Who was Harriet Tubman?

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents in Maryland, likely between 1820 and 1825. Her mother, Harriet "Rit" Green, who was held by the Brodess family, worked as a cook, while her father, Ben Ross, managed timber work on a nearby plantation. Araminta was one of nine children. Rit fought to keep her family together, but the Brodess family sold three of her daughters, who were never reunited with their relatives. Rit did manage to stop the sale of one of her sons to a Georgia trader by hiding him for months and confronting her enslaver.

Harriet Tubman's childhood was full of work and hardship. Along with caring for her younger siblings while her mother worked, she checked muskrat traps in the marshes, served as a nursemaid, plowed fields, and hauled timber. She was forced to keep working even after she caught measles, until she grew so ill her mother had to nurse her. As a teenager, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a heavy weight at another enslaved person and struck her instead. She received little medical care and lived with seizures, vivid visions, and headaches for the rest of her life.

Around 1844, while still enslaved, Harriet married John Tubman, a free Black man. Marriages between free and enslaved people were not unusual at the time, though their differing statuses made the union complicated. Under the laws of the era, any children the couple had would have been born enslaved, since a child's status followed the mother's. It was around this time that she changed her name from Araminta to Harriet, taking her mother's name. Historians think the change may have reflected her faith or the couple's hope of buying her freedom.

Tubman fell ill again in 1849, and her enslaver, Edward Brodess, tried to sell her because he saw her as less useful. Harriet later said she "prayed for him all night long" to change his ways. When that failed, she prayed, "kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way." Brodess died about a week later, and Tubman came to regret the prayer, feeling responsible for his death. Certain she would soon be sold, she set out with two of her brothers, but they grew fearful and turned back. Harriet soon escaped on her own, traveling the chain of homes and helpers that made up the Underground Railroad. Crossing into Pennsylvania, she said, felt like she "was in heaven."

Tubman wasn't content with her own freedom; she wanted her family and friends to be free too, declaring she "was free, and they should be free too." Working and saving money in Philadelphia, she prepared to go back and lead others to freedom. Her first rescue brought out a niece and her two children on the very day they were to be auctioned. Such missions grew far more dangerous after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which sharply increased the penalties for helping freedom seekers and required law enforcement everywhere, even in free states, to assist in their capture. Over about 13 trips into Maryland, Tubman personally guided roughly 70 enslaved people to freedom, and she gave instructions that helped some 70 more escape on their own.

John Brown was an abolitionist who tried to launch a violent uprising against slavery in the United States. Tubman shared his belief in confronting slavery head-on, and both felt their work was divinely guided. She gave Brown valuable information about travel routes and sympathetic contacts, and she helped recruit formerly enslaved men interested in joining his cause.

In 1859, Republican Senator William Seward sold Tubman a piece of land in Auburn, New York. She used it to make a home for her family, who returned after fleeing to Canada, and the property became a refuge for freedom seekers during a time of intense racial tension. Tubman made her final rescue trip in 1860, hoping to bring out her sister and her sister's two children. Her sister had died by then, but Tubman led another group north instead. Dangers stretched the journey out for months before they reached New York safely in December 1860.

During the Civil War in the 1860s, Harriet Tubman took on many roles in support of the Union. She first worked as a nurse in Port Royal, South Carolina, caring for soldiers who had fallen ill with dysentery. After the Emancipation Proclamation, she led a band of scouts through the area around Port Royal, gathering intelligence and mapping the terrain. Tubman became the first woman to help lead an armed raid in the war when she guided Union boats up the Combahee River in 1863, an operation that destroyed several plantations and freed more than 700 enslaved people.

After the war, Tubman spent the rest of her life on her property in Auburn, opening her home to people in need. In 1869, she married Nelson Davis, a bricklayer 22 years her junior, and the couple adopted a young girl named Gertie. They were together until Davis died of tuberculosis in 1888. Tubman became a passionate advocate for women's right to vote, traveling to give talks on suffrage and pointing to her own life, and the lives of other women, as proof that women had more than earned an equal place.

Harriet Tubman is remembered as one of the most influential African Americans in history. Her work to end slavery and her decades of service to others continue to inspire. Schools across the country bear her name, a museum in Cambridge, Maryland, honors her, and her Auburn home is now an educational center and museum. She is a member of both the Maryland and National Women's Halls of Fame, and she became the first African American woman featured on a U.S. postage stamp. A cargo ship and an asteroid carry her name, and her life has inspired numerous books, films, and operas. Harriet Tubman endures as an icon of American history.