Harriet Tubman Biography
A woodcut of Tubman in her Civil War clothing
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland in 1822. Like Frederick Douglass, her actual birth date is not known. Her parents, Ben and Harriet Ross, named her Araminta and called her “Minty.” She later changed her named to honor her mother, Harriet. She was one of nine children who, despite their mother’s every attempt, were separated through the callousness of the slave trade.
As a child and young slave, Minty worked in homes and in the fields and forests. At a young age, she was assigned as a nursemaid and whipped whenever she was unable to quiet a crying baby. On one occasion, she was beat so badly she suffered broken ribs and possibly lacerated organs, injuries that persisted her entire life. Experiences like these caused her to the loathe the “petty tyranny” of the household. She was by nature more suited for the rigors of the outdoors and astounded many with her strength and stamina on the plantations and in the woods.
She endured harsh physical and emotional abuse under a number of masters. In her adolescence, she was badly injured when hit in the head by a heavy metal weight. Despite persistent bleeding, sickness, and emaciation, she received no medical care. She was forced to continue working while bleeding and sweating in the fields. Somehow she recovered, but the trauma plagued her the rest of her life, causing seizures, headaches, visions, and loss of consciousness.
Minty’s productivity was greatly compromised. Her master attempted to sell his damaged asset, but her condition would attract no takers. Eventually, she recovered enough to allow her master to hire her out to a large plantation with multiple operations from farming to lumbering. A rejuvenated Minty exhibited extraordinary physical prowess. Her new master “would often exhibit her feats of strength to his friends.” He assigned her the “rudest of labors—drove oxen, carted, and plowed and did all the work of a man.”
The area in which this plantation was located turned out to be significant for reasons that bear some explaining. Owning slaves would often become a financial liability for slave owners after their slaves’ prime working years had passed. Many slaves in Maryland were, therefore, manumitted (freed) at a predetermined age, the terms often stipulated in sales contracts or wills. In fact, Minty’s father, Ben Ross, was manumitted in 1840.
Some years prior to Minty’s assignment, this particular area had attracted a large number of free black men as a means of manpower to forge a canal through the marshy landscape. Many of these laborers stayed in the area after the completion of the canal and continued to work alongside slaves. Minty must have been well respected for her grit among these men and they proved invaluable to her future designs. Their worldview and interaction extended well beyond the limited range of their counterpart slaves. Their connections reached far into the free states. They knew who to trust and where to find safe houses. Minty was gathering prized information.
The complicated interplay in Minty’s life between slave and free grew still more pronounced when she married John Tubman, a free black man. Her status as a slave meant that any children the marriage produced would become property of her slave owner. Upon marrying (circa 1844), she assumed her husband’s surname and changed her given name to Harriet, thus becoming the Harriet Tubman the world would come to know her as.
In the late 1840s, Tubman hired a lawyer to investigate the probate records of her mother’s original owner. It was revealed that her mother was, like her father, legally manumitted. This should have additionally resulted in the manumission of her mother’s children. No such freedom, however, was forthcoming. Their current owner, Edward Brodess, had willfully continued to ignore the obligation, but legal recourse was not a likely option.
In March 1849, Edward Brodess died. Tubman feared this would likely result in her being sold again. Though it was illegal to sell slaves across state lines, Tubman had learned some of her siblings had earlier suffered this fate, possibly landing in the cotton fields of the Deep South. Tubman had resolved to take her fate into her own hands.
In 1849, Tubman escaped with her brothers, Ben and Henry. Her husband, John, did not condone the idea and so she left him behind. To Tubman’s disappointment the weight of the situation and consideration of all the possible outcomes led the brothers to turn back, forcing Tubman to do the same. It was an experience that stuck with her. Later, when conducting the Underground Railroad, she carried a pistol with her. Ostensibly the firearm was for protection, but Tubman also held it as leverage against escapees who developed cold feet.
Soon after the aborted escape mission, Tubman tried again. This time she went alone. The reconnaissance she had gathered from the free black men now served her well. She traveled mostly at night by the guidance of the North Star, stopping at one safe house while getting directions to the next.
