Chapter 4
Pathways to Freedom: Marriage, Legal Battles, and Escape
In 1844, at nineteen, Araminta married John Tubman, a free black man from northern Dorchester County. Their union was unusual, as free black men rarely married enslaved women since any children would inherit the mother's enslaved status. No records exist of their courtship or wedding ceremony, though family lore indicates Araminta was deeply in love with John. Their marriage suggests John's deep attachment to Araminta despite the complications of her enslaved status.
Shortly after her marriage, Araminta paid five dollars to a lawyer to investigate her mother's legal status. The attorney discovered that Rit should have been freed at age forty-five according to Atthow Pattison's will, and that her children would also be entitled to freedom at that age. This revelation was devastating-her mother had been illegally enslaved for over a decade, and some siblings may have been born free. Whether through indifference or fraud, Rit and her children had been cheated of their freedom. This betrayal fueled Araminta's resolve to liberate herself.
Ever since her skull injury, Araminta experienced powerful visions and narcoleptic spells. Graphic nightmares plagued her-horsemen kidnapping slaves, women having children torn from them. These fears were particularly potent for a married woman who, five years into her marriage, remained childless. The absence of children may have strained her relationship with John, who clearly wanted offspring. While Araminta felt increasingly drawn toward freedom in the North, John, already a free man, didn't share her urgency to relocate.
In 1849, hearing rumors that Brodess planned to sell her "down the river," Araminta began praying for her master's conversion to Christianity. When this seemed futile, she changed tactics: "Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord." When Brodess shortly thereafter died, she felt guilt but also clarity. Like Sojourner Truth before her, Araminta realized she needed to combine faith with action rather than merely praying for deliverance. With her owner's death creating uncertainty about her family's fate, she confronted a momentous choice: "there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."
When Araminta escaped slavery in 1849, she transformed herself, taking her mother's name Harriet while keeping her husband's surname Tubman. Her escape was remarkable-most successful fugitives were men, yet here was a young woman venturing beyond her home counties for the first time, displaying the nerve and resourcefulness that would become her trademark.
In September 1849, fearing sale after Brodess's death, Tubman fled. A notice in the October 3 Cambridge Democrat offered $50 in Maryland or $100 out of state for "MINTY, aged about 27 years, chesnut color, fine looking, bout 5 feet high." Whether she left with her brothers or alone, Tubman struck out for freedom through Maryland, Delaware, and into Pennsylvania, relying on her wits and determination.
Chapter 5
The Underground Railroad: Networks of Liberation
Tubman received crucial help from antislavery networks during her escape. A white woman gave her a paper with two names and directions to a safe house. At the first house, she was instructed to sweep the yard to appear as a servant, before being transported after dark to another station. Quakers like the Levertons likely assisted her journey. By the 1840s, the Underground Railroad had established networks with code words, "stationmasters," "conductors," and "cargo" (fugitives).
Tubman likely followed the Choptank River northeast across the Delmarva peninsula, using flowing water as her guide. She traveled mostly on foot, hiding during daylight and moving at night, taking anywhere from ten days to three weeks to cover the nearly ninety miles to Pennsylvania. The Mendinhall estate near Longwood, with its imposing stone gates, may have been one of her stopping points before reaching Philadelphia.
Tubman arrived in Philadelphia unharmed, fulfilling her recurring vision of "flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains" to freedom. In her dreams, she would reach a great fence or river, nearly sink from exhaustion, and then be pulled across by "ladies all drest in white." Though she left no account of who actually helped her cross to freedom, her arrival marked the realization of a hope that remained just a dream for most enslaved Americans.
For most enslaved people, freedom remained an elusive dream, with many seeking salvation only in the afterlife. African American spirituals reflected this sentiment, describing heaven as a place "where slavery and prejudice, sin and sorrow in every form, are unfelt and unknown." The northern states were revered as a kind of Canaan-a promised land where blacks could live freely.
The Underground Railroad evolved gradually, with fugitive William Wells Brown noting that when he escaped in 1834, "there was no Underground Railroad" and "the North Star was, in many instances, the only friend" available to escapees. The movement formalized in the mid-1830s when southern bounty hunters began aggressive campaigns in the North. In 1835, vigilance committees formed in New York City, followed by Philadelphia in 1838, initially to protect free blacks from kidnapping. These groups soon expanded their mission to assist fugitives in transit and eventually to actively support slave escapes.
Unlike most UGRR conductors who guided fugitives only between specific stations, a rare breed called "abductors" ventured into the South to extract slaves. Before Tubman, these were exclusively white men whose activities became known only when they were caught. Tubman would become the most famous and successful of all these operatives-and the only woman to achieve such prominence.
Chapter 6
The Moses of Her People: Rescue Missions and Resistance
When Harriet's former master died in 1849, his widow planned to sell Keziah (Kizzy), daughter of Harriet's sister who had been sold south. Kizzy's husband, John Bowley, a free black, contacted Harriet in Philadelphia about the impending December 1850 sale. Despite the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law that put northern fugitives at risk, Harriet decided to help rescue her niece rather than let history repeat itself. Using Philadelphia's antislavery networks, she arranged to meet Bowley after he smuggled Kizzy and her two children from the Cambridge auction house across the Chesapeake to Bodkin's Point. Harriet then hid the family in Baltimore until securing their passage to freedom.
Devastated by John Tubman's rejection and new relationship, Harriet realized "if he could do without her, she could do without him." This watershed moment in 1851 forced her to reimagine her future. Building on her previous successful rescues and growing network of antislavery contacts, she committed fully to the Underground Railroad in December 1851. Her first major mission as an abductor included eleven fugitives-among them her brother William Henry and his sweetheart Catherine, who disguised herself in men's clothing. For the first time, Harriet guided strangers as well as family members, taking them all the way to Canada. She declared, "I wouldn't trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer," likely using Frederick Douglass's Rochester home as a safe house along the way.
Harriet's transformation into the UGRR's most famous conductor was as significant as her self-emancipation. From 1852, she made at least one or two trips yearly into slave territory, developing a pattern of rescuing about ten fugitives at a time. She traveled south by train (reasoning a Black woman entering slave states was less suspicious than one leaving), while her "cargo" moved north by boat or on foot. She established a seasonal rhythm-rescuing parties in fall, wintering in Canada, earning money in northern states during spring and summer, then planning autumn raids. By winter 1853-54, she had completed at least five trips, freeing nearly thirty slaves.
Tubman employed ingenious strategies to avoid capture. When warned about police watching a bridge in Wilmington, she dