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Quick Facts
- NAME: Harriet Tubman
- OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist
- BIRTH DATE: c. 1820
- DEATH DATE: March 10, 1913
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Dorchester County, Maryland
- PLACE OF DEATH: Auburn, New York
Best Known For
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist. She led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom along the route of the Underground Railroad.
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Harriet Tubman - Mini Bio (7:21)
Harriet Tubman. (2012). Biography.com. Retrieved 04:10, May 22, 2012 from http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430
Harriet Tubman [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430, May 22
" Harriet Tubman." 2012. Biography.com 22 May 2012, 04:10 http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430
' Harriet Tubman', Biography.com,(2012) http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430 [accessed May 22, 2012]
" Harriet Tubman," Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430 (accessed May 22, 2012).
Harriet Tubman [Internet]. Biography.com; 2012 [cited 2012 May 22]. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430.
Harriet Tubman, http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430 (last visited May 22, 2012).
Harriet Tubman, http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430 (last visited May 22, 2012).
Synopsis
Harriet Tubman (born c. 1820, Dorchester county, Maryland, U.S. - d. March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York) was an American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War. She led hundreds of bondsmen to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroadan elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for that purpose.
Quotes
"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
"I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."
"I grew up like a neglected weed – ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it."
"I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves."
"Oh, Lord! You've been with me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!"
Profile
(born c. 1820, Dorchester county, Maryland, U.S.—died March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York) American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War. She led hundreds of bondsmen to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroad—an elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for that purpose.
Born a slave, Araminta Ross later adopted her mother's first name, Harriet. From early childhood she worked variously as a maid, a nurse, a field hand, a cook, and a woodcutter. About 1844 she married John Tubman, a free black.
In 1849, on the strength of rumours that she was about to be sold, Tubman fled to Philadelphia, leaving behind her husband, parents, and siblings. In December 1850 she made her way to Baltimore, Maryland, whence she led her sister and two children to freedom. That journey was the first of some 19 increasingly dangerous forays into Maryland in which, over the next decade, she conducted upward of 300 fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad to Canada. By her extraordinary courage, ingenuity, persistence, and iron discipline, which she enforced upon her charges, Tubman became the railroad's most famous conductor and was known as the “Moses of her people.” It has been said that she never lost a fugitive she was leading to freedom.
Rewards offered by slaveholders for Tubman's capture eventually totaled $40,000. Abolitionists, however, celebrated her courage. John Brown, who consulted her about his own plans to organize an antislavery raid of a federal armoury in Harpers Ferry, Va. (now in West Virginia), referred to her as “General” Tubman. About 1858 she bought a small farm near Auburn, New York, where she placed her aged parents (she had brought them out of Maryland in June 1857) and herself lived thereafter. From 1862 to 1865 she served as a scout, as well as nurse and laundress, for Union forces in South Carolina. For the Second Carolina Volunteers, under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, Tubman spied on Confederate territory. When she returned with information about the locations of warehouses and ammunition, Montgomery's troops were able to make carefully planned attacks. For her wartime service Tubman was paid so little that she had to support herself by selling homemade baked goods.
After the Civil War Tubman settled in Auburn and began taking in orphans and the elderly, a practice that eventuated in the Harriet Tubman Home for Indigent Aged Negroes. The home later attracted the support of former abolitionist comrades and of the citizens of
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