Harriet Tubman

American abolitionist (1822 - 1913)

• || At The Bottom

• 1849 -- Born in Eastern Maryland sometime between 1820 and 1825, Harriet Tubman looked forward to a life that was gravely limited by virtue of her status as a slave.  During her younger years, she suffered a terrible head injury when her master clubbed her for refusing to help arrest a fellow slave who had left his plantation without permission.  For the rest of her life, she suffered headaches, nausea and seizures as a result of the trauma from that assault.  Her illness eventually reduced her value as a slave, and in 1849 her master, Edward Brodess, attempted to sell her; when he died that year, his widow resumed the search for a buyer.  Fearful that she would be sold and shipped far away from her family, Harriet Tubman reached a state of near despair.

• || At The Top

• 1865 -- By the end of the Civil War, the institution of slavery was no more, and Tubman herself had played no small role in bringing about its destruction.  Shortly after Edward Brodess died in the spring of 1849, Tubman and her brother fled to Pennsylvania, where slavery had been abolished since the 1820s.  Not satisfied with her own freedom, Tubman returned to Maryland numerous times over the next eleven years and led dozens of enslaved people through the "Underground Railroad" to freedom.  Tubman placed herself at great risk throughout these years, and slaveholders in the region tried desperately -- though without success -- to capture her.  When the Civil War broke out, Tubman worked as a nurse and a scout for the Union army in South Carolina.  In June 1863, Tubman even served as an adviser to Colonel James Montgomery during an armed attack on a plantation along the Combahee River.  More than seven hundred slaves were liberated in the raid.  Remarkably, Tubman never received a regular salary for her work and did not receive a military pension until 1899.  Nevertheless, her bravery was recognized throughout the country, and Harriet Tubman became one of the great heroes of her era.

• || The Comeback

• Harriet Tubman became legendary due to her selflessness and an insatiable belief in the right of all people to be free.  Rather than take comfort in the success of her own escape, Tubman put herself in harm's way again and again as she helped rescue family members and other enslaved people during a very dangerous period of American history.  Tough anti-fugitive laws during the 1850s made her work especially dangerous.  She could have remained in Ontario, Canada, where she'd settled with other escaped slaves (including her parents, whom she'd brought northward in 1857).  Instead, she believed she had a larger purpose.  She believed, in fact, that she was on a mission from God, and other opponents of slavery soon began referring to her as the "Moses of her people."  Though she was nearly captured many times during her years of work on the Underground Railroad, Tubman valued the freedom of others over her own personal safety.  She understood that she was essential to the cause, and she trusted in her own ability to prevail.