Harriet Tubman

Early life

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross, called "Minty," in Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The National Park Service dates her birth to March 1822, though other sources give 1820 or 1821. Her parents, Ben and Harriet "Rit" Ross, were both enslaved. In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took the name Harriet.

Escape and the Underground Railroad

In 1849, facing the threat of being sold, Tubman fled north through Delaware into Pennsylvania and reached Philadelphia, where she worked as a domestic servant. A reward was posted for her capture.

She did not stay safe in the North. Over roughly a decade she returned to Maryland about 13 times to lead out family members and friends, including her parents in 1857. The National Park Service puts the number she personally guided at about 70 people, and says she gave instructions to some 50 to 60 others who escaped on their own. Because the Fugitive Slave Act made the free states unsafe, many of those she helped settled in Auburn, New York, or in southern Ontario. Tubman later said she never lost a passenger.

The question of numbers

Older and much larger figures still circulate, most often the claim that she made 19 trips and freed 300 people. Historians do not support them. As NPR reported in 2024, that figure goes back to Sarah Bradford's 1869 biography, which repeated what others said rather than what Tubman herself recalled. Biographer Kate Clifford Larson's research, published in 2003, puts the number she led out at about 70, the figure the National Park Service also uses.

Civil War

In early 1862 Tubman went to South Carolina to nurse Black soldiers and newly freed people. Working with Major General David Hunter, she organized spying and scouting behind Confederate lines. On June 1, 1863, she helped guide Colonel James Montgomery and the 2nd South Carolina Infantry in a raid along the Combahee River that freed more than 700 enslaved people, many of whom then joined the Union Army. She struggled for years to win a government pension, eventually receiving a nurse's pension.

Later life and legacy

Tubman made her home in Auburn, New York, on property she had bought in 1859 from William Seward. She campaigned for women's suffrage alongside figures such as Susan B. Anthony and founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She died in Auburn on March 10, 1913, and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery. She remains one of the best-known figures of the struggle against American slavery.