The breathtaking courage of Harriet Tubman Janell Hobson
Escaping slavery;
risking everything to save her family;
leading a military raid;
championing the cause
of women’s suffrage;
these are just a handful
of the accomplishments
of one of America’s most
courageous heroes.
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross
in Dorchester County, Maryland,
in the early 1820s.
Born into chattel slavery, Araminta,
or Minty, was the fifth of nine children.
Two of Minty’s older sisters
were sold to a chain gang.
Even as a small child,
Minty was hired out to different owners,
who subjected her to whippings
and punishment.
Young Minty’s life changed forever
on an errand to a neighborhood store.
There, an overseer threw a two-pound
weight at a fugitive enslaved person,
missed, and struck Minty instead.
Her injury caused her
to experience sleeping spells,
which we know of today as narcolepsy,
for the rest of her life.
Minty’s owner tried to sell her,
but there were no buyers for an enslaved
person who fell into sleeping spells.
She was instead put to work
with her father, Ben Ross,
who taught her how to lumber.
Lumbering increased
Minty’s physical strength
and put her in touch with free black
sailors who shipped the wood to the North.
From them, Minty learned about
the secret communications
that occurred along trade routes,
information that would prove
invaluable later in her life.
In this mixed atmosphere of free
and enslaved blacks working side by side,
Minty met John Tubman,
a free black man she married in 1844.
After marriage, she renamed herself
Harriet, after her mother.
Harriet Tubman’s owner died in 1849.
When his widow planned to sell
off her enslaved human beings,
Harriet feared she would be sold away
from everyone she loved.
She had heard of
an “underground railroad,"
a secret network of safe houses,
boat captains,
and wagon drivers
willing to harbor fugitive enslaved people
on their way north.
So Tubman fled with two of her brothers,
Ben and Harry.
They eventually turned back,
fearing they were lost.
But in one of her sleeping spells,
Harriet dreamed
that she could fly like a bird.
Looking down below,
she saw the path to liberation.
And in the autumn of 1849,
she set out on her own,
following the North Star to Pennsylvania,
and to freedom.
Tubman returned to the South
13 times to free her niece,
brothers,
parents,
and many others.
She earned the nickname Black Moses
and worked diligently
with fellow abolitionists
to help enslaved people escape,
first to the North, and later to Canada.
Harriet Tubman worked
as a Union army nurse,
scout,
and spy during the Civil War.
In 1863, she became the first woman
in United States history
to plan and lead a military raid,
liberating nearly
700 enslaved persons in South Carolina.
After the war, the 13th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution
legally abolished slavery,
while the 14th expanded citizenship
and the 15th gave voting rights
to formerly enslaved black men.
But she was undaunted, and she persisted.
She raised funds
for formerly enslaved persons
and helped build schools
and a hospital on their behalf.
In 1888, Tubman became more active
in the fight for women’s right to vote.
In 1896, she appeared
at the founding convention
of the National Association
of Colored Women in Washington D.C.
and later at a woman’s suffrage
meeting in Rochester, New York.
There she told the audience:
“I was a conductor
on the Underground Railroad,
and I can say what many others cannot.
I never ran my train off the track,
and I never lost a passenger.”
As her fame grew,
various friends and allies
helped her in the fight
to collect a veteran’s pension
for her service in the Union Army.
In 1899, she was finally
granted $20 a month.
In a fitting twist of fate,
the United States
Treasury announced in 2016
that Tubman’s image will appear
on a redesigned twenty dollar bill.
Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913.
Even on her deathbed at age 91,
she kept the freedom
of her people in mind.
Her final words were:
“I go away to prepare a place for you.”