Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist who escaped from slavery in Maryland and then returned again and again to lead others to freedom along the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War she served the Union Army as a nurse, scout and spy, and helped guide a raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people. In later life she campaigned for women's suffrage and cared for the elderly poor.

She was born Araminta Ross, known as Minty, in Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, probably around 1822; as with most people born into slavery, no record of the exact date survives. Her parents, Harriet "Rit" Green and Ben Ross, were enslaved by different owners. Her owner, Edward Brodess, sold three of her sisters, breaking up the family, and Rit once hid her youngest son for a month to prevent his sale.

From about the age of five Minty was hired out to other households, where she was beaten and whipped. As an adolescent she was struck on the head by a heavy metal weight that an overseer had thrown at another enslaved man. The injury left her with headaches, seizures and sudden spells of sleep for the rest of her life. She also began to have vivid dreams and visions, which she understood as messages from God; her deep Methodist faith shaped everything she later did. She worked as a field hand and in timber, and in about 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man. Around this time she took her mother's name, Harriet.

When Brodess died in 1849, Tubman feared she would be sold south, away from her family. In the autumn of that year she escaped alone, travelling by night and relying on the help of Black and white members of the network of safe houses and guides known as the Underground Railroad, including Quakers in Delaware. She reached Philadelphia, a free state city, and found work there.

Tubman soon went back. Between 1850 and 1860 she made about thirteen journeys into Maryland and brought out roughly seventy people, among them her brothers, their families and, in 1857, her elderly parents. She also gave instructions that helped dozens more escape on their own. She usually travelled in winter, when nights were long, and set off on Saturday evenings, because runaway notices could not be printed in newspapers until Monday. She used disguises and coded songs and carried a revolver, which she reportedly said she would use on any fugitive who tried to turn back and endanger the group. She later said she never lost a passenger. When her husband, who had remarried, declined to join her in 1851, she went on without him.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it far more dangerous for escapees to remain in the northern states, so Tubman led many of them on to St Catharines in Ontario, in British North America, today's Canada, where she lived for several years. Abolitionists began calling her "Moses". In 1858 she met the militant abolitionist John Brown, who called her "General Tubman" and sought her help recruiting for his raid on Harpers Ferry, though she did not take part in it. In 1859 she bought a small property in Auburn, New York, from Senator William H. Seward, and settled her parents there.

When the war began in 1861, Tubman went to the Union-held coast of South Carolina, where she nursed soldiers and escaped slaves, using her knowledge of herbal remedies. She then organised a network of scouts among the local Black population to gather intelligence. On 2 June 1863 she guided Colonel James Montgomery and Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers in a raid up the Combahee River. Steamboats steered past Confederate mines, troops burned plantations, and more than 700 enslaved people were carried to freedom. She is widely regarded as the first woman to help lead an armed operation in the war. She later witnessed the assault on Fort Wagner by the 54th Massachusetts. Despite her service she was paid very little, and she spent decades seeking a government pension.

After the war Tubman returned to Auburn. On a train journey in 1865 a conductor forced her into the baggage car, injuring her. In 1869 she married Nelson Davis, a younger Union veteran, and the couple later adopted a daughter, Gertie. That year Sarah Bradford published a biography, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, whose proceeds helped support her, though it embroidered some details. She was poor for most of her life, but took in relatives, formerly enslaved people and the sick.

Tubman became active in the women's suffrage movement, speaking at meetings in New York, Boston and Washington with figures such as Susan B. Anthony. In the 1890s she finally received a widow's pension through Davis, and later a small pension for her own service as a nurse. In 1908 she opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on land next to her house, and moved into it herself as her health declined. She died of pneumonia in Auburn on 10 March 1913 and was buried with military honours.

Tubman was little known outside abolitionist circles at the time of her death, but in the twentieth century she became one of the most celebrated figures in American history, the subject of biographies, schoolbooks and films. Some popular stories about her, such as claims that she rescued hundreds of people or that huge rewards were offered for her capture, are exaggerations that historians have corrected. Her homes in Auburn and the Maryland landscape of her early life are now national historical parks, and in 2016 the United States Treasury announced plans to put her portrait on the twenty-dollar bill, a change that has since been repeatedly delayed. Her contemporary Frederick Douglass wrote that he knew of no one who had willingly faced more danger to serve the enslaved. She is remembered as a symbol of the long struggle against slavery in the United States.