The journey intersected with much of the same network that had assisted Frederick Douglass in his escape to freedom in 1838. It covered 150 miles through Maryland, across to Delaware, and into Pennsylvania. Crossing the Pennsylvania state line, Tubman later recalled, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
She then headed for Philadelphia, just as Frederick Douglass had about eleven years earlier. Here again her resourcefulness came in handy. Surviving alone as a female fugitive came with substantial risks. She kept one eye open for professional slave catchers and another open for means to support herself. Before long began planning a return trip to Maryland to help family members escape.
Over the next eleven years, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland thirteen times to rescue 70 slaves, including many family members and friends. She also instructed approximately fifty more slaves who undertook their own successful escapes.
After her own escape, subsequent escape journeys became much longer. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 legally required citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture of runaway slaves. This act, which had sent Douglass and many other slaves to seek safety in Ireland, also caused many fugitives to flee to Canada. Tubman’s missions would now need to continue on past Philadelphia, through New Jersey, across New York, and over the Niagara River into St. Catherines, Canada. Such treks would now cover over 600 miles.
Consider these missions required: significant fund raising; the physical fortitude of months of winter night travel on foot; emotional and mental endurance to deal with intense stress; and the stealth and courage to evade slave hunters with bloodhounds. Then, further ponder a five-foot tall woman with a life-long brain injury and chronic bodily pain from a life of beatings, volunteering to lead such missions over and over again, and you begin to get a glimpse into the Herculean capacities of Harriet Tubman and how she became known as “Moses.”
Tubman had great confidence in her extraordinary intuition, but she was also quite calculating and creative. She conducted most missions in the winter due to the additional hours of darkness and the fact that prying eyes tended not to be outdoors in the cold. She used a variety of disguises and would communicate covertly with fugitives by singing spirituals laced with coded words or even different tempos. Through the many trials, the illiterate conductor of the Underground Railroad would one day be able to sincerely claim, “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
In January 1858, Tubman met with Frederick Douglass who had been in communication with John Brown. Brown, a fervent abolitionist, was in the process of planning a daring armed raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia with the aim of creating a new free state in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland. Douglass eventually dropped out of Brown’s plans, believing the scheme to be doomed to failure. It is likely Douglass introduced Tubman to Brown. Immediately impressed by Tubman’s capacities, Brown enlisted her to the cause calling her “General Tubman.” In the end, like Douglass, Tubman did not participate in the armed attack, which failed and ultimately led to Brown’s hanging. She was thought to be ill when the attack took place, but it may well have been another example of the protective guidance of her intuition.
Prior to the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, Tubman had another prophetic vision that the nation would plunge into a war that would result in the freedom of slaves. She again found her “General Tubman” alter ego in demand when hostilities broke out.
Some of the early Union victories resulted in southern slaves escaping their Confederate owners and seeking protection among Union ranks. These escaped slaves became known as “contrabands.” President Lincoln was not yet willing to make the war about the abolition of slavery. His foremost goal remained the preservation of the Union. As a result, Lincoln did not originally encourage his generals to harbor “contrabands.”
This position did not sit well with Tubman and when Massachusetts Governor John Andrew offered Tubman the chance to tend to the swelling numbers of contrabands in South Carolina, Tubman answered the call. There she served tirelessly as a nurse, though not paid for her efforts. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it declared “all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
This cast the contraband issue in new light and Tubman sought to become more directly involved. Her reputation earned her meetings with the military brain trust and she was quickly pressed into service as a scout. She probed into Confederate territory, spying behind enemy lines and returning with valuable reconnaissance information.
Then, exactly five months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman became the first woman to plan and lead an armed assault during the Civil War. She directed three steamboats to plantations along the South Carolina Combahee River. The raid proved to be quick and decisive, but the swift victory created unexpected chaos. Hundreds of slaves found themselves in a frenzied limbo, wondering if they should stay put on the familiar plantation or flee toward unknown, intimidating gun boats. Not sure what to do, Tubman again relied on instincts. “I looked at them about two minutes, and then I sung to them.” The singing resonated deeply and soon her audience was joining in and coming aboard the boats in a joyous evacuation-cum-celebration. The raid resulted in approximately 750 contrabands, nearly all of which later joined Union black regiments.
