of operations in the heart of the slave South, is a measure of both her skill and the extraordinary courage of the network of people who sheltered her and her passengers.

Among the prominent figures in the Underground Railroad who worked with her were Thomas Garrett, a Quaker stationmaster in Wilmington, Delaware, who had been financially ruined by a legal judgment against him for aiding freedom seekers and who continued his work anyway; William Still, the Philadelphia-based Black abolitionist who kept careful records of the people who passed through the network and whose documentation is one of the primary sources for the history of the Underground Railroad; and the network of free Black communities in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York that provided the essential logistical support for the operations.

Tubman worked closely with the Boston-based abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson and with the Boston Vigilance Committee, which raised money for her operations. She met John Brown in 1858 at the home of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, and Brown, who called her "General Tubman," tried to recruit her for his Harpers Ferry raid. She did not join the raid, reportedly because of illness, but she endorsed Brown's willingness to use force and shared his conviction that slavery would not end through peaceful persuasion alone.

The CIVIL War: Scout, Spy, and Nurse

When the Civil War began in 1861, Harriet Tubman moved from the Underground Railroad to the Union Army almost seamlessly, bringing with her the skills that had made the Underground Railroad operations possible: the ability to move through hostile territory without detection, the ability to gather intelligence and to cultivate local informants, and the ability to command the trust of people in desperate situations.

She went to South Carolina in 1862, joining the Union forces on the Sea Islands — the chain of barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where the Union had established a beachhead early in the war. She worked initially as a nurse, treating the freedpeople and contraband workers — enslaved people who had fled to Union lines — who suffered from dysentery, typhoid, and smallpox. She was reportedly the only person on the base who did not contract the dysentery that was devastating Union forces, which she attributed to the wild herbs she used to make her own remedies.

Her most important Civil War contribution was as a spy and intelligence operative for the Union Army. Working under the command of Colonel James Montgomery and later in support of operations organized by Major General David Hunter, she recruited and led a network of Black scouts who moved through Confederate-held territory gathering information on troop movements, supply routes, and the locations of Confederate fortifications. The intelligence she gathered helped plan what is now known as the Combahee River Raid of June 2, 1863 — one of the most successful Union operations of the war's South Carolina theater.

The Combahee River Raid was a gunboat assault led by Colonel Montgomery on Confederate positions along the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman provided the intelligence about Confederate positions and torpedo placements that allowed the Union gunboats to navigate the river safely, and she guided the operation from the lead gunboat, the John Adams. The raid destroyed Confederate infrastructure — rice plantations, supply depots, bridges — and liberated approximately 750 enslaved people, who came down to the riverbanks and crowded aboard the Union vessels. It was the first military operation in American history planned and led by a woman.

Despite her service, she was never paid as a soldier. She received no regular salary for most of her Civil War work, subsisting largely on the money she earned selling pies and root beer to the troops. She applied for a military pension for decades after the war and was denied repeatedly on the grounds that she had not been formally enrolled as a soldier, even though her service was well documented. She finally received a pension — not for her own service but as the widow of her second husband, Nelson Davis, whom she had married in 1869 — in 1899, more than three decades after the war ended.

Nelson Davis, St. Catharines, and the Later Years

After the Civil War, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, in a house she had purchased from U.S. Senator William Henry Seward while still engaged in her rescue operations. The property would be her home for the rest of her life, and it became the center of a community of care and activism that extended through the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era.

She married Nelson Davis, a Civil War veteran nearly twenty years her junior, in 1869. Davis suffered from tuberculosis, likely contracted during the war, and Tubman cared for him until his death in 1888. She also took in elderly and destitute people who needed care, running what she described as a home for the needy from her Auburn property. When she found that the home she had established was being run in ways that charged admission to the very people she had intended it to serve, she donated the property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which took over its management.

Her Auburn household was a gathering place for reformers, abolitionists, and civil rights advocates throughout the late nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass wrote to her in 1868 in terms that captured what her contemporaries understood about the comparison between their respective achievements: "I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have." The letter is one of the most celebrated tributes in American history — a recognition by the greatest Black public figure of the era that Tubman's was a different kind of courage, a more purely physical and immediate courage than his, exercised at greater personal risk and in conditions of greater vulnerability.

She worked actively for women's suffrage in her later years, attending conventions, speaking at meetings organized by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and aligning herself with the cause on the same grounds that Douglass had: that the denial of rights on the basis of sex was as unjust as the denial of rights on the basis of race. She lived long enough to see Black men — not yet Black women — enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment, and she did not live to see women's suffrage achieved: the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, seven years after her death.

She died on March 10, 1913, at her home in Auburn, New York, surrounded by family and friends, reportedly saying as she died: "I go to prepare a place for you." She was given a military funeral by the post of the Grand Army of the Republic in Auburn, a recognition of her Civil War service that her pension applications had been denied for decades. The city of Auburn erected a bronze tablet in her honor the following year.

