Harriet Ross Tubman was an American abolitionist who, as an agent for the Underground Railroad, a clandestine escape route used to smuggle slaves to freedom in the North and Canada, helped hundreds flee captivity.
Background
Harriet Ross was born Araminta Ross circa 1820 in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was one of Benjamin and Harriet Green Ross’ 11 children. Both of her parents were enslaved full-blooded Africans and lived on the plantation of Edward Brodas. Araminta later adopted her mother’s first name, Harriet.
Harriet was a slave child who suffered the usual hardships of black children during the period of Southern slavery. When she was only five years old, Brodas began “renting” the young Harriet to neighboring families where she performed such work as winding yarn, checking muskrat traps, housekeeping, splitting fence rails, loading timber, and nursing children. Tubman eventually came to prefer field labor over domestic duties.
Education
Harriet had no education.
Career
Tubman’s wasted youth of hard work and sometimes harsh punishment led, predictably, to a desire to escape slavery. In 1848, with two brothers (who later became frightened and returned), she ran away. During the next 10 years Tubman returned to the South to help slaves, including her own parents, to escape. Using a complicated system of way stations on the route from the South to Canada, she is believed never to have lost a charge.
In 1850 the Federal Fugitive Slave Law was reinforced with a clause that promised punishment to anyone who aided an escaping slave. In addition, a price of $40, 000 was set for Tubman's capture. Thus she began transporting some slaves past the North to refuge in Canada. Tubman supported John Brown's insurrection. Deeply disappointed after it failed, she began an intensive speaking tour in 1860, calling not only for the abolition of slavery, but also for a redefinition of woman's rights.
In 1861, when the Civil War began, she served as a nurse, spy, and scout for the Union forces. Well acquainted with the countryside from her days as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, she was considered especially valuable as a scout. After the war, owing to government inefficiency and racial discrimination, Harriet Tubman was denied a pension and had to struggle financially for the rest of her life. To ease this pressure, Sarah Bradford wrote a biography of Miss Tubman (1869), and the profits from its sales were given to her.
A friend of many of the great figures of the day, she did finally receive a small pension from the U. S. Army. Meanwhile, she continued lecturing. In 1857 Harriet Tubman had bought a house in Auburn, New York. During her last years she turned it into a home for the aged and needy. She died there on March 10, 1913, leaving the home as a monument to her character and will.
Achievements
Connections
Around 1844 Harriet Ross married a free black man, John Tubman, who lived near the Brodas plantation. Even though she was married to a free man, Tubman was still forced to retain the status of slave, and in 1849, he threatened to sell her “down the river” into the Deep South, a possibility that had terrorized many of her dreams and waking thoughts. Tubman left her husband in the middle of the night, afraid he would carry through his threat to betray her. In 1869 she married Nelson Davis, a man whom she had met at a South Carolina army base. In 1874 they adopted a girl named Gertie.