Harriet Tubman's Life and Impact on the Underground Railroad

Tubman's Family & Birth

Harriet Ross Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 in Dorchester County Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The fifth of nine children of two enslaved parents, Benjamin Ross or Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green. Her mother was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess and Tubman's father by Anthony Thompson. Her parents gave her the name Araminta, and called her "Minty" for short [source: Allen].

As with most enslaved people, Tubman's existence was harsh and full of brutality. As her 1860s biographer Sarah Hopkins Bradford wrote, "Tubman was put to work at an early age as a field hand, following the oxen and loading and unloading wood — labor so grueling that she developed muscles that made her as powerful as some male laborers, despite her lack of stature. Her owners eventually converted her into a house maid, and she endured whippings from her mistress if her dusting and dish-washing was deemed inadequate."

Harriet Tubman as a Teenager

As a teenager, she suffered a fractured skull when an overseer hit her with an iron weight intended for another slave, and the injury caused her to suffer headaches and seizures for the rest of her life [source: Larson].

In 1844, Araminta Ross married a free African-American named John Tubman. Though the marriage wouldn't last, she kept his surname and began using her mother's first name as her own, and became Harriet Tubman [source: Allen]. Though her John was not an enslaved man, because she was the law at the time dictated that any children born to them would be enslaved people as well.

In March 1849, Tubman's legal owner Edward Brodess died, leaving behind an estate deeply in debt. Tubman, who'd already seen three of her sisters auctioned off, feared being sent off to an even crueler household. When her husband John refused to go along, she and her brothers Ben and Henry ran away together. After a few weeks, the two young men lost their nerve and forced her to return with them. But Tubman refused to give up. Instead, she slipped off again, this time alone.

She traveled by night, using the north star to guide her, and sought refuge during the day with Quaker families who were so opposed to slavery that they were willing to break Maryland law and help fugitives [source: Allen]. She made her way through Delaware, and eventually crossed into free Pennsylvania. "There was such a glory over everything," she later recalled. "The sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven" [source: Bradford].

But Tubman's joy at escaping slavery was muted, because her family had remained behind in servitude. "I was free, and they should be free," she later recalled thinking. She was determined to help them escape, too [source: Bradford].

After settling in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that had existed since the 1820s. It was a highly dangerous mission, since "slave stealers," as the Southern states called them, faced the risk of being publicly branded and jailed — and in Tubman's case, enslaved once more. And in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made such efforts a federal crime [source: Allen].

That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back into Maryland and helped her niece and her two children escape. Over the next decade, she repeated that mission a dozen more times, cautiously confining her efforts to farms that she knew on Maryland's Eastern Shore [source: Larson].

Tubman followed elaborate procedures to maintain stealth. She wore disguises, communicated with would-be escapees through third parties, and arranged for them to meet her miles away from their cabins, to reduce the chances that they would lead pursuers to her. And if all else failed, she carried a pistol. She warned her escapees that if they tried to turn back, she would shoot them to prevent them from betraying her and the rest [sources: Allen, Quinn].

As word got around of Tubman's successful missions, she became a sought-after speaker at abolitionist movement fundraising meetings. She also became a target of mercenary slave catchers. But their failure to apprehend her only added to her legend [source: Allen]. Her admirers naming her "General Tubman" for her heroic deeds.

An 1849 newspaper advertisement offered $50 for Tubman's capture in Maryland and $100 for her capture outside the state. The ad described her as "of a chestnut color, fine looking, and about five feet high" [source: Larson]. Escaping slavery became even more challenging in 1850, with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law. This law stated that any escaped enslaved people could be captured in the North and returned to enslavement.

In 1860, Tubman pulled off an even more daring feat, by thwarting federal marshals in Troy, New York, who were attempting to send a captured slave named Charles Nalle back to Virginia. Tubman disguised herself as an elderly woman and slipped into a government building. When Nalle and his captors stepped out into the street, Tubman shouted a signal from an upper-story window, and a mob of abolitionists converged on them and seized Nalle, who was spirited away to a waiting riverboat [source: Winkler].

