8 amazing facts about Harriet Tubman

• Tubman’s codename was “Moses,” and she was illiterate her entire life.
• She suffered from narcolepsy.
• Her work as “Moses” was serious business.
• She never lost a slave.
• Tubman was a Union scout during the Civil War.
• She cured dysentery.
• She was the first woman to lead a combat assault.

Tubman devoted her life to the emancipation and betterment of the African-American people. She worked with abolitionists (people devoted to the abandonment of slavery) through the Underground Railroad in her twenty trips South to lead slaves to freedom.

• 1819 Birth. Araminta Ross [Harriet Tubman] was born into slavery in 1819 or 1820, in Dorchester County, Maryland.
• 1844 Marriage.
• 1849 Escape.
• 1850 Conductor: In September of the same year, Harriet was made an official “conductor” of the UGRR.
• 1851 Canada.
• 1857 Auburn.
• 1861 Civil War.
• 1869 Second marriage.

Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Before her death she told friends and family surrounding her death bed “I go to prepare a place for you”. Tubman was buried with military honors in the Auburn’s Fort Hill Cemetery.

300 slaves

Tubman was never caught and never lost a “passenger.” She participated in other antislavery efforts, including supporting John Brown in his failed 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia arsenal.

Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. Born Araminta Ross, she was the fifth of nine children, four boys and five girls, of Ben and Harriet Greene Ross. She rarely lived with her owner, Edward Brodess, but from the age of six was frequently hired out to other masters.

Auburn, NY

M

She died surrounded by loved ones on March 10, 1913, at approximately 91 years of age. Her last words were, “I go to prepare a place for you.” Tubman’s accomplishments are, of course, hard to summarize.

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She seized her own freedom and then led many more American slaves to theirs. She is a hero of the Second American Revolution — the war that ended American slavery and that made American capitalism possible.

CLAIM: Harriet Tubman said: “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

Truth is powerful and it prevails.

Harriet Tubman to Ednah Dow Cheney, New York City, circa 1859. “There are two things I’ve got a right to, and these are, Death or Liberty – one or the other I mean to have. No one will take me back alive; I shall fight for my liberty, and when the time has come for me to go, the Lord will let them, kill me”.

However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad was formed in the late 18th century….Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most well-known conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped hundreds of runaway slaves escape to freedom.

Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia and an outcast after her mother Mabel ran off without her. She resents Mabel for escaping, although it is later revealed that her mother tried to return to Cora but died from a snake bite and never reached her.

system used by abolitionists between 1800-1865 to help enslaved African Americans escape to free states.

Slavery itself was abolished everywhere in the British Empire in 1834. In 1793 Upper Canada (now Ontario) passed the Anti‐slavery Act. The law freed enslaved people aged 25 and over and made it illegal to bring enslaved people into Upper Canada.

Most of the millions of slaves brought to the New World went to the Caribbean and South America. An estimated 500,000 were taken directly from Africa to North America. But those numbers were buttressed by the domestic slave trade, which started in the 1760s – a half century before legal importation of slaves ended.