Harriet Tubman

Few people could imagine that a poor black woman born into slavery could go on to become one of the best known figures of the nineteenth century, but that’s exactly what Harriet Tubman became. Born in Maryland around 1821, Tubman’s life was one of hardship and deprivation from childhood that even marriage to a free black man named John Tubman could not erase. Finally having enough of being bought and sold as property, she finally escaped her master in 1849 and fled northward with the help of the Underground Railroad, which Thomas Garrett and other white abolitionists had established. Reaching safety in Philadelphia, she went on to help other slaves—by some accounts as many as 300, including members of her own family—find sanctuary in northern states over the next eleven years. Her efforts made her a hunted woman in the south, resulting in as much as a $40,000 price being put on her head at one point. When the Civil War broke out, her work with the Underground Railroad ended but her service to the Union cause did not.  During the war she served, in turn as: a nurse, a scout for the Union, and, at one time, even a Union spy. After the war, she remained a tireless advocate for civil and human rights and a figure in the woman’s suffrage movement right up to the year of her death in 1913. Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, after her death she became an American icon. She is frequently referred to as the “Moses of her people” for her tireless efforts at freeing slaves, even at great personal danger to herself, serving as an inspiration for future generations of civil right activists.