After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Massachusetts Gov. John A. Andrew, a fervent abolitionist, contacted his friend Tubman and told her that the Union forces needed her help. He arranged transportation for Tubman to travel to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she went to work for Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Ostensibly, her mission was to help provide food and clothing to escaped enslaved people who were flocking to the Union Army's camps, but that seems to have been a cover story for her real work in gathering intelligence. With a budget of $100 in "secret service money," she recruited a small team of escaped enslaved people who were experienced riverboat pilots and knew every inch of the South Carolina coastline, and put them to work as scouts for the Union forces [sources: Winkler, Quinn].

After President Abraham Lincoln authorized the recruiting and deployment of African-American troops in the summer of 1862, Tubman and her spies provided intelligence for the new units. In January 1863, her team's spying helped Union forces evade Confederate guards and stage a nine-day covert operation to seize needed supplies. As historian H. Donald Winkler describes it, Tubman's scouts "evolved into a kind of special-forces operation for the Black regiments," sneaking into enemy territory to gather information on their troop movements and fortifications.

In June 1863, according to Winkler, Tubman accompanied Union Col. James Montgomery and his forces up the Combahee River in the southern low country of South Carolina and helped lead a crucial raid. Tubman and her scouts sailed upriver and stealthily went ashore to talk to the enslaved who'd placed mines in the water for Confederate forces, so they could map the locations, and locate the storehouses where the enemy kept their supplies. Then she helped guide the Union craft around the deadly mines. The resulting raid not only struck a devastating blow to the Confederate forces, but also resulted in freedom for 700 enslaved people — many of whom subsequently were recruited by Tubman to serve in the Union forces.

After the Civil War ended in a Union victory in 1865, Tubman left her position and set out for the town of Auburn, New York, where she and her family had settled on property that the state's former governor, William H. Seward, had sold her on generous terms. But on the way, she got a rough reminder that the struggle to achieve freedom for African-Americans was just beginning.

According to Tubman biographers James A. McGowan and William C. Kashatus, Tubman was accosted by a train conductor, who refused to honor her soldier's pass for a train ticket. They got into an argument, and he and several passengers threw her into the baggage car, breaking her arm and three ribs. She was unable to work for months, and the woman who'd helped to defeat the Confederacy was compelled to accept handouts from neighbors and local grocers to feed her family and elderly parents [source: NPS].

But Tubman was too tough to despair. Once she healed, she began growing vegetables and raising chickens, worked as a domestic and took in boarders. She fell in love with one of her guests, a former enslaved man and Union Army veteran named Nelson Davis, who was 22 years her junior, and the two married in 1869. In 1874, the couple adopted a baby girl named Gertie.

But Davis' ill health and some other setbacks meant that Tubman continued to struggle to make ends meet for the next several decades [source: McGowan and Kashatus]. While the federal government wouldn't give her a pension for her wartime service as a spy, after Davis's death in 1888, she was able to collect a widow's stipend, and eventually got a pension for having worked as a nurse in the latter part of the war [source: Larson].

Despite her own humble circumstances, Tubman was determined to keep helping others as well. In 1896, she scraped together enough money to buy a second plot of land alongside her Auburn property, where she started a home for elderly African-Americans. Seven years later, as Tubman aged, she turned the property over the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, of which she was a member, with the understanding that the church would continue to run the home. Tubman continued to live next door until her own health began to decline, at which point she became one of the residents at the home she had founded. She passed away there in 1913, at the age of 90 [sources: NPS, Larson].

After Tubman was buried with military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York, her fame continued to grow. The city of Auburn commemorated her legacy with a plaque on the courthouse. During World War II, after a successful war bond drive by the National Council of Negro Women, a Liberty ship was christened the SS Harriet Tubman in her honor [source: Larson]. She became the subject of numerous biographies and children's books, and the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged was recognized as a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Four years later, she became the first African-American woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp [source: Larson].