Harriet Tubman

Araminta "Minty" Ross was born around 1822 on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was the fifth of nine children of Harriet "Rit" Green and Ben Ross, both enslaved. From infancy she knew what her life was: property. She was hired out to other households as a small child, sent to work as a nursemaid at age five or six, beaten when the baby cried. She later described being so hungry she stole a small sugar cube and hid in a pigsty for days to avoid the whipping. Her father, Ben Ross, was a skilled timber worker who was allowed unusual autonomy — he would later help guide freedom seekers north, teaching Harriet that the forest held both danger and direction. Her mother Rit was ferocious in her children's defense: when a slaveholder tried to sell one of Harriet's brothers south, Rit told him she would fight any man who tried to take her child. The stubbornness that would make Harriet Tubman impossible to stop was not self-invented. It was inherited.

Around 1835, when Harriet was perhaps thirteen, an overseer threw a two-pound lead weight at another enslaved man who had left the field without permission. The weight struck Harriet in the head instead. The injury cracked her skull and caused a form of hypersomnia or narcolepsy she would carry for the rest of her life: sudden, uncontrollable sleep attacks that could strike at any moment, even mid-sentence, even mid-step. She also experienced vivid dreams and what she described as visions — detailed perceptions she interpreted as direct communication from God. For her enslavers, the head injury made her less valuable: brain-damaged, unreliable, unpredictable. For Harriet, it opened something. She became deeply religious and began to believe she was being guided. She also married a free Black man named John Tubman in 1844, took his surname, and quietly began laying plans she did not share with him. When she told him she intended to escape north, he told her he would report her to their enslaver. She left anyway. She left alone.

Over the following decade, Harriet Tubman made thirteen missions into slave territory and guided approximately seventy people to freedom. She traveled in winter, when nights were long. She preferred Saturdays, because wanted posters could not be published until Monday. She disguised freedom seekers as travelers, as the elderly, as the dead. She carried a gun — not only for the slave catchers she might encounter, but for passengers who lost their nerve. She was reported to have told wavering travelers: "You'll be free or die." This was not cruelty. It was the logic of a covert operation: a person who turned back under duress could, intentionally or not, give away the route and endanger everyone. She never used the gun on a passenger. She never lost a passenger. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made her work dramatically more dangerous, extending the reach of slave catchers into free states and requiring even Northern citizens to assist in recapturing escaped enslaved people. Harriet began routing her freedom seekers all the way to Canada. She became known among enslaved people as Moses, which she found accurate. She was leading people out of Egypt.

When the Civil War began, Harriet Tubman offered her services to the Union Army and was eventually deployed to South Carolina, operating out of Beaufort. She worked as a nurse, a cook, and most valuably as a spy — running a network of scouts who moved through Confederate territory gathering intelligence about troop positions, supply routes, and the disposition of enslaved people who might be willing to flee. On June 2, 1863, she guided Colonel James Montgomery and 150 Black Union soldiers of the Second South Carolina Infantry up the Combahee River on a nighttime raid. She had navigated the river using intelligence she had gathered from local Black contacts who knew where Confederate torpedoes were buried. In a few hours, they destroyed Confederate infrastructure, seized crops, and liberated more than 700 enslaved people — who surged out of the fields and riverbanks toward the Union boats in the dark. She was the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid. The Union Army paid her poorly, denied her a pension for decades, and a colleague later published a book about her life without compensating her adequately. She spent years in poverty afterward. None of this changed what she had done.