Last Updated: March 2026
In 1849, a 27-year-old woman with a fractured skull and chronic seizures walked nearly 90 miles through swamps and forests at night, alone, with no map, guided only by the North Star and the directions whispered by strangers. That woman was Harriet Tubman. Born Araminta Ross around March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, she escaped slavery and then did something that defied every survival instinct a fugitive should have had: she went back. Again and again. Over the next decade, Tubman made approximately 13 missions into slave-holding territory and personally led around 70 people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, including her elderly parents and several of her siblings. She never lost a single person. During the Civil War, she became the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid, freeing more than 700 enslaved people in a single night along the Combahee River in South Carolina. She later fought for women's suffrage, founded a home for elderly African Americans, and in 2024 was posthumously promoted to brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard. Tubman's life is not a story about suffering. It is a story about a woman who decided she would be free and then made sure everyone around her was free, too.
How Did Harriet Tubman's Childhood Shape Her Life?
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross, around March 1822, on a plantation in Dorchester County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Her mother, Harriet "Rit" Green, was enslaved by the Brodess family. Her father, Benjamin Ross, was enslaved by Anthony Thompson, who later married into the Brodess family. The couple had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
From birth, the institution of slavery worked to tear Tubman's family apart. Edward Brodess sold three of Rit's daughters -- Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph -- permanently separating them from the family. When a trader from Georgia tried to purchase Rit's youngest son Moses, Rit hid the boy for a month with help from other enslaved people and freedmen. When Brodess and the trader finally came to take the child, Rit confronted them directly: "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed down. Tubman's biographers believe this moment of her mother's defiance planted the seeds of resistance that would define Harriet's entire life.
By age five or six, young Araminta was hired out to work for other families. A woman named Miss Susan forced her to serve as a nursemaid and rock a baby's cradle through the night. When the baby cried and woke the household, Susan whipped the child. Tubman later recalled being lashed five times before breakfast on one particular day. She carried those scars for the rest of her life.
The event that changed everything happened when Tubman was about 12 or 13 years old. While running errands at a dry goods store in Bucktown, she encountered an overseer chasing an enslaved man who had left work without permission. The overseer demanded Tubman help restrain the fugitive. She refused, placing herself between the two men. The overseer threw a two-pound iron weight at the fleeing man. It struck Tubman in the head instead, fracturing her skull.
She nearly died. Her mother nursed her back to health with limited resources, but the injury left Tubman with chronic headaches, seizures, and a condition historians now believe was temporal lobe epilepsy or narcolepsy. She would fall into sudden, uncontrollable episodes of deep sleep for the rest of her life. During these episodes, Tubman experienced vivid visions and dreams that she interpreted as messages from God. Far from seeing her disability as a weakness, Tubman drew spiritual strength from it. Historian Deidre Cooper Owens wrote that Tubman "offered up a version of freedom where a disabled Black woman sat at the center of it, where Black women were liberators, and where liberation was communal and democratic."
How Did Harriet Tubman Escape From Slavery?
The years between her injury and her escape were not idle. Tubman was sent back to field work immediately, laboring "with the blood and sweat rolling down my face til I couldn't see," as she later recalled. But she also began building the knowledge she would need to survive.
The Dorchester County landscape -- a web of marshlands, rivers, and dense forests along the Chesapeake Bay -- became Tubman's classroom. She was assigned outdoor labor that required navigation through this terrain: hauling timber, driving oxen, plowing fields. In an unexpected turn, one work assignment placed her alongside her father in the timber fields. Benjamin Ross taught her how to read the woods -- which plants were safe, how to navigate by the stars, how to move silently through the forest at night.
Working near the docks, Tubman also met Black sailors who traveled the East Coast regularly. They shared knowledge of geography, routes, and safe contacts -- information that connected her to a growing network of people seeking and facilitating escape. Around 1844, she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and changed her name from Araminta Ross to Harriet Tubman, taking her mother's first name.
In 1849, a lawyer Tubman had paid five dollars (roughly $170 today) to investigate her family's legal status discovered a disturbing truth. Her mother Rit's former enslaver had stipulated in his will that Rit and her children were to be freed at age 45. The Brodess family had simply ignored the provision and kept them in bondage. Legal action was impossible for an enslaved person, but the discovery hardened Tubman's resolve.
