Harriet Tubman

Their life

Born enslaved, Tubman escaped and then returned to the South again and again as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, personally leading some seventy enslaved people to freedom without ever losing one. She later served as a Union scout, spy, and nurse, and championed suffrage.

Known for

• Underground Railroad conductor
• Led ~70 people to freedom
• Union scout and spy
• Combahee River Raid commander
• Women's suffrage advocate
• Founded home for the aged

The road they walked

She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 on a Dorchester County, Maryland plantation, one of nine children belonging to Harriet 'Rit' Green and Ben Ross. As a girl she was hired out to neighboring farms and beaten regularly; a foreman once struck her in the head with a heavy weight meant for another enslaved man, fracturing her skull. She survived, but the injury left her with seizures, headaches, and vivid dream-visions for the rest of her life, which she came to understand as messages from God. In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took her mother's first name — becoming Harriet Tubman years before she took her famous journey north.

In 1849, facing the threat of sale further south, she escaped alone, traveling by night and following the North Star with help from free Black communities and Quaker sympathizers along what was becoming known as the Underground Railroad. She reached Philadelphia, but freedom alone did not satisfy her — she went back for her family. Over the next decade she made roughly thirteen trips into slave territory, guiding relatives and strangers alike, moving through a network of safe houses, forged passes, and disguises, always at night, always armed. She became known as 'Moses' among abolitionists, and her reputation reached figures like Frederick Douglass, William Still, and John Brown, who consulted her while planning his raid on Harpers Ferry.

When the Civil War came, Tubman put her knowledge of Southern terrain to direct use for the Union Army in South Carolina, working as a nurse, cook, and scout before helping plan the 1863 Combahee River Raid, which freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single night — making her the first woman known to have led an armed U.S. military expedition. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, on land bought from Secretary of State William Seward, and spent decades fighting — often unsuccessfully — for the government pension owed her for wartime service. In her later years she turned to the cause of women's suffrage, appearing alongside Susan B. Anthony, and founded a home for elderly and indigent Black Americans on her own property.

How their story ended

Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913, at the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, the charitable institution she herself had established in Auburn, New York. She was roughly ninety years old, having spent her final years in declining health but still active in suffrage and community work. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery, and the city she'd made her home mourned her as a national figure — the woman once called Moses, who had walked back into danger again and again and never lost a single passenger.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

Tables where Harriet sits

The Changemakers’ Circle

For finding the courage to stand for what matters.

The Long Road to Freedom

For the long, brave fight to set things right.

From the Journal