8. Harriet Tubman 1849-1860
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross on a plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland. Born between 1800 and 1825, she was one of nine children. Her enslaved father worked as a woodsman and her mother worked in the “big house.” Despite the pleas of her mother, Minty’s older siblings were sold, which impacted the young girl. When Minty was five years old, she was hired out to work as a nursemaid. Her task was to watch over a sleeping baby. When the baby awoke, it cried, and Minty was whipped. As an adult, the scars from her early whippings remained evident.
As Minty aged, she moved from caring for children to working in the fields. Her master often hired her out to work on other plantations. On one such occasion, Minty was running an errand and was hit with a heavy metal weight. Bloody and unconscious, she was carried to a weaving room where she laid for two days without medical care. Forced to return to the fields, her head continued to bleed. The planter returned Minty to her owner proclaiming that she was not worth a penny. The untreated head trauma caused Minty to experience headaches and seizures for the rest of her life.
Around 1844, Minty married a free black John Tubman, after which she changed her name to Harriet Tubman. Edward Brodess, who owned Harriet, attempted to sell her away from her family. When she fell ill in 1849, her value as a slave diminished making a sale impossible. When Brodess died, Harriet Tubman decided that only she would determine her fate. On September 17, 1849, she escaped and became a fugitive slave. With assistance from abolitionists, Quakers, and sympathetic whites, Harriet was shuttled in false-bottom wagons from safe house to safe house. When she arrived in Pennsylvania, she later recalled that she felt like she “was in Heaven.”
Liberty and family was the most important thing to Tubman. Over the next 11 years, she traveled back to Maryland, using deceptive tactics to avoid capture, to assist 70 people to freedom. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Tubman and any slaves she was assisting could be captured and sold to new masters or returned to their old masters. This made her work especially difficult, yet she was determined to help as many family members to freedom as she could. In 1859, Tubman purchased land near Auburn, New York, where her newly freed family members lived.
During the American Civil War, she spied for the United States Army, determined to help end slavery for good. In 1869, Tubman married a man 22 years her junior and adopted a baby girl. Money that she earned from working and later her military pension went toward supporting her family. Her biography was published for which she received some income, but friends and strangers sent her monetary support. Late in her life, she joined the women’s rights movement. Harriet Tubman died in 1913.
Sources For Further Reading:
Catholic News Agency – The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Encyclopedia – The “Great Negro Plot” Trial: 1741
History Channel – Louisiana Purchase
Smithsonian Magazine – How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World
Smithsonian Magazine – How a Nearly Successful Slave Revolt Was Intentionally Lost to History
Folks Magazine – The Brain Injury That Helped End Slavery
BBC – Harriet Tubman: Former Slave Who Risked All to Save Others
History – After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid
