Tubman, Harriet

Tubman, Harriet (1820–1913), abolitionist, Civil War volunteer, escaped slave who assisted other slaves to freedom.Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, one of eleven children of Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene, Harriet Ross worked as a field slave, gaining the strength and endurance that would later prove invaluable. About 1844, she married a free black man, John Tubman. In 1849, fearful of being sold into the Deep South, she escaped to Philadelphia. In 1850–1851, she made three trips back to bring out various of her siblings and their families. As the decade went on, she made some sixteen more trips to Maryland, displaying great courage and ingenuity in assisting other slaves to escape, including, in 1857, her aged parents. Estimates of the number of slaves she helped escape range from sixty to more than three hundred.

Viewing Tubman's activities as a major threat, Maryland slaveowners offered rewards totalling forty thousand dollars for her capture. As her exploits became known, she sometimes spoke at abolitionist rallies. Living at first in St. Catharines, Ontario, she moved to farm near Auburn, New York, around 1858. Here she built a home for her parents and, later, a residence for aged and disabled ex‐slaves. A civilian volunteer with the Union Army during and after the Civil War, she worked as a nurse and a cook in military hospitals in South Carolina and Virginia and gathered military intelligence from African‐American informants. In 1897, after years of effort by Tubman and her supporters, Congress awarded her a twenty‐dollar monthly pension for her wartime service. The subtitle of Sarah Bradford's 1869 biography gave her the epithet often associated with her name: Moses of Her People.
See also Antislavery; Slave Uprisings and Resistance.

Bibliography

Earl Conrad , Harriet Tubman, 1974
Benjamin Quarles , Harriet Tubman's Unlikely Leadership, in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier, 1988, pp. 43–57.
Harriet Ross Tubman, in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al., vol. 2, 1993, pp. 1176–80.

Theresa D. Napson‐Williams