Legacy: the Long Arc

Harriet Tubman died before the full recognition of what she had accomplished became part of the national consciousness, but the process of recognition — slow, uneven, and still continuing — began almost immediately. Booker T. Washington, who had known her personally, gave a eulogy that placed her in the same category as the greatest heroes of the antislavery struggle. The generation of scholars who documented the Underground Railroad — primarily through the records kept by William Still and through the narratives collected by abolitionists — established her operations as the most remarkable individual contribution to the network.

The twentieth century brought a deepening engagement with her legacy. The Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn was opened to the public as a historic site; her image appeared on postage stamps; her story was told in children's books, adult biographies, film, and television. The announcement in 2016 that her image would replace Andrew Jackson's on the twenty-dollar bill — a decision later delayed but not reversed — was a statement about whose contribution to American history the nation chose to honor on its currency.

The scholarly reassessment of her life, accelerated by Kate Clifford Larson's 2004 biography Bound for the Promised Land and Catherine Clinton's 2004 biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, has established the full dimensions of her achievement more precisely than earlier accounts could. The intelligence work of the Civil War, which had been underemphasized in earlier treatments, emerged from this scholarship as a genuinely important military contribution; the strategic sophistication of her Underground Railroad operations was documented with a precision that made clear that "Moses" was not merely a folk hero but a first-rate operational thinker.

She remains, more than a century after her death, one of the most powerful symbols in American life — of courage, of faith, of the refusal to accept conditions that were both legally established and morally intolerable. She is proof that individuals matter, that one person's determination to act on what she knows to be right can change the world — or at least a corner of it, one person at a time.

Dorchester County and the World of Eastern Shore Slavery

The world into which Araminta Ross was born was one of the most intensively slave-worked agricultural landscapes in antebellum America. Dorchester County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, was tobacco and then wheat country — a landscape of tidal rivers, marshes, pine forests, and rich farmland worked by enslaved Black people who outnumbered the white population in many parts of the county. The plantation system of the Eastern Shore was somewhat different from the large-scale cotton plantations of the Deep South: farms were smaller on average, enslaved people were hired out frequently to neighboring plantations, and the proportion of free Black people — who had been emancipated in large numbers after the Revolution under the influence of Quaker abolitionism — was unusually high. This proximity to freedom, and the knowledge that freedom was a real and existing condition rather than a mere abstraction, gave the enslaved people of the Eastern Shore a particular relationship to the possibility of escape.

The Ross family was owned by Edward Brodess, who had inherited them from his stepfather. Tubman's mother, Rit Green, had herself been promised freedom under the terms of an earlier will but had been kept in bondage when that will was contested. The knowledge of this betrayal — of a freedom legally promised and then stolen — was part of the family's understanding of their situation and of the system that held them. Tubman's father, Benjamin Ross, was enslaved by a different owner, Anthony Thompson, which meant that the family's daily life was shaped by the fact of having parents owned by different people, a common situation in the Eastern Shore's more fragmented slave economy.

Rit Green was known in the local slave community for her determination to keep her children together. When one of Tubman's brothers was threatened with sale to a chain gang, Rit hid him for a month and when the slave trader came to collect him, she told him that the first person who tried to take one of her children would be dealing with God Almighty. The trader backed down. This act of maternal resistance — the refusal to accept the destruction of the family that slavery routinely imposed — was part of the inheritance that shaped Tubman's own moral character.

The hiring-out system that put Tubman to work from an early age for neighboring farmers and households also gave her an unusually broad knowledge of the local geography. She worked as a domestic servant in the home of one James Cook, where she was forced to check muskrat traps in the streams in winter, wading into the cold water and contracting measles, nearly dying. She was beaten so regularly that, she later said, her neck and back bore scars for the rest of her life. She ran away from one employer and was beaten so severely that she had to be sent back, half dead, to her owner. These early experiences of systematic cruelty did not break her — the adult Tubman was not a woman who appeared to have been broken by anything — but they gave her a thorough and visceral understanding of what the slave system was and what it cost those it held.

The Head Injury and Its Consequences

The blow to the head that Tubman suffered at around age twelve or thirteen was the defining medical event of her life, and its consequences were profound in ways that went beyond the obvious physical damage. The injury — a two-pound lead weight thrown by an overseer at a fleeing enslaved man and striking her instead — fractured her skull and caused what modern physicians have diagnosed retrospectively as temporal lobe epilepsy or narcoleptic episodes, the sudden and uncontrollable loss of consciousness that she experienced for the rest of her long life.

These episodes — which she called "sleeping spells" — were both a severe practical disability and, in her understanding, a form of spiritual communication. During the spells, she experienced what she described as vivid visions of heavenly landscapes, of divine presence, of guidance that she understood as direct communication from God about what she should do. She took these visions with complete seriousness as sources of practical direction: they told her which routes to take, when danger was approaching, which houses were safe. Whether or not one accepts her theological interpretation of these experiences, their practical effect was real — they gave her a confidence in her own judgment under extreme pressure that bordered on the absolute.

She sought medical treatment for the head injury in her old age, traveling to Boston and undergoing a brain operation at Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1890s. The surgeon's identity has not been definitively established in the historical record. The operation, which she underwent without anesthesia — she requested to bite a bullet rather than use ether, in the tradition of soldiers she had seen in the field during the Civil War — was considered successful, and she reported that it reduced the frequency of the sleeping spells. She was an old woman by the time this treatment became available; she had lived with the injury's consequences for more than fifty years.

The head injury also affected her physical appearance and her manner. She moved through the world with an intensity of focus that observers consistently remarked on — the direct gaze, the deliberate speech, the quality of absolute presence. She had learned, of necessity, to conceal the sleeping spells during her rescue missions, to trust companions to keep her moving when she lost consciousness on the trail, and to communicate to freedom seekers in advance that if she fell asleep they should keep going or wait, depending on the circumstances. The need to function in conditions of extreme danger while managing a severe neurological condition required a kind of self-organization that few people have ever needed to develop.

The Freedom Network: People Who Made It Possible

Tubman's rescue missions were possible because of a remarkable network of individuals whose contributions, while less celebrated than hers, were equally essential to the Underground Railroad's functioning. Understanding who these people were and what they risked illuminates the broader social infrastructure that made individual heroism possible.

Thomas Garrett, the Quaker merchant and stationmaster in Wilmington, Delaware, was among the most important of her collaborators. Garrett had been convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act and financially ruined — fined into bankruptcy — for his assistance to freedom seekers, but he continued his work undeterred, reportedly saying at his sentencing that he had not committed a crime and that he intended to continue doing what he had done. He assisted more than two thousand freedom seekers over the course of his decades of work on the Underground Railroad, and his station in Wilmington was a critical link in the route from the Eastern Shore to the free North.

William Still, the Philadelphia-based Black abolitionist whose meticulous records of the people who passed through his station — their names, their situations, the families they left behind — constitute the primary documentary source for the history of the Underground Railroad, provided the essential Philadelphia link in Tubman's operations. His records of her arrivals with freedom seekers are among the few contemporaneous documentary sources for her missions. Still himself was a free Black man whose own brother had been enslaved, and his documentation of the Underground Railroad — published in 1872 as The Underground Rail Road — was both a historical record and a political argument about the agency and intelligence of the people who used the network.

In St. Catharines, Ontario, where Tubman settled temporarily between missions and where many of her passengers made their permanent homes, the free Black community provided the social fabric that received and integrated the freedom seekers. St. Catharines had a substantial African Canadian population, including many people who had escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, and it had a Black church — the Salem Chapel, British Methodist Episcopal — that served as a community center, mutual aid society, and spiritual anchor for those starting their new lives. Tubman herself worshipped there during her St. Catharines years.

The white allies who operated safe houses along the routes — Quakers primarily, but also members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, secular abolitionists, and individual sympathizers — took risks that were real and legally defined. The Fugitive Slave Act imposed specific penalties: fines of up to one thousand dollars and imprisonment for up to six months for anyone who assisted an escaped enslaved person. For the people of the Eastern Shore and the border states, where the reach of the slave power was most immediate, the risks were greater still. That so many people accepted these risks is itself a remarkable fact about the moral seriousness with which a significant minority of white Northerners approached the question of slavery.

Tubman and John Brown

The meeting between Harriet Tubman and John Brown in 1858 brought together two of the most consequential figures in the history of American abolitionism — two people who shared a conviction that slavery was a war that required warriors, and that the enslaved had a right to freedom that could be claimed by force. Brown was already planning what would become the Harpers Ferry raid, and he sought Tubman's help in recruiting enslaved people for the insurrection he envisioned.

The meeting took place at the home of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, at one of the abolitionist gatherings that Brown convened in the late 1850s to recruit support for his plans. Brown was struck by Tubman immediately and referred to her in subsequent correspondence as "General Tubman" — a title that reflected his genuine admiration for her strategic capabilities and his recognition that her network of connections in the Eastern Shore slave community was exactly the kind of operational resource he needed.

She did not join the raid at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, reportedly because she was ill at the time it was executed. But her endorsement of Brown's principles — of the necessity of armed resistance, of the right of the enslaved to take their freedom by force — was unambiguous. When Brown was captured, tried, and executed, Tubman was among those who saw him as a martyr. She later said that Brown had done more for her people than any other person, living or dead.

Her relationship with Brown also illuminates something important about the differences between the various strands of abolitionist thought in the 1850s. The Garrisonian abolitionists — who emphasized moral suasion and refused to participate in a political system they saw as corrupted by slavery — were committed to nonviolence as a matter of principle. Tubman was not. The pistol she carried on her missions was not a defensive weapon only; it represented her conviction that freedom was worth fighting for and that the violence of the slave system justified violent resistance. She and Brown shared this conviction with an intensity that many of their contemporaries did not.

