Meet Harriet Tubman: Nineteen Trips Back

The head injury she carried

Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822, she was struck in the head as a teenager by a two-pound iron weight thrown at another enslaved person. The injury caused seizures, severe headaches and vivid visionary episodes for the rest of her life. She understood them as divine.

She escaped alone in 1849, walking north by night roughly ninety miles to Pennsylvania.

Going back

Escaping once is a story of survival. What makes her singular is that she returned — around thirteen times over roughly a decade, guiding some seventy people out, family first. She moved in winter when nights were long, started on Saturdays because runaway notices could not be printed until Monday, and carried a pistol.

After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the northern states unsafe, she extended the route to Canada rather than stop.

The raid

In June 1863 she guided the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina — Union gunboats up a mined river, using intelligence she had gathered — which freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single night. She is generally credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the American Civil War.

She spent decades afterwards fighting for a pension she had earned and was repeatedly denied.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when the risk is real and the reasons to stay put are good ones. She is not a symbol of courage in the abstract — she made a specific, repeated, calculated decision to go back, and she can tell you how she planned it.