Harriet Tubman's place in history is inarguable.
Born Araminta Ross, the Union spy and women's suffragist put her own freedom at risk to
help more than 70 people escape slavery on the Underground Railroad.
So how did she do it?
Inspired by her mother
Born to Harriet "Rit" Green and Ben Ross sometime near 1820 on a Maryland plantation owned by
the Brodess family, Tubman was one of nine children, and in the course of her childhood,
three of her sisters were sold off to faraway plantations.
When slaveholder Edward Brodess informed Tubman's mother that her youngest child, Moses, was
soon to be sold away, Rit refused to cooperate.
She fought Brodess off so bravely that he eventually had no choice but to give in and
allow mother and son to remain together.
Tubman witnessed her mother's courageous battle and was inspired by it.
In 1849, Harriet decided to escape to Philadelphia.
Her brothers joined her on the perilous journey, but they lost their nerve when they saw a
newspaper ad offering $300 for their recovery.
Tubman accompanied her brothers safely back to Maryland, but having tasted freedom, she
wanted nothing less.
She followed the North Star and the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania on her own.
A blow to the head
As a young girl, Tubman suffered a head injury that affected her health for the rest of her
life.
She received the injury when an enraged slave owner threw a two-pound weight at the head
of another slave who'd attempted an escape.
Tubman was struck instead and soon began experiencing bouts of dizziness and pain.
She was also prone to seizures and excessive sleepiness.
The latter condition, also called "hypersomnia," prompted some people to mistakenly label her
lazy.
In fact, it was almost certainly a result of that fateful head injury.
It's more difficult to say if Tubman's vivid dreams or her strange visions, which included
regular visions of God, were likewise a result of the same injury.
Either way, Tubman credited her deep Christian faith with giving her the courage she needed
to continually put herself in harm's way.
She was also known to approach her friends for much-needed funds for her trips south,
claiming that God sent her.
She was rarely refused.
"Lord's not letting me alone.
Keeps pestering me near to death with…dreams."
Because she was completely confident that God was on her side and that death would only
bring her eternal life, she feared no one and nothing.
For Tubman, a slave owner with a gun and a pack of dogs was no match for the divine power
of her heavenly Father.
John Brown's buddy
Tubman was well-respected and revered by the abolitionist community, whose members considered
her not just an ally but a leader and an inspiration.
John Brown, who became famous for his revolutionary raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, even went
so far as to call her "General Tubman."
The raid, which took place on October 16th, 1859, was intended to spark an armed rebellion
against slavery, with Brown's forces seizing control of the federal armory in the town
before being defeated by Marines.
Even though the raid itself didn't go as planned, Brown did by many measures succeed.
His willingness to take up arms in defense of human rights, as well as his martyr's death
by hanging, drew attention to the abolitionist cause, accelerating the country's course toward
Civil War.
Tubman helped organize the raid and was even invited to participate, though she was unable
to attend due to illness . Regardless, Tubman was quick to champion Brown, whom she described
as the greatest white man who'd ever lived.
The Combahee River Raid
On her own, Tubman freed at least 70 slaves.
But with the help of Union soldiers, she once freed more than 700 in one day.
In June 1863, Tubman, along with free blacks of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers and the
3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, boarded three Naval gunboats in the dark of night.
Under the leadership of Colonel James Montgomery, they headed up South Carolina's Combahee River
with the intention of disabling Confederate river mines, as well as destroying key supply
centers in the area.
Thanks to Tubman, the operation's main scout, the raid went off without a hitch.
Perhaps most damaging to the Confederate side was the sight of 756 slaves abandoning their
posts in the middle of the raid and joining Tubman, Montgomery, and the two regiments
on their ships.
The men and women fled in such great numbers that their white owners could do nothing but
stand by helplessly and watch them go.
Fighting for her family
While she was still a slave, Harriet married a free man named John Tubman.
Not much is known about him beyond the fact that he seemed to view Tubman's longing for
freedom as unrealistic and naive, reportedly even helping slave catchers try to find her
and bring her back to servitude.
