Harriet Tubman led a Civil War raid that freed more than 700 people
After escaping slavery in 1849, Harriet Tubman went back south about 13 times and guided roughly 70 people to freedom, later boasting she never lost a passenger. In the Civil War she became a Union scout and spy, and her guidance of the Combahee Ferry raid made her the first woman credited with leading an armed US military operation.
She was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, to enslaved parents known as Rit and Ben. Her exact birth year is uncertain: she herself gave 1825, her death certificate says 1815 and her gravestone 1820. Historian Kate Larson's 2004 biography settled on 1822, using a midwife payment and her runaway advertisement, and later biographers generally accept March of that year. Family memory mattered too. When Edward Brodess tried to sell her youngest brother Moses to a Georgia trader, Rit hid the boy for a month and faced the buyers down, and biographers agree the story shaped Harriet's belief that resistance could work.
As an adolescent she was struck on the head by a two-pound weight an overseer had aimed at another man. For the rest of her life she suffered headaches, seizures and spells of apparent sleep; Larson has suggested temporal lobe epilepsy, while Catherine Clinton has proposed narcolepsy or cataplexy. She also began having visions that she took as messages from God, and although she could not read, she drew on the Old Testament's stories of deliverance rather than the preaching of obedience.
She wed John Tubman, who was free, in about 1844, and took her mother's name, Harriet. In 1849, after Brodess died and his widow began selling the people the family held, she fled with her brothers Ben and Henry on 17 September. They turned back, but she soon escaped alone to Philadelphia. Called Moses, she travelled by night, and after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 she guided people onward to Canada. In 1858 she met John Brown and helped recruit for his raid on Harpers Ferry.
During the war she worked first as a cook and nurse before scouting for the Union. Afterwards she lived in Auburn, New York, on land bought in 1859, cared for her parents and campaigned for women's suffrage. She died on 10 March 1913 in a home for elderly African Americans she had helped found.
Source: Harriet Tubman