International Dimensions: Canada and the Diaspora

The decision to route her rescue missions all the way to Canada — following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made even the nominally free Northern states legally dangerous for freedom seekers — placed Tubman in the context of the broader African diaspora and the international dimensions of the antislavery struggle. Canada was not merely a geographical destination; it was a political statement: a declaration that the United States, in its post-1850 form, was not a country where Black people could be safe.

St. Catharines, Ontario, where she established her base of operations in the 1850s, was in many ways the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad's main eastern routes. The town had a substantial and well-organized Black community by the time Tubman arrived, with churches, schools, and mutual aid societies that provided the infrastructure for receiving and integrating freedom seekers. The community included people from across the American South who had made their way to Canada by various routes, and the stories they brought with them — of plantations, of families torn apart, of the systematic brutality of the slave system — created a collective memory of slavery that would survive in the community for generations.

The African Canadian experience in St. Catharines was also shaped by the presence of the British legal framework, which had abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834. The symbolic importance of setting foot on British soil — or Canadian soil, which was legally equivalent — was enormous for freedom seekers who had grown up under a system that treated them as property. The Underground Railroad's Canadian terminus was thus not merely a logistical endpoint but a marker of a fundamentally different legal and social order, a place where Black people had rights that courts would enforce.

Tubman's international reputation extended beyond Canada. British abolitionists followed her work with interest; the anti-slavery movement in Britain had long maintained connections with American abolitionists, and news of her rescue missions — spread through abolitionist newspapers and correspondence networks — reached audiences in England and Scotland who saw her as confirmation of everything they believed about the capacity for resistance of the enslaved. This international attention was itself a form of pressure on the United States, a reminder that the world was watching and that the country's claims to being a democracy were measured against the reality of slavery.

The Combahee River Raid in Detail

The military operation that Harriet Tubman planned and guided on June 2, 1863, along the Combahee River in South Carolina was not merely a successful Union raid — it was one of the most carefully planned and decisively executed operations of the entire Civil War's South Carolina theater, and its success depended almost entirely on intelligence that Tubman's network had gathered over the preceding months.

The Combahee River flowed through the heart of the South Carolina rice-growing country, one of the wealthiest agricultural regions of the antebellum South. The plantations along its banks were among the largest in the state, worked by enslaved people who had extensive knowledge of the river's channels, the Confederate defensive arrangements, and the locations of the torpedoes — early naval mines — that had been placed to prevent Union gunboat incursions. It was this knowledge, gathered by Black scouts operating under Tubman's direction and passed back to Union commanders, that made the raid possible.

Colonel James Montgomery, who commanded the operation, led three Union gunboats — the John Adams, the Harriet A. Weed, and the Sentinel — up the Combahee on the night of June 1–2, 1863. Tubman, who had guided the intelligence operation that mapped the Confederate positions and torpedo placements, was aboard the lead gunboat as a guide and intelligence resource. The flotilla successfully avoided the torpedoes, destroyed seven rice plantations worth an estimated $2 million in Confederate resources, and — most significantly — liberated 756 enslaved people who came down to the riverbanks and waded out to the boats.

The scene of the liberation was chaotic and overwhelming. Tubman later described the crowds of people surging toward the boats, carrying their children and whatever possessions they could grab, desperate to board before the gunboats had to withdraw. The Union sailors struggled to accommodate the numbers — the boats had not been provisioned for hundreds of additional passengers — and Tubman reportedly helped organize the boarding, calming panicked crowds by beginning to sing and leading others in joining her. The singing, which had been a form of coded communication throughout her Underground Railroad years, became in this moment a form of communal reassurance.

The raid was reported in the Boston Commonwealth under the headline that described Tubman as the "Black She Moses" who had planned and led the operation — one of the first major newspaper accounts to associate her publicly with military command. The coverage helped establish her reputation in the North as not merely a heroic freedom seeker but a military operative of genuine skill, and it attracted attention from Union commanders who had not previously known of her work.

The 756 people liberated in the Combahee River Raid joined the tens of thousands of freedom seekers who had come to Union lines in South Carolina since the fall of Port Royal in November 1861 and who were living in the freedpeople's camps on the Sea Islands under the oversight of the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern missionary organizations. Their liberation was real but their situation was precarious — they were free but destitute, dependent on Union Army rations, and living in temporary conditions that the chaos of the war made impossible to plan beyond. Tubman, whose years in the Underground Railroad had taught her to think about what happened to freedom seekers after they reached safety, was aware of these conditions and worked to address them as best she could.

Faith, Folk Medicine, and Healing Practice

Tubman's deep religious faith was inseparable from her practical knowledge of healing — a knowledge that she had developed over years of enslaved labor on the Eastern Shore, where access to formal medical care was essentially nonexistent and survival depended on the plant-based remedies and practical medical knowledge accumulated by enslaved communities over generations.

She had learned from her mother and from the broader community of enslaved women on the Eastern Shore a substantial pharmacopoeia of herbal remedies — plants that treated fever, dysentery, infected wounds, respiratory illness, and the many other conditions that affected people living in poverty without access to trained physicians. This knowledge, which derived from both African healing traditions and the practical ecology of the Eastern Shore, was the same knowledge that had helped her survive her own illnesses in childhood and that she applied during the Civil War when she worked as a nurse in the Union Army camps on the Sea Islands.

Her reputation for healing on the Sea Islands was remarkable. The dysentery that was devastating Union forces — killing soldiers and freedpeople alike — appeared not to affect Tubman, which she attributed to the wild herbs she gathered and prepared as protective remedies. She shared these remedies with others and was credited by those around her with a healing power that seemed almost miraculous. Whether the specific plants she used had genuine pharmaceutical effectiveness against the bacteria causing the dysentery epidemic is uncertain, but the social and psychological dimensions of her healing practice — the confidence she inspired, the sense that someone was taking care of people that the military medical establishment was failing — were themselves therapeutic.

Her faith made no sharp distinction between the spiritual and the physical dimensions of healing. Prayer and plant medicine were not alternatives; they were complementary expressions of the same conviction that human beings were in the care of a God who wanted them to survive and to flourish. This integrated approach to healing was characteristic of the African American religious tradition in which she had been formed, and it served her and those around her remarkably well through decades of extreme hardship.

Her relationship to formal Christianity was complex in ways that the biographical record suggests but does not fully document. She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — an institution that had from its founding in 1796 been explicitly committed to the struggle against slavery — and her faith was organized around the AME Zion tradition's emphasis on communal worship, prophetic witness, and the obligation of the church to act on behalf of the oppressed. But her direct, conversational relationship with God — the visions, the instructions she understood as divine guidance, the confidence with which she acted on what she heard — was less institutional than personal, less theological than practical.

Tubman's Circle: Seward, Anthony, and the Auburn Network

The Auburn, New York, to which Tubman came in the late 1850s and where she would live for the rest of her life was not a random destination. It was the home of William Henry Seward, one of the most prominent antislavery politicians in America — he would become Lincoln's Secretary of State and be nearly killed in the conspiracy that assassinated Lincoln — who sold Tubman a house on the outskirts of town on extremely favorable terms. Seward had been a supporter of the Underground Railroad and of the abolitionist cause generally, and his willingness to sell property to Tubman reflected both his political convictions and his personal admiration for her work.

The Auburn community that formed around Tubman and her extended household included her parents, her brothers and their families, and a shifting population of elderly, disabled, and impoverished people whom she took in and cared for. Her household was also a gathering point for abolitionists, reformers, and visitors who came to pay their respects and to hear her stories. The stories themselves — told and retold over decades — became a form of living oral history of the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and the long struggle for freedom.

Her relationship with Susan B. Anthony, who also lived in the region and who was one of the central figures in the women's suffrage movement, was an important part of her later life. The two women shared a platform on multiple occasions, and Tubman was among the relatively small number of Black women who were actively engaged in the predominantly white women's suffrage movement. The movement's relationship to race was complicated — the post-Civil War disagreements over the Fifteenth Amendment had opened deep wounds — but Tubman maintained her commitment to women's suffrage throughout, understanding it as part of the same fundamental argument about human equality that had organized her entire life.

She also maintained connections with Frederick Douglass throughout his life. Douglass's celebrated letter to her — written in 1868, expressing his conviction that no one had "willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people" — was one of the defining recognitions of her career, a tribute from the most prominent Black American of the era that acknowledged the difference between their respective kinds of courage. Douglass had risked his reputation and his freedom; Tubman had risked her life, repeatedly, in the most direct possible way.

The Harriet Tubman Home — the property adjacent to her own residence that she eventually donated to the AME Zion Church for use as a home for the elderly — was the material expression of her lifelong commitment to care for those the larger society neglected. She had been asking her church to take it over for years, frustrated by the requirement to charge admission fees that she felt were incompatible with the purpose of the institution. When the church finally assumed management in 1903, she reportedly said: "I did as the Lord told me to do."

Reconstruction and Its Failure: Tubman's Response

The period from the end of the Civil War through the collapse of Reconstruction was for Harriet Tubman, as for most Black Americans, a time of dizzying hope followed by devastating betrayal. The Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment's extension of voting rights to Black men represented the fulfillment of much of what she had worked and risked her life for. The freedpeople of the South were organizing politically, electing Black legislators and governors, building schools and churches, and claiming the rights of citizenship with a determination that testified to the depth of the hunger for freedom and equality that slavery had suppressed but not extinguished.

Tubman was in a position to observe these developments both from Auburn, where she followed the news with intense interest, and from her occasional returns to the South for specific purposes. She spent time in Washington, D.C., in the years immediately after the war, where she encountered the freedpeople pouring into the capital and the chaotic effort by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern missionary societies to provide education, shelter, and economic support to millions of people who had been systematically denied all three under slavery.

The withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and the subsequent restoration of white Democratic control over the former Confederate states — the process that dismantled Reconstruction and inaugurated the Jim Crow system — was a catastrophe that Tubman understood with complete clarity. The violence that accompanied this counter-revolution — the systematic terror of the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, the murders of Black political leaders, the mass disenfranchisement of Black voters through both formal and informal means — was slavery by another name: a system of racial control that used different instruments but pursued the same end.

She responded to these developments with the activism available to her in Auburn — public speaking, support for the civil rights organizations that emerged in the post-Reconstruction period, and her continued engagement with the women's suffrage movement, which she saw as part of the broader struggle for a genuinely democratic America. She was not a passive observer of the betrayal of Reconstruction, but her options for resistance were more limited in the post-Civil War era than they had been during the Underground Railroad years, when the system had a specific and visible vulnerability that her courage and operational skill could exploit.

Tubman in Popular Memory and Historiography

The history of how Harriet Tubman has been remembered in American culture is itself a story worth telling — a story of appropriation and distortion, of simplification and recovery, that tracks the broader history of how Americans have reckoned with the legacy of slavery.

The first full biography, Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land (2004), established the historical record on firmer documentary ground than any previous account had achieved. Earlier biographies — most notably the pioneering 1943 biography by Earl Conrad and the beloved 1955 children's biography by Ann Petry — had relied on oral tradition and on Tubman's own accounts, filtered through the memory of those who had heard her speak, without the kind of documentary verification that modern historical scholarship requires. Larson's work, which drew on records from the Dorchester County courthouse, the National Archives, and the collections of institutions that had held relevant documents, established dates, names, and specifics that earlier accounts had necessarily left vague.

The children's literature tradition that grew up around Tubman from the mid-twentieth century onward created a version of her story that was heroic and simplified in ways that served the pedagogical purposes of the civil rights era but that inevitably reduced the complexity of her actual life. The version of Tubman who appears in elementary school curricula — fearless, always successful, guided by the North Star — is not false, but it omits the sleeping spells, the pistol, the complexity of her religious visions, and the difficult choices she made about whom to bring and when. The simplified version serves important purposes, but the full version is both more humanly interesting and more instructive about the actual conditions of resistance under oppression.

The effort to place her image on the twenty-dollar bill, announced by the Obama Treasury Department in 2016 and subsequently delayed by the Trump administration before being revived by the Biden administration, became a focal point for debates about whose history America chooses to honor and whose it prefers to obscure. The image of Tubman on the currency of the country that had enslaved her and that she had defied at mortal risk is both a genuinely meaningful symbolic act and an occasion for reflection on the distance between the symbol and the substance of racial equality.

Tubman's Voice: the Oral Tradition and Storytelling

One of the challenges of writing about Harriet Tubman is the nature of the historical record. Unlike Frederick Douglass, who left an enormous written legacy — three autobiographies, sixteen years of newspaper editorials, hundreds of published speeches — Tubman could not read or write and left no written documents in her own hand. Her story comes to us almost entirely through the testimony of others: through the interviews given to Kate Clifford Bradford, who wrote the first Tubman biography in 1869; through the records kept by William Still and Thomas Garrett; through newspaper accounts of her speeches; and through the oral tradition that was transmitted by members of her community to subsequent generations.

This dependence on oral tradition and on intermediary sources is itself historically significant. The enslaved and the formerly enslaved could not rely on literacy as a tool for preserving their own history; the oral transmission of memory and story was the primary means by which Black communities maintained their historical consciousness. The stories about Tubman that were told and retold in the Black communities of the Eastern Shore, of Philadelphia, of St. Catharines, and of Auburn — stories that were eventually collected by biographers and historians — were shaped by the processes of oral tradition: the emphasis on what was most morally significant, the tendency toward representative rather than specific incident, the accumulation of meaning around a few key images and moments.

Bradford's two books — Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869) and Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (1886) — were the primary sources for most subsequent accounts of her life, and they were themselves based on interviews with Tubman conducted in the 1860s. Bradford was a white abolitionist sympathizer who brought her own assumptions and rhetorical conventions to the telling of Tubman's story, and the resulting texts reflect both Tubman's actual experience as she described it and Bradford's interpretation of that experience for a white Northern audience. Reading them requires attention to both dimensions: what Tubman said and what Bradford heard.

The image of Tubman that emerges from these sources — the direct communication with God, the sleeping spells as sources of divine guidance, the absolute refusal to countenance failure or retreat — is consistent across multiple sources and across the long arc of her life, which suggests that however it may have been shaped by the telling, it reflects something genuinely central to how she understood herself and her mission. She was not a modest woman about her own accomplishments; she had done what she had done, and she said so.

