Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad, abolitionist, suffragist, Civil War scout

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an abolitionist, suffragist, and the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes, passages, and safe houses to help enslaved people escape to freedom. She led more than 300 people out of slavery and into freedom and, as she told Frederick Douglass, never lost a passenger.

She was born Araminta Ross (known as Minty) to enslaved parents Harriet Green, a cook, and Ben Ross, a skilled woodsman. Minty was loaned out to abusive individuals as a child, until she was old enough to work in the fields. While she was a field hand, an overseer threw a 2-pound metal weight at another enslaved worker and hit Minty in the head, severely injuring her. She was left with a lifetime of headaches, seizures, and a condition similar to narcolepsy. She also began having vivid dreams, which she interpreted as divine revelations.

In 1844, Minty married a free black man named John Tubman and changed her first name to Harriet after her mother. Five years later, Harriet grew concerned that she would be sold away from her family due to her illness, and planned an escape with her brothers, Ben and Henry. The men had second thoughts and the three returned to their respective slaveholders. Shortly afterward, Harriet escaped alone, traveling some 90 miles from Maryland to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Harriet wound up in Philadelphia, where she worked odd jobs and kept an eye out for overzealous slave catchers, emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which forced free states and their citizens to aid in capturing enslaved people who had escaped. In December 1850, she received word that her niece and her niece’s children were about to be sold; Harriet helped the family escape to Philadelphia. She soon returned to the South for other family members and discovered that her husband had married another woman and refused to leave. Never one to waste a trip, Harriet helped a group of almost a dozen enslaved people make their escape. There is evidence she may have stopped at the home of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, N.Y., while guiding this group to Canada.

Over the next 10 years, Harriet made approximately 19 trips leading the enslaved to freedom, including her own parents, earning her the nickname, “Moses” from abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. By 1856, Southern slave holders had placed a bounty on her head of $40,000—remarkable for a five-foot tall woman, who lived with traumatic brain injury. In 1859, she helped firebrand abolitionist John Brown recruit men for the infamous, doomed raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. During the Civil War, she served as a scout and spy for the Union Army and led a raid on the plantations on the Combahee River in South Carolina that liberated more than 750 enslaved people.

Following the war, Harriet became an activist for women’s suffrage. She also kept fighting for her rights. After years of being denied a government pension for her service in the Civil War, and repeated attempts by New York congressmen to get bills passed that would grant her financial relief, President William McKinley signed a bill granting her $20 a month in 1899. She settled in Auburn, N.Y., where she died in 1913.