Tubman then returned to her volunteer nursing for injured and ailing soldiers. In this role, she once again exhibited extraordinary ability, often concocting medicinal teas and using roots and herbs to cure dysentery and other ailments. Sadly, she never received a regular salary for her exemplary, multi-faceted service. It was not until more than three decades after the Civil War that the U.S. government issued her a pension.
Poverty and additional injuries suffered from a racially fueled assault aboard a train plagued her later years. Generous support from friends within the abolitionist community helped buoy her up. Prior to the Civil War, Tubman had purchased a small piece of land from then U.S. Senator William H. Seward. For years she used the homestead as a safe place for family and friends. Seward, who would become President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, offered Tubman very favorable terms on the purchase of the property. Upon his death, Seward’s son and heir forgave Tubman substantial debt and signed over the home to her.
Tubman was in her later years a committed promoter of women’s suffrage, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others. The head injury she had suffered in her teens, however, continued to debilitate her, often escalating into excruciating headaches. One day while in Boston, she walked into Massachusetts General Hospital and asked a doctor, “Sir, do you think you could cut my head open?” After further clarification the doctor agreed to operate and, per Tubman’s insistence, did so without anesthesia. During the Civil War she had pinned down soldiers during amputations. Out of respect for those soldiers, she laid as still as she could while clenching her teeth on a bullet. She was in her mid-seventies at the time and would go on to live about fifteen more years.
Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913 of pneumonia. She had lived ninety-one remarkable years. She was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York. On April 20, 2016, the U.S. Treasury Secretary announced plans to add Tubman’s portrait to the front of the twenty-dollar bill.
-------------------------------
Sources:
Larson, Kate Clifford, “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero,” 2004.
Clinton, Catherine, “On the Road to Harriet Tubman,” American Heritage Magazine (June–July 2004). AmericanHeritage.com.
Foner, Eric, “Excerpt: New Book Documents Courage of Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad,” The Root, February 10, 2015.
As a child and young slave, Minty worked in homes and in the fields and forests. At a young age, she was assigned as a nursemaid and whipped whenever she was unable to quiet a crying baby. On one occasion, she was beat so badly she suffered broken ribs and possibly lacerated organs, injuries that persisted her entire life. Experiences like these caused her to the loathe the “petty tyranny” of the household. She was by nature more suited for the rigors of the outdoors and astounded many with her strength and stamina on the plantations and in the woods.
She endured harsh physical and emotional abuse under a number of masters. In her adolescence, she was badly injured when hit in the head by a heavy metal weight. Despite persistent bleeding, sickness, and emaciation, she received no medical care. She was forced to continue working while bleeding and sweating in the fields. Somehow she recovered, but the trauma plagued her the rest of her life, causing seizures, headaches, visions, and loss of consciousness.
Minty’s productivity was greatly compromised. Her master attempted to sell his damaged asset, but her condition would attract no takers. Eventually, she recovered enough to allow her master to hire her out to a large plantation with multiple operations from farming to lumbering. A rejuvenated Minty exhibited extraordinary physical prowess. Her new master “would often exhibit her feats of strength to his friends.” He assigned her the “rudest of labors—drove oxen, carted, and plowed and did all the work of a man.”
The area in which this plantation was located turned out to be significant for reasons that bear some explaining. Owning slaves would often become a financial liability for slave owners after their slaves’ prime working years had passed. Many slaves in Maryland were, therefore, manumitted (freed) at a predetermined age, the terms often stipulated in sales contracts or wills. In fact, Minty’s father, Ben Ross, was manumitted in 1840.
Some years prior to Minty’s assignment, this particular area had attracted a large number of free black men as a means of manpower to forge a canal through the marshy landscape. Many of these laborers stayed in the area after the completion of the canal and continued to work alongside slaves. Minty must have been well respected for her grit among these men and they proved invaluable to her future designs. Their worldview and interaction extended well beyond the limited range of their counterpart slaves. Their connections reached far into the free states. They knew who to trust and where to find safe houses. Minty was gathering prized information.
The complicated interplay in Minty’s life between slave and free grew still more pronounced when she married John Tubman, a free black man. Her status as a slave meant that any children the marriage produced would become property of her slave owner. Upon marrying (circa 1844), she assumed her husband’s surname and changed her given name to Harriet, thus becoming the Harriet Tubman the world would come to know her as.
In the late 1840s, Tubman hired a lawyer to investigate the probate records of her mother’s original owner. It was revealed that her mother was, like her father, legally manumitted. This should have additionally resulted in the manumission of her mother’s children. No such freedom, however, was forthcoming. Their current owner, Edward Brodess, had willfully continued to ignore the obligation, but legal recourse was not a likely option.
In March 1849, Edward Brodess died. Tubman feared this would likely result in her being sold again. Though it was illegal to sell slaves across state lines, Tubman had learned some of her siblings had earlier suffered this fate, possibly landing in the cotton fields of the Deep South. Tubman had resolved to take her fate into her own hands.
In 1849, Tubman escaped with her brothers, Ben and Henry. Her husband, John, did not condone the idea and so she left him behind. To Tubman’s disappointment the weight of the situation and consideration of all the possible outcomes led the brothers to turn back, forcing Tubman to do the same. It was an experience that stuck with her. Later, when conducting the Underground Railroad, she carried a pistol with her. Ostensibly the firearm was for protection, but Tubman also held it as leverage against escapees who developed cold feet.
Soon after the aborted escape mission, Tubman tried again. This time she went alone. The reconnaissance she had gathered from the free black men now served her well. She traveled mostly at night by the guidance of the North Star, stopping at one safe house while getting directions to the next.
The journey intersected with much of the same network that had assisted Frederick Douglass in his escape to freedom in 1838. It covered 150 miles through Maryland, across to Delaware, and into Pennsylvania. Crossing the Pennsylvania state line, Tubman later recalled, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
She then headed for Philadelphia, just as Frederick Douglass had about eleven years earlier. Here again her resourcefulness came in handy. Surviving alone as a female fugitive came with substantial risks. She kept one eye open for professional slave catchers and another open for means to support herself. Before long began planning a return trip to Maryland to help family members escape.
Over the next eleven years, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland thirteen times to rescue 70 slaves, including many family members and friends. She also instructed approximately fifty more slaves who undertook their own successful escapes.
After her own escape, subsequent escape journeys became much longer. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 legally required citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture of runaway slaves. This act, which had sent Douglass and many other slaves to seek safety in Ireland, also caused many fugitives to flee to Canada. Tubman’s missions would now need to continue on past Philadelphia, through New Jersey, across New York, and over the Niagara River into St. Catherines, Canada. Such treks would now cover over 600 miles.
Consider these missions required: significant fund raising; the physical fortitude of months of winter night travel on foot; emotional and mental endurance to deal with intense stress; and the stealth and courage to evade slave hunters with bloodhounds. Then, further ponder a five-foot tall woman with a life-long brain injury and chronic bodily pain from a life of beatings, volunteering to lead such missions over and over again, and you begin to get a glimpse into the Herculean capacities of Harriet Tubman and how she became known as “Moses.”
Tubman had great confidence in her extraordinary intuition, but she was also quite calculating and creative. She conducted most missions in the winter due to the additional hours of darkness and the fact that prying eyes tended not to be outdoors in the cold. She used a variety of disguises and would communicate covertly with fugitives by singing spirituals laced with coded words or even different tempos. Through the many trials, the illiterate conductor of the Underground Railroad would one day be able to sincerely claim, “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
In January 1858, Tubman met with Frederick Douglass who had been in communication with John Brown. Brown, a fervent abolitionist, was in the process of planning a daring armed raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia with the aim of creating a new free state in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland. Douglass eventually dropped out of Brown’s plans, believing the scheme to be doomed to failure. It is likely Douglass introduced Tubman to Brown. Immediately impressed by Tubman’s capacities, Brown enlisted her to the cause calling her “General Tubman.” In the end, like Douglass, Tubman did not participate in the armed attack, which failed and ultimately led to Brown’s hanging. She was thought to be ill when the attack took place, but it may well have been another example of the protective guidance of her intuition.
Prior to the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, Tubman had another prophetic vision that the nation would plunge into a war that would result in the freedom of slaves. She again found her “General Tubman” alter ego in demand when hostilities broke out.
Some of the early Union victories resulted in southern slaves escaping their Confederate owners and seeking protection among Union ranks. These escaped slaves became known as “contrabands.” President Lincoln was not yet willing to make the war about the abolition of slavery. His foremost goal remained the preservation of the Union. As a result, Lincoln did not originally encourage his generals to harbor “contrabands.”
This position did not sit well with Tubman and when Massachusetts Governor John Andrew offered Tubman the chance to tend to the swelling numbers of contrabands in South Carolina, Tubman answered the call. There she served tirelessly as a nurse, though not paid for her efforts. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it declared “all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
This cast the contraband issue in new light and Tubman sought to become more directly involved. Her reputation earned her meetings with the military brain trust and she was quickly pressed into service as a scout. She probed into Confederate territory, spying behind enemy lines and returning with valuable reconnaissance information.
Then, exactly five months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman became the first woman to plan and lead an armed assault during the Civil War. She directed three steamboats to plantations along the South Carolina Combahee River. The raid proved to be quick and decisive, but the swift victory created unexpected chaos. Hundreds of slaves found themselves in a frenzied limbo, wondering if they should stay put on the familiar plantation or flee toward unknown, intimidating gun boats. Not sure what to do, Tubman again relied on instincts. “I looked at them about two minutes, and then I sung to them.” The singing resonated deeply and soon her audience was joining in and coming aboard the boats in a joyous evacuation-cum-celebration. The raid resulted in approximately 750 contrabands, nearly all of which later joined Union black regiments.
Tubman then returned to her volunteer nursing for injured and ailing soldiers. In this role, she once again exhibited extraordinary ability, often concocting medicinal teas and using roots and herbs to cure dysentery and other ailments. Sadly, she never received a regular salary for her exemplary, multi-faceted service. It was not until more than three decades after the Civil War that the U.S. government issued her a pension.
Poverty and additional injuries suffered from a racially fueled assault aboard a train plagued her later years. Generous support from friends within the abolitionist community helped buoy her up. Prior to the Civil War, Tubman had purchased a small piece of land from then U.S. Senator William H. Seward. For years she used the homestead as a safe place for family and friends. Seward, who would become President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, offered Tubman very favorable terms on the purchase of the property. Upon his death, Seward’s son and heir forgave Tubman substantial debt and signed over the home to her.
Tubman was in her later years a committed promoter of women’s suffrage, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others. The head injury she had suffered in her teens, however, continued to debilitate her, often escalating into excruciating headaches. One day while in Boston, she walked into Massachusetts General Hospital and asked a doctor, “Sir, do you think you could cut my head open?” After further clarification the doctor agreed to operate and, per Tubman’s insistence, did so without anesthesia. During the Civil War she had pinned down soldiers during amputations. Out of respect for those soldiers, she laid as still as she could while clenching her teeth on a bullet. She was in her mid-seventies at the time and would go on to live about fifteen more years.
Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913 of pneumonia. She had lived ninety-one remarkable years. She was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York. On April 20, 2016, the U.S. Treasury Secretary announced plans to add Tubman’s portrait to the front of the twenty-dollar bill.
-------------------------------
Sources:
Larson, Kate Clifford, “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero,” 2004.
Clinton, Catherine, “On the Road to Harriet Tubman,” American Heritage Magazine (June–July 2004). AmericanHeritage.com.
Foner, Eric, “Excerpt: New Book Documents Courage of Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad,” The Root, February 10, 2015.