Tubman and the Question of Gender

Harriet Tubman's life was lived in almost complete defiance of the gendered expectations that nineteenth-century American society imposed on women — both white women and Black women, though the specific forms of those expectations were different for each group. The white middle-class ideology of the "cult of domesticity" — which defined women's proper sphere as the home, the family, and the cultivation of private virtue — was obviously inapplicable to enslaved women, who were required to perform the same heavy physical labor as enslaved men and whose bodies were subject to sexual exploitation by their enslavers. But there was also a set of gendered expectations within Black communities that Tubman's life exceeded: the expectation that women would defer to men in public leadership roles, that physical courage and military command were masculine prerogatives.

She simply did not operate within these expectations. She led men and women alike on her rescue missions; she carried a pistol and used the threat of it; she planned and guided a military operation; she testified before congressional committees and spoke on platforms alongside the most prominent public figures of her era. She did all of this not as an explicit feminist challenge to gender norms — she did not theorize her own position in the way that Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Sojourner Truth did — but as the natural expression of what she was and what she needed to do.

Her engagement with the women's suffrage movement in her later years was the most explicit form of her feminist politics. She attended the 1896 founding meeting of the National Association of Colored Women, the organization that brought together the Black women's club movement into a national body committed to racial advancement and women's rights. She spoke at suffrage conventions, was photographed with the leading suffragists of the era, and was publicly identified as a supporter of women's right to vote until the end of her life.

But she also experienced the racism of the predominantly white women's suffrage movement. The exclusion of Black women from certain suffrage organizations, the willingness of some suffragists to appeal to Southern white women by distinguishing between "educated" women's suffrage and the suffrage of Black men, and the general subordination of racial justice to gender justice in the movement's mainstream were all realities that Tubman negotiated. She maintained her commitment to both causes without, apparently, feeling that she had to choose between them — though she was surely aware of the ways in which the movement that claimed to speak for women often did not speak for women who looked like her.

Sojourner Truth and the Question of Comparison

Any account of Harriet Tubman must address the figure of Sojourner Truth, the other great Black woman abolitionist of the nineteenth century, whose name is invariably paired with Tubman's in the popular memory of the antislavery struggle. The comparison illuminates what is distinctive about each.

Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in New York State, gained her freedom in 1827 under New York's gradual emancipation laws and became a traveling preacher and abolitionist lecturer whose famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, is one of the defining documents of nineteenth-century feminist and antislavery rhetoric. Like Tubman, she was illiterate; like Tubman, she was deeply religious; like Tubman, she spoke with a directness and a moral force that contemporaries found overwhelming.

The differences are equally significant. Truth's abolitionism was primarily rhetorical — she was a speaker and a witness, someone whose power lay in the moral force of her presence and her argument. Tubman's abolitionism was operational — she was a strategist and an operative, someone whose power lay in the physical reality of what she actually accomplished. Truth changed minds; Tubman changed lives in the most direct possible way. Truth worked on the level of consciousness; Tubman worked on the level of bodies and roads and safe houses and rivers.

This distinction is not a hierarchy. Both forms of abolitionism were necessary, and both required extraordinary courage. But it is worth noting that the historiography has sometimes treated the two women as interchangeable — as representatives of the same category of "Black woman abolitionist" rather than as individuals with distinct and complementary contributions. The specificity of Tubman's operational achievement — the particular skills, the particular risks, the particular results — deserves to be understood on its own terms.

The Long Life: Tubman from the CIVIL War to Her Death

Harriet Tubman lived until 1913 — nearly fifty years after the end of the Civil War — and the arc of her life across that half-century tracks the arc of Black American history from emancipation through the nadir of racial terror and toward the beginnings of organized resistance. She was present at the creation of the movement for Black freedom in a uniquely literal sense: she had liberated dozens of people personally, had served in the Union Army that destroyed slavery, and had lived to see both the fulfillment of emancipation and its betrayal by the Reconstruction's collapse.

Her physical vitality in old age was remarkable. She was in her eighties when she submitted to the brain operation in Boston, biting a bullet rather than taking anesthesia, and she reportedly recovered from it quickly. She continued to tend her garden, to receive visitors, and to engage with the political questions of the day well into her final years. When the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged opened officially in 1908 — five years before her death — she was present at the opening ceremony and delivered a brief speech.

The military funeral she received at her death, organized by the local Grand Army of the Republic post, was a recognition that her contemporaries at least — the veterans who had served in the same war she had served in — understood what she had done. The bronze memorial tablet that Auburn erected in 1914, the year after her death, bore the inscription: "In memory of Harriet Tubman Davis. Heroine of the Underground Railroad. Nurse and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. Born about 1820 in Maryland. Died March 10, 1913 at Auburn, N.Y."

The characterization — heroine, nurse, spy — captured three dimensions of a life that had been all of those things and more. What it did not capture, and what the subsequent century of recognition has gradually made more visible, was the specific quality of her achievement: that she was not merely brave but brilliantly strategic, not merely faithful but operationally precise, not merely a symbol but an architect — someone who built, with her own hands and her own courage, a road to freedom that others could follow.

The American reckoning with Harriet Tubman is still incomplete. The twenty-dollar bill remains unprinted with her image; the full history of her Civil War intelligence work remains less well known than her Underground Railroad missions; the remarkable fact that she underwent brain surgery in her old age without anesthesia, biting a bullet as Civil War soldiers had done, remains little known outside specialist circles. But the core of who she was and what she did is now established beyond any doubt, and the argument she made — that freedom is worth any risk, that one person who refuses to accept injustice can change the world — is as relevant and as necessary as it has ever been.

The Pension Struggle and the Question of Recognition

Few episodes in Harriet Tubman's life better illustrate the specific ways in which American society failed to honor its debts to Black women than the thirty-year struggle for her military pension. She had served the Union Army for approximately three years, from 1862 to 1865, working as a nurse, a scout, and an intelligence operative. She had planned and guided the Combahee River Raid, one of the most successful Union operations in South Carolina. She had been recognized by her commanding officers as an essential resource. And she received, for all of this, no regular salary for most of her service and no pension for more than three decades after the war ended.

The pension applications she filed — beginning in 1865 and continuing through multiple congressional attempts over the following decades — were denied on technical grounds: she had not been formally enrolled as a soldier, her service had not been properly documented in military records, the specific categories of service she had provided did not fit the existing pension legislation. These were real bureaucratic obstacles, but they were also obstacles that the system would have been capable of overcoming if there had been political will to do so. The political will to provide a pension to an elderly Black woman for military service that had never been officially acknowledged was, for most of the post-Civil War period, simply absent.

The campaigns on her behalf were waged by abolitionists, by members of Congress who sympathized with her cause, and eventually by the women's suffrage network, which publicized her case as an example of the double burden borne by women who served their country without receiving the recognition that male service received as a matter of course. Her supporters included Secretary of State William Seward, who testified to her service, and various generals and officers who had worked with her in South Carolina.

When she finally received a pension in 1899 — thirty-four years after the war ended — it was not a pension for her own service but a widow's pension based on the service of her second husband, Nelson Davis, who had been a Union soldier. She received twenty dollars a month. Congress subsequently raised this to twenty-five dollars a month in 1908, adding a five-dollar supplement in belated recognition of her own service. She died in 1913 having received a cumulative total of approximately three thousand dollars in pension payments for service that had been worth far more to the Union cause than that sum could begin to represent.

The pension story is not merely an anecdote about bureaucratic injustice; it is a precise illustration of the mechanisms by which the contributions of Black women to American history were systematically devalued and erased. The same pattern played out across the post-Civil War era: the freedwomen who had worked as nurses, teachers, and community organizers during the war and its aftermath, who had built the schools and churches and mutual aid societies that sustained Black communities through Reconstruction and after, received none of the formal recognition — the pensions, the monuments, the honorary degrees — that the culture bestowed on men who had done similar work.

Tubman and the Black Church

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, to which Harriet Tubman belonged throughout her adult life, was not merely a religious institution; it was the organizational backbone of the Black freedom struggle in the northeastern United States. Founded in 1796 by Black Methodists in New York City who had separated from the white Methodist Episcopal Church over issues of racial discrimination, the AME Zion Church had from its founding been committed to the twin causes of spiritual liberation and earthly freedom. Frederick Douglass himself had been licensed as a lay preacher in the AME Zion tradition, and the church's network of congregations provided the organizational infrastructure for many of the Underground Railroad's northern stations.

Tubman's relationship to the AME Zion Church was both institutional and deeply personal. The Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario, where she worshipped during her years of Underground Railroad operations, was the church in which many of the freedom seekers she led to safety first established themselves as members of the free Black community in Canada. The Thompson Memorial AME Zion Church in Auburn, which she joined after settling there permanently, became the center of her community life and the institution to which she eventually donated the Harriet Tubman Home.

Her faith was not, however, confined to denominational structures. The most distinctive feature of her religious life was the direct, personal, unmediated quality of her relationship with what she understood as God's presence and guidance. She spoke of God not as a distant deity but as an immediate companion — someone she consulted about practical decisions, who communicated through the sleeping-spell visions, and whose commands she obeyed with the same directness that she expected those around her to obey her commands. This was the tradition of prophetic religion — the tradition of Amos and Isaiah, of the antebellum revival preachers, and of the slave spirituals — that understood the divine will as a direct mandate for action in the world, not merely a set of personal moral precepts.

The spirituals that she used to communicate with freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad — "Go Down Moses," "The Gospel Train Is Coming," "Wade in the Water" — were themselves expressions of this prophetic religion, using biblical narrative as a code for the present struggle. The identification of the enslaved with the children of Israel in Egypt, of the slave master with Pharaoh, of the North with the Promised Land, was not mere metaphor; it was a theological statement about the meaning of the present moment in the history of God's dealing with humanity. Tubman inhabited this theology completely, and it gave her a confidence in the righteousness of her cause that no amount of danger could shake.