HARRIET TUBMAN (ca. 1821 - 1913)

This most famous Underground Railroad conductor, Harriet Tubman was one of 11 children of Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, slaves on the Brodas Plantation in eastern Maryland.
In 1848, she married John Tubman, a free Black man. Harriet remained enslaved, and when her master died, her sisters were sold to another owner. After a failed escape attempt with her brothers, she learned that they too would be sold and sent to live in Georgia. Harriet had other plans. She later wrote: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted."

On her first of many trips north, Harriet navigated her way through the woods, found shelter with the help of free Black and Quakers, and eventually reached Philadelphia, where she met William Still. He was a leader in the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, a group that helped fugitive slaves escape slave hunters. When Tubman heard that her sister Mary and her children would soon be sold, Harriet arranged to meet the group in Baltimore, Maryland and lead them to freedom. It was the first of 19 trips during which she guided, coaxed, and coerced over 300 escaped slaves (including her parents) to the north. The trips became more difficult after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. That law made it legal for slave hunters from the south to reclaim escaped slaves living in the north. After the law's passage, Canada became the primary destination for Harriet's passengers.

Tubman spoke often for abolitionist causes, detailing some of her flights from the south. On her final trip in December 1860, shortly before the civil war began, a reward was posted for her capture, $40,000 dead or alive, an amazing sum for that time. Harriet, however, was never caught and went on to serve as a Union spy, scout, and nurse during the Civil War. The government refused to give her a pension for her war time service, so she sold vegetables and fruit door to door, and lived on the proceeds from Scenes From the Life of Harriet Tubman, a book she wrote with Sarah Hopkins Bradford. In 1913, at the age of 93, Harriet Tubman died in Auburn, New York.

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