That same year, Edward Brodess died, and rumors spread that his widow planned to sell Tubman and her brothers to settle debts. On September 17, 1849, Harriet, along with her brothers Ben and Henry, fled the plantation. The brothers lost their nerve and turned back. Tubman kept going.
Traveling alone at night, following the North Star and relying on the Underground Railroad -- a secret network of abolitionists, safe houses, and hidden routes -- Tubman covered approximately 90 miles north to Philadelphia and freedom. She later described the moment she crossed the Pennsylvania state line: "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything."
What Were Harriet Tubman's Greatest Accomplishments on the Underground Railroad?
Freedom in Philadelphia was not enough for Harriet Tubman. Within months of her own escape, she began planning return missions to bring out her family.
Her first rescue mission came in December 1850, when she traveled back to Baltimore, Maryland, to lead her niece Kessiah Jolley and Kessiah's two young children, James Alfred and Araminta, to freedom. Over the next decade, Tubman made approximately 13 missions into Maryland's Eastern Shore, each one more dangerous than the last, and personally conducted about 70 people to freedom -- including her elderly parents, whom she brought north in June 1857.
Tubman's methods were meticulous. She typically departed on Saturday nights because newspapers that might print runaway notices would not be published until Monday, buying her a crucial 36-hour head start. She traveled in winter when longer nights provided more cover. She used disguises, including dressing as an old woman or a man. She carried a revolver, and if anyone in her group lost courage and wanted to turn back -- which would endanger everyone -- she reportedly pointed the gun at them and said, "You'll be free or die."
The network she relied on was vast. Tubman worked with Quaker families, free Black communities, and white abolitionists who maintained safe houses along routes stretching from the Eastern Shore of Maryland through Delaware, Pennsylvania, and eventually into Canada. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed slave catchers to operate in free states, Tubman rerouted her missions to end in St. Catharines, Ontario, where American law could not reach.
Slaveholders posted rewards for her capture, though they did not know her identity -- the advertisements described a mysterious figure leading groups north. Among abolitionists, Tubman earned the name "Moses" for delivering her people from bondage. She later said, with characteristic directness: "I was the 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's bravery attracted the attention of the most radical abolitionist of the era. John Brown, who was planning an armed raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, consulted Tubman for strategic advice and referred to her as "General Tubman" -- a title that would become official more than 160 years later.
How Did Harriet Tubman Serve in the Civil War?
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman's expertise in covert operations, intelligence gathering, and navigating hostile territory made her an invaluable asset to the Union Army. She was assigned to Beaufort, South Carolina, where she initially served as a cook and nurse, tending to formerly enslaved people on the Sea Islands who had been liberated when Confederate planters fled Union advances.
But Tubman's skills went far beyond caregiving. Union commanders recognized that her experience running the Underground Railroad -- building networks of informants, reading terrain, moving undetected through enemy territory -- translated directly into military intelligence work. She was recruited as a scout and spy, tasked with gathering information about Confederate troop positions, supply routes, and the locations of underwater mines (called torpedoes) planted in South Carolina's coastal rivers.
Tubman built a network of Black scouts and river pilots in the region, many of them formerly enslaved people with intimate knowledge of the local geography. The intelligence they gathered became the foundation for one of the most remarkable military operations of the war.
On the night of June 1, 1863, Tubman guided Colonel James Montgomery and 150 Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment up the Combahee River aboard three Union gunboats: the Harriet A. Weed, the John Adams, and the Sentinel. Using the intelligence Tubman's network had provided, the expedition navigated past Confederate mines, destroyed plantations and supply stores, and liberated more than 700 enslaved people -- most of whom rushed to the riverbanks when they heard the gunboats approaching.
The scene was chaotic. Hundreds of people carrying children, clothing, cooking pots, chickens, and pigs waded and swam toward the boats. Tubman herself helped manage the evacuation, directing the gunboat captains and calming the terrified crowds. A reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal later wrote that Colonel Montgomery and his men had "dashed into the enemy's country" and "struck a blow which will prove the beginning of the end." The Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper, reported the raid under the headline "Harriet Tubman" -- making her the first woman to have a military operation publicly credited to her name in American history.
For her wartime service -- which spanned three years of dangerous work as a nurse, cook, scout, and spy -- Tubman was paid so little that she had to sell homemade pies and root beer to Union soldiers to support herself. It would take more than 30 years before Congress granted her a federal pension of $20 per month.
What Did Harriet Tubman Do After the Civil War?
