Harriet Tubman

Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland around 1822. She was forced into labor when she was still a child. At 13, Tubman sustained a serious brain injury when a plantation overseer struck her in the head with an iron weight. Thereafter, she suffered from chronic headaches and narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that gave her vivid dreams and hallucinations, which she experienced as divine messages impelling her towards freedom.

In 1849 Tubman escaped. Traveling some 90 miles on foot, she crossed the Mason-Dixon line (the line dividing the northern states that outlawed slavery from the southern states that sanctioned it) into Philadelphia. Unable to rest while her people remained enslaved, Tubman resolved to use the Underground Railroad to lead her family, friends and others to freedom.

Even as passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 – which made it a crime to assist anyone escaping from slavery and established bounties for the capture and return of runaways – greatly increased the danger of Underground Railroad activities, Tubman was undeterred. Between 1849 and 1860 she conducted roughly 13 trips between Maryland and Ontario, Canada, liberating at least 70 people. (Although it was once believed that Tubman rescued some 300 people, recent scholarship has revised this figure.)

During the Civil War (1861-65), Tubman served as a Union Army nurse, scout and spy, recruiting enslaved people in Confederate territories to aid the Union cause. After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, where she was active in progressive intellectual and political circles that included Frederick Douglass and William Henry Seward. A staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, she also collaborated with movement leaders such as Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha Coffin Wright and Susan B. Anthony.

In the last decades of her life Tubman opened the doors of her Auburn home to African Americans who needed food, clothing, shelter and medical assistance. In 1908, with help from the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, she established the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes to carry on her philanthropic work. Having stretched her financial resources to the brink of poverty, Tubman was living in the home herself at the time of her death. Today, Tubman’s legacy is a source of inspiration for anyone who views their own wellbeing as intrinsically connected to the freedom and security of their community.

Contributor: Erin Brown