Harriet Tubman

For more than twenty years before the American Civil War (1861–65), there was a secret system for helping runaway slaves escape to freedom in the northern states or in Canada. Called the Underground Railroad , it was neither underground nor a railroad. It got its name from the railroad terminology that was used to describe the secret activities of the system. The slaves were called “passengers,” those who aided them were “conductors,” escape routes were “lines,” and stopping places of safety were “stations.”

Lines in the Underground Railroad went from Kentucky and Maryland to stations in New England and Canada. While most conductors were Quakers (whose religion forbids slavery) and abolitionists (northerners who fought against slavery), some conductors were free blacks or former slaves who themselves had been passengers on the Railroad. Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) was an escaped slave who single-handedly led over three hundred slaves to safety in the years 1850 to 1860.

Tubman was born on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland, one of the eleven children of Benjamin and Harriet Ross. As a young girl, Tubman was often hired out to work for other families. Unlike many slaves, she had the chance to return to her family between jobs, but she did not escape the brutalities of slavery: the permanent scars on her back testified to the many whippings she received while growing up.

Slave uprising spurs desire to escape

When Tubman was about thirteen, a fellow slave attempted to escape. The overseer (slave supervisor) tried to pursue the runaway, but Tubman blocked his path. Enraged, the overseer hurled a two-pound weight at the fleeing slave, only to strike Tubman in the forehead. The injury left her skull permanently pressed against her brain, and she experienced sudden unconscious spells for the rest of her life. She made up her mind to try to escape one day. In 1849 she decided the time was right. With the help of conductors along the Underground Railroad, she made her way north to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania .

Tubman supported herself by working as a cook and as a household servant. Within a year, she returned to Maryland to start freeing her relatives. She then began a decade-long campaign of conducting runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. Known by the name of “Moses” (after the Hebrew prophet who led his people out of slavery in Egypt in 1400 bce), Tubman would appear in slave cabins on a Saturday night disguised as a man or as an old woman. She would then lead a group of passengers to safety the following morning, knowing slave owners were less likely to pursue slaves on a Sunday.

Leads “passengers” to safety in Canada

Soon after Tubman had begun her work on the Railroad, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1850. It required all runaway slaves, even those in the free states of the North, to be returned to their owners without the benefit of a jury trial. Anyone caught helping a slave was heavily fined. Because she feared for the safety of her passengers in the United States, Tubman began to guide them to the small town of Saint Catherines in Ontario, Canada. Since slavery was outlawed in Canada, slaves were immediately free once they crossed the border. Saint Catherines also became her temporary home.

By 1857 Tubman had rescued her entire family. She then decided to risk settling in Auburn, New York, a strongly abolitionist community. There she met and worked with other reform-minded individuals like the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and the women's rights movement leader Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906). Perhaps the most famous of her associations was with the antislavery crusader John Brown (1800–1859; see Harpers Ferry Raid ). She helped him plan a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in November of 1859. Luckily, Tubman was too ill to take part in the unsuccessful raid in which Brown's sons were killed and he was captured and later executed.

Nurses Union soldiers

During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse for sick and wounded Union soldiers. She also acted as a spy, gathering information for the Union. On one occasion, she even organized and led a group of eight black men on a scouting assignment along the coast of South Carolina .

After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn to care for her parents and to continue to work for women's rights and other reform movements. Concerned about the poor condition of newly free black children, she raised money for clothing and schools. In 1908 she helped the elderly by opening the John Brown Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People (later renamed for her). Tubman lived her last two years in this home, dying in Auburn on March 10, 1913.