In 1849, five years after their wedding, he refused to join Harriet when she finally left
enslaved Maryland for free Pennsylvania.
Many of the trips Tubman took back to the pro-slavery South were for her family, and
by the time slavery was outlawed, she'd succeeded in bringing almost all to safety, including
her mother and father.
Tubman returned at least once to attempt to convince John to join her in Philadelphia,
but by that time, he'd remarried and was even less interested in her efforts than before.
That didn't stop Tubman from fashioning a family of her own.
In 1869, 20 years after she became free, Tubman married a Civil War veteran named Nelson Davis,
and together they adopted a daughter, Gertie, in 1874.
Harriet in charge
Tubman took a little under 20 trips south to help fugitive slaves escape to freedom,
and every excursion was a resounding success.
No one was injured, and no one was lost.
As Tubman said at a 1896 suffrage convention,
"I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors
can't say, I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger."
Tubman was not only fearless but cunning.
She made sure to always began her trips in the winter, when most people would be shut
up indoors.
She was also careful to arrive at plantations on a Saturday night.
Given that slaves often had Sundays off, this all but guaranteed their masters wouldn't
notice their absence until Monday morning.
Missing and fugitive slave notices wouldn't appear in newspapers until Tubman and her
fellow travelers were well on their way.
"It was a Saturday night.
Ain't nobody be watching you on his day, you could get a good head start."
Other methods Tubman used to increase the chance of a trip's success included taking
the master's horse, thereby limiting his ability to come after them, sedating babies so they
wouldn't cry, and remaining armed at all times.
This wasn't just for self-defense; it was also so that, in the event a fugitive grew
unsure about the journey, she had the power to convince them to stay the course.
"And if we go through, we'll die!"
"If you go back, you're dead already!"
Connecting to Canada
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, stipulating that slaves caught in the
North had to be returned to the South where they would again be enslaved.
Tubman had been accustomed to ending her journeys in Philadelphia.
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, though, stopping in New England was no longer
a viable option, and she took it upon herself to reroute the railroad all the way into Canada,
where slavery was outlawed and the legislation couldn't reach.
She settled on the town of St. Catharines, Ontario, as her final destination because
it was an abolitionist stronghold.
She and her family soon made a peaceful life for themselves there until the breakout of
the Civil War effectively put an end to the Fugitive Slave Law.
Tubman left Canada to become a spy and for the Union side.
Thereafter, Tubman and her family lived in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her
elderly parents until their deaths.
What retirement plan?
You might think that Tubman would spend her twilight years with her feet up, contemplating
her legacy.
Not so with Harriet Tubman, who at the end of her life added elder care to her long list
of passions and causes.
At age 74, Tubman, who'd gone from being a conductor on the Underground Railroad to a
caretaker of her elderly parents, purchased a 25-acre tract of land in Auburn, New York,
in order to build what would become the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged.
She bought the land in 1896, and with the help of the African Episcopal Methodist Zion
Church, she saw it begin housing and treating patients in 1908.
Five years later, Tubman died there herself in a room named after John Brown.
Her biblical nickname
Thanks to her efforts to free her people from slavery, Tubman earned herself a nickname:
"Moses".
Like the biblical figure, Tubman's life's work was bringing men, women, and children
to freedom.
And the nickname did double-duty.
It not only honored her courage and selflessness in the face of danger, it also helped shroud
her identity while she guided slaves through the Underground Railroad.
Slave catchers might get word that a person named Moses was hard at work, helping fugitive
slaves escape, but they might not put two and two together to realize that Moses was
indeed Harriet Tubman.
Song played a large part in her work.
Slaves signaled to each other that Tubman was on her way by singing old time spirituals
like "Steal Away," "Go Down, Moses," and "I Looked Over Jordan."
The hymns spread like a fire from field to field, plantation to plantation, alerting
people to the fact that it was time to prepare for the journey.
And many historians believe that it was Tubman who inspired the classic hymn, "Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot."
For this and other reasons, the Biblical comparisons certainly seem appropriate.
So what if she didn't part an ocean?
She certainly moved mountains.
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