Born: c. 1820, Dorchester County, Maryland Died: March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York
Tubman’s Early Years and
Escape from Slavery
Harriet Tubman’s name at birth was Araminta Ross.
She was one of the 11 children of Harriet and Benjamin Ross born into slavery
in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a child, Araminta was “hired out” by her
master as a nursemaid for a small baby. Araminta had to stay awake all night so
that the baby wouldn’t cry and wake the mother. If Araminta fell asleep, the
baby’s mother whipped her.
As a slave, Araminta Ross had been scarred for life
when she refused to help in the punishment of another young slave. A young man
had gone to the store without permission and, when he returned, the overseer
wanted to whip him. He asked Araminta to help but she refused. When the young
man started to run away, the overseer picked up a heavy iron weight and threw
it at him. He missed the young man and hit Araminta instead. The weight nearly
crushed her skull and left a deep scar. She was unconscious for days afterward,
and suffered from seizures for the rest of her life.
In 1844, Araminta married a free black named John
Tubman and took his last name. She also changed her first name, taking her
mother’s name, Harriet. In 1849, worried that she and the other slaves on the
plantation were going to be sold, Tubman decided to run away. Her husband
refused to go with her. So she set out with her two brothers. They followed the
North Star in the sky to guide her north to freedom. Her brothers became
frightened and turned back. She continued on and reached Philadelphia. There
she found work as a household servant. She saved her money so she could return
to help others escape.
Tubman: Conductor of the
Underground Railroad
After Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery, she
returned to slaveholding states many times to help other slaves escape. She led
them safely to the northern free states and to Canada. It was very dangerous to
be a runaway slave. There were rewards for their capture. Whenever Tubman led a
group of slaves to freedom, she placed herself in great danger. There was a
bounty offered for her capture because she herself was a fugitive slave. She
was breaking the law in slave states by helping other slaves escape.
If anyone ever wanted to change his or her mind
during the journey to freedom and return, Tubman pulled out a gun and said,
“You’ll be free or die a slave!” Tubman knew that, if anyone turned back, it
would put her and the other escaping slaves in danger of discovery, capture, or
even death. She became so well known for leading slaves to freedom that Tubman
became known as the “Moses of Her People.” Many slaves dreaming of freedom sang
the spiritual “Go Down Moses.” Slaves hoped a savior would deliver them from
slavery just as Moses had delivered the Israelites from slavery.
Tubman made nineteen trips to Maryland. She helped
three hundred people to freedom. During these dangerous journeys she helped
rescue members of her own family, including her 70-year-old parents. At one
point, the amount of rewards for Tubman’s capture totaled $40,000. Yet, she was
never captured and never failed to deliver her “passengers” to safety. As
Tubman herself said, “On my Underground Railroad I [never] run my train off
[the] track [and] I never [lost] a passenger.”
In the spring of 1860, Harriet Tubman was requested
by Mr. Gerrit Smith to go to Boston to attend a large antislavery meeting. On
her way, she stopped at Troy to visit a cousin. While she was there she learned
that a fugitive slave, by the name of Charles Nalle, had been followed by his
master (who was his younger half-brother). The slave was already in the hands
of the officers, and was to be taken back to the South.
The instant Harriet heard the news, she started for
the office of the United States commissioner, telling everyone she passed as
she went. An excited crowd was gathered about the office. Harriet forced her
way through. She rushed upstairs to the door of the room where the fugitive was
detained. A wagon was already waiting before the door to carry off the man, but
the crowd was even then so great and in such a state of excitement that the
officers did not dare to bring the man down.
On the opposite side of the street stood the blacks
of the community. They watched the window where they could see Harriet’s
sunbonnet. They knew that so long as she stood there, the fugitive was still in
the office. Time passed on, and he did not appear.
“They’ve taken him out another way, depend upon
that,” said some. “No,” replied others, “there stands Moses yet, and as long as
she is there, he is safe.”
Harriet, now seeing the necessity for a tremendous
effort for the man’s rescue, sent out some little boys to cry fire. The bells
rang and the crowd increased, until the whole street was a dense mass of
people.
Again and again the officers came out to try and
clear the stairs, and make a way to take their captive down. Others were driven
down, but Harriet stood her ground, her head bent and her arms folded.
“Come, old woman, you must get out of this,” said
one of the officers. “I must have the way, cleared. If you can’t get down
alone, some one will help you.”
Harriet, still putting on a greater appearance of
decrepitude, twitched away from him, and kept her place. Offers were made to
buy Charles from his master, who at first agreed to take twelve hundred dollars
for him; but when this was subscribed, he immediately raised the price to
fifteen hundred. The crowd grew more excited. A gentleman raised a window and
called out, “Two hundred dollars for his rescue, but not one cent to his
master!” The crowd below responded with a roar of satisfaction. At length the
officers appeared. They announced to the crowd that, if they would open a lane
to the wagon, they would promise to bring the man down the front way.
The moment he appeared, Harriet roused from her
stooping posture, threw up a window, and cried to her friends: “Here he
comes—take him!” Then she darted down the stairs like a wildcat. She seized one
officer and pulled him down, then another, and tore him away from the man.
Keeping her arms about the slave, she cried to her
friends: “Drag us out! Drag him to the river! Drown him! But don’t let them
have him!”
