Biographical+Information

Harriet Tubman is one of the most well-known conductor's of the Underground Railroad. It is reported that during a ten year span, she made around nineteen trips into the South and escorted over three hundred slaves to freedom in the North. She told Frederick Douglas that she never lost a single passenger. Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland around 1820. Some sources actually cite a birthdate of March 18, 1822, but this is not a confirmed birthdate. Harriet began working as a house servant around age five or six. When she was about twelve or thirteen, she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens she was injured trying to protect another slave from an angry overseer. The man threw an object believed to be a brick or an iron weight and hit her in the head. Throughout her life this injury caused her to have spells where she would fall into deep sleeps, or have seizures. ﻿ Sometime around 1844 she married a free black man named John Tubman and took his last name. Around 1849 when she feared being sold, she ran away on foot one night. She followed the North Star to Pennsylvania where she got a job and began to save her money. Starting the next year, she made trips back to Maryland to rescue her family members and others. By the time she tried to rescue her husband, he had remarried, so she found other slaves seeking freedom and helped them get to freedom in the North. By the end of her career as a conductor, she had brought about 300 slaves to freedom in the North or Canada. She as so successful that slave owners feared and hated her enough to fund a $40,000.00 reward for her capture. This success in her job as "conductor" of the Underground Railroad led to her being given the nickname of //Moses//. The famous John Brown said that "General Tubman" was one of the bravest persons on the continent. Frederick Douglass also spoke of the danger and hardship she encountered to free enslaved people. ﻿Harriet Tubman died March 10, 1913 in Auburn, New York at the approximate age of 93. ﻿ []  []