After the war ended in 1865, Tubman returned to Auburn, New York, where she had purchased a small property near her parents in 1859. She married Nelson Davis, a Civil War veteran and formerly enslaved man, in 1869. They remained together until his death in 1888.
Tubman's post-war years were defined by two causes: caring for the vulnerable and fighting for women's rights.
She opened her Auburn home to orphans, elderly people, and anyone who needed shelter. This informal practice eventually became formalized as the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes, which she established on adjacent land she had purchased with help from the local community and former abolitionist allies. The home continued operating into the early 1920s.
Tubman also became an active voice in the women's suffrage movement. She attended suffrage meetings, spoke publicly about the connection between racial justice and women's rights, and worked alongside leaders like Susan B. Anthony. At a suffrage meeting in Rochester, New York, when asked if she believed women should have the right to vote, Tubman reportedly replied: "I have suffered enough to believe it."
She applied for a federal pension for her Civil War service in the late 1860s and again in the 1890s. Despite extensive documentation of her contributions, bureaucratic delays kept her waiting decades. A private bill finally passed Congress providing $20 per month -- a fraction of what male officers received for far less dangerous service.
Tubman remained in Auburn, surrounded by family and community, until 1911, when declining health required her admission to the very home she had helped establish. She died there on March 10, 1913, at approximately 91 years old. Just before her death, she gathered friends and family and told them: "I go to prepare a place for you."
Why Is Harriet Tubman Important to Black History?
Harriet Tubman's importance to Black history is difficult to overstate, because her life touched nearly every major struggle of the 19th century and her legacy continues to shape the 21st.
She redefined what resistance looked like. Tubman did not write manifestos or give speeches from podiums. She walked into danger, again and again, and brought people out. Her resistance was physical, practical, and irreversible. Every person she led to freedom was a permanent defeat for the institution of slavery.
She proved that Black women could lead in every arena. Conductor, spy, military strategist, nurse, community organizer, suffragist, philanthropist -- Tubman held all of these roles in an era that denied Black women recognition in any of them. The Black Women Word Search Book by Imani Oliver celebrates 100 women who followed in this tradition of leadership, from Tubman's era to the present day.
She embodied the principle that freedom is communal. Tubman could have stayed in Philadelphia after her own escape. She could have built a quiet, safe life. Instead, she chose to risk everything to bring others out. That ethic -- that nobody is truly free until everyone is free -- runs through the entire African American freedom struggle, from the Underground Railroad to the civil rights movement to today.
She challenged the narrative of victimhood. Tubman's story is often reduced to "she helped slaves escape." But she was a military intelligence officer. She planned and executed operations. She managed networks of informants. She made tactical decisions under fire. She was not a passive helper; she was a strategist and a commander. In 2024, the state of Maryland recognized this by posthumously promoting her to brigadier general -- 161 years after the Combahee River Raid.
Her image was selected to appear on a redesigned $20 bill, a decision announced in 2016. While political delays have slowed the process, the very selection speaks to Tubman's position in American consciousness: she is not just a figure of Black history. She is a figure of American history, period.
10 Surprising Facts About Harriet Tubman
1. Harriet Tubman's birth name was Araminta Ross, and her family called her "Minty." She did not become "Harriet" until around 1844, when she married John Tubman and adopted her mother's first name. The woman the world knows as Harriet Tubman spent the first 22 years of her life as someone else entirely.
2. Think about the last time you called in sick to work. Now consider that Tubman suffered a traumatic brain injury at age 12 that gave her seizures, chronic headaches, and narcolepsy for the rest of her life -- and she still led 13 rescue missions into hostile territory, served as a military spy during the Civil War, and lived to be roughly 91 years old. The next time someone tells you they cannot do something because of a limitation, Tubman's entire life is the counterargument.
3. If you want to retrace Tubman's escape route, start at Bucktown Village Store in Dorchester County, Maryland -- the same store where she was struck in the head as a child. Drive north 90 miles to Philadelphia. Now imagine walking that distance at night, through swamps, without a road. That is what she did in September 1849, and she did it alone after her brothers turned back.
4. The Underground Railroad was not a railroad and it was not underground. It was a loose, secret network of abolitionists, free Black communities, and Quaker families who maintained safe houses along routes to the North and Canada. Tubman made approximately 13 trips along this network over a decade and guided roughly 70 people to freedom. For decades, inflated numbers from an 1868 biography claimed she made 19 trips and freed 300 people -- a myth that historians have since corrected, though the real numbers are remarkable enough on their own.