They were knocked down together. While down, she
tore off her sunbonnet and tied it on the head of the fugitive. When he rose,
only his head could be seen, and amid the surging mass of people the slave was
no longer recognized, while the master appeared like the slave. Again and again
they were knocked down, the poor slave utterly helpless, with his manacled
wrists, streaming with blood. Harriet’s outer clothes were torn from her, and
even her stout shoes were pulled from her feet, yet she never relinquished her
hold of the man, till she had dragged him to the river, where he was tumbled
into a boat. Harriet followed in a ferryboat to the other side.
The officers had telegraphed ahead of them. As soon
as they landed the slave was seized and hurried from her sight. After a time,
some school children came hurrying along, and to her anxious inquiries they
answered, “He is up in that house, in the third story.”
Harriet rushed up to the place. Some men were
attempting to make their way up the stairs. The officers were firing down. Two
men were lying on the stairs, who had been shot. Over their bodies our heroine
rushed. With the help of others she burst open the door of the room, and
dragged out the fugitive, whom Harriet carried down stairs in her arms.
A gentleman was riding by with a fine horse. He
stopped to ask what the disturbance meant. On hearing the story, his sympathies
seemed to be thoroughly aroused. He sprang from his wagon, calling out, “That
is a blood-horse, drive him till be drops.” The poor man was hurried in. Some
of his friends jumped in after him. They drove at the most rapid rate to
Schenectady.
The slave, Charles Nalle, later bought his freedom
from his master.
Tubman During the Civil
War
During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union
army as a nurse, a cook, and a spy. Her experience leading slaves along the
Underground Railroad had been especially helpful because she knew the land
well. The Union forces in South Carolina badly needed information about
Confederate forces opposing them. Intelligence on the strength of enemy units,
location of encampments, and designs of fortifications was almost nil. All
these requirements could be met by short-term spying trips behind enemy lines,
and it fell to Tubman to organize and lead these expeditions. She recruited a
group of former slaves to hunt for rebel camps and report on the movement of
the Confederate troops. In 1863, she went with Colonel James Montgomery and
about one hundred fifty black soldiers on a gunboat raid in South Carolina.
Because she had inside information from her scouts, the Union gunboats were
able to surprise the Confederate rebels.
At first, when the Union Army came through and
burned plantations, slaves hid in the woods. However, when they realized that
the gunboats could take them behind Union lines to freedom, they came running
from all directions, bringing as many of their belongings as they could carry.
Tubman later said, “I never saw such a sight.” Tubman played other roles in the
war effort, including working as a nurse. Folk remedies she learned during her
years living in Maryland would come in very handy.
Tubman worked as a nurse during the war, trying to
heal the sick. Many people in the hospital died from dysentery, a disease associated
with terrible diarrhea. Tubman was sure that she could help cure the sickness
if she could find some of the same roots and herbs that grew in Maryland. One
night she searched the woods until she found water lilies and crane’s bill
(geranium). She boiled the water lily roots and the herbs and made a
bitter-tasting brew that she gave to a man who was dying—and it worked! Slowly
he recovered.
Tubman’s contribution to the Union cause was
significant. When Tubman died in 1913, as a mark of respect for her activities
during the war she was honored with a full military funeral. On her grave the
tombstone reads: “Servant of God, Well Done.”
1. As a
slave child, what was Harriet Tubman’s first job?
a.
Harriet helped with the cooking.
b.
She helped the household nurse to care for the
sick.
c.
Harriet freed slaves on the Underground Railroad.
d.
She
was a nursemaid for a baby.
2. How had
Araminta Ross been hurt as a child?
a.
She was chained and whipped.
b.
She was beaten for not following orders.
c.
She
was hit on the head with a weight.
d.
She had seizures all her life.
3. Why did
Harriet Tubman decide to run away from the plantation she had worked on as a
slave?
a.
Her husband wanted her to run away with him to the
North.
b.
She
feared that the plantation owners were going to sell her.
c.
She wanted to see new places and do a new kind of
work.
d.
All the slaves at that plantation were planning a
group escape.
4. Why did
Harriet Tubman return to the slave states after she had escaped to freedom?
a.
She returned to convince her husband to join her in
the North.
b.
She wanted to become a teacher there and share what
she had learned.
c.
She
had become a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
d.
She wanted to help Gerrit Smith and the
abolitionist community.
5. Which of
the following is the best reason
why Harriet Tubman was called the “Moses of Her People”?
a.
She had suffered as a small child and devoted her
life to helping children.
b.
She threatened the fugitives if they became
uncertain about their attempts to escape
oppression.
c.
She had traveled much and could tell people about
other places.
d.
As
a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she had led many slaves to safety
and
freedom.
6. Why was
Harriet Tubman interested in helping Charles Nalle?
a.
He had an easy time escaping slavery and, as a free
man, offered to help her.
b.
Even though his younger half-brother was his
master, he granted him freedom.
c.
He
was a fugitive who had been caught and was on his way back to the South.
d.
Because of his experiences, he had become a symbol
of the proslavery movement.
7. Which of
the following is true about
Harriet Tubman’s experiences during the Civil War?
a.
Harriet Tubman worked as a secretary in one of the
Union army’s camps.
b.
Because
she knew the roads and geography of the South, she made a good spy.
c.
Harriet Tubman had compassion for the sick but
lacked medical knowledge.
d.
She never was able to use her knowledge to help on
the gunboats because she had a
great fear of water.
8. There are
many tales in this section about what Harriet Tubman was willing to do to free
slaves. Choose two examples, describe them, and then explain whether or not you
agree with her methods. Was Harriet Tubman effective in her efforts? Why or why
not?
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