Who was Harriet Tubman?

Harriet Tubman was an enslaved woman who escaped from a Maryland plantation in 1849 and went on to lead approximately 70 enslaved people, most of them members of her own family, to freedom through the network of safe houses called the Underground Railroad, while later serving as a Union scout, spy, nurse, and women's suffrage advocate. She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland to enslaved parents Harriet "Rit" Green and Benjamin Ross. As a child she was hired out and beaten cruelly. At about age 12 she suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a two pound iron weight that struck her in the forehead, an injury that produced lifelong seizures, headaches, and visions she interpreted as divine guidance.

She married John Tubman, a free Black man, around 1844. In 1849, fearing she was about to be sold further south, Tubman escaped alone, traveling about 90 miles by night with help from Quaker conductors of the Underground Railroad to reach Philadelphia, then a free city.

After her own escape, she returned to the South at least 13 times, beginning in 1850, to rescue family and others. She conducted these missions during winter when nights were long, communicated through coded songs, used disguises, and carried a pistol both for self-defense and to keep nervous fugitives from turning back. She is credited with personally leading roughly 70 people to freedom, including her own parents, who she rescued in 1857 at ages around 70 each, and supporting the escape of perhaps 70 more by giving instructions. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made her work more dangerous by extending federal authority for slave-catchers into free states, so she increasingly led escapees all the way to Canada, settling them at St. Catharines, Ontario. She earned the nickname Moses among abolitionists.

During the Civil War, Tubman served the Union Army from 1862 onward as a cook, nurse, scout, and spy in South Carolina. On June 2, 1863 she became the first woman to lead an armed military expedition in American history when she guided Colonel James Montgomery's raid up the Combahee River, freeing approximately 750 enslaved people.

After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her parents, opened her home to relatives and the indigent, married Civil War veteran Nelson Davis in 1869, advocated for women's suffrage, and helped found the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She died on March 10, 1913, around age 91. The Treasury Department announced in 2016 that her image would replace Andrew Jackson on the 20 dollar bill, with redesign work continuing.