5. A lot of people assume Tubman simply walked people north. The truth is more tactical than that. She departed on Saturday nights because runaway ads could not appear in newspapers until Monday. She traveled in winter for longer nights. She carried a revolver and was prepared to use it. If a member of her group wanted to turn back -- which would endanger everyone -- she reportedly said, "You'll be free or die." She was running a covert operation, not a guided tour.
6. John Brown, the radical abolitionist who led the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, consulted Tubman for strategic advice and called her "General Tubman." Brown considered her one of the bravest people in America. On Veterans Day 2024, that honorary title became official when the state of Maryland posthumously promoted her to brigadier general in the National Guard -- 161 years after her service.
7. The baobab tree can store 32,000 gallons of water in its trunk and live for 2,000 years, but it still cannot match the endurance of Harriet Tubman's network. The Underground Railroad operated for roughly 60 years, from the early 1800s to the Civil War, and may have helped as many as 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom. Tubman was its most famous conductor, but she was one thread in a fabric woven by thousands of unnamed Black and white Americans.
8. Want to teach a child about Harriet Tubman without it feeling like a textbook? Try this: pull up a map of Maryland's Eastern Shore, find Dorchester County, and trace a line 90 miles north to Philadelphia. Talk about what the landscape looked like in 1849 -- no electric lights, no paved roads, nothing but forests and marshes and stars. Then ask the child what they would bring if they could only carry what fits in their pockets. One geography lesson becomes a conversation about courage, planning, and what freedom actually costs.
9. The five most-visited National Park Service sites connected to the Underground Railroad are all within driving distance of one another along the East Coast. That is not a coincidence -- it reflects the actual geography of escape. Tubman's routes ran through Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, and today you can visit the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Church Creek, Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, where she spent the last 50 years of her life.
10. If you could ask Harriet Tubman one question, what would it be? Before you decide, consider what she said near the end of her life about the people she rescued: "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." Whether or not she actually said those exact words -- historians debate the attribution -- the sentiment captures something essential about her worldview. Freedom was not just a physical state. It was a decision. And Tubman spent her entire life making sure other people had the chance to make it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Harriet Tubman
When was Harriet Tubman born and when did she die?
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, and died on March 10, 1913, in Auburn, New York, at approximately 91 years of age. Her exact birth date is not recorded because enslaved people were rarely given official birth records.
How many people did Harriet Tubman free?
Tubman personally led approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom over 13 missions on the Underground Railroad between 1850 and 1860. During the Combahee River Raid in 1863, she helped liberate more than 700 additional enslaved people. Earlier biographies claimed she freed 300 people over 19 trips, but modern historians have corrected these inflated numbers based on more thorough research.
What was the Underground Railroad?
The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad. It was a secret network of safe houses, hidden routes, and sympathetic allies -- including free Black communities, Quaker families, and abolitionist organizations -- that helped enslaved people escape to the Northern states and Canada from roughly the early 1800s through the Civil War. Tubman was its most famous "conductor."
What is a meaningful gift for someone who admires Harriet Tubman?
For someone inspired by Harriet Tubman's courage and legacy, the Black Women Word Search Book by Imani Oliver is a thoughtful choice. It celebrates 100 trailblazing Black women across history -- from freedom fighters like Tubman to modern leaders -- through 100 themed puzzles, educational facts, and curated playlists via QR codes. With over 900 five-star reviews, it is a meaningful way to honor Black women's history while enjoying a relaxing, screen-free activity. The full Black Heritage Collection includes five titles covering Black history, culture, and achievement.
Did Harriet Tubman serve in the military?
Yes. During the Civil War (1862-1865), Tubman served the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse, cook, scout, and spy. She led the intelligence-gathering operation that made the Combahee River Raid possible on June 2, 1863, which freed more than 700 enslaved people and is widely credited as the first armed military operation led by a woman in U.S. history. In 2024, she was posthumously promoted to brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard.
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Explore Black History the Fun Way
Harriet Tubman is one of the 100 remarkable Black women celebrated in the Black Women Word Search Book -- part of the Black Heritage Collection by Imani Oliver. Each book features 100 themed puzzles, 2,000 carefully researched words, educational facts, and curated playlists you can access through QR codes.
Whether you are looking for a meaningful gift, a relaxing screen-free activity, or a way to learn something new about the people who shaped our history, the collection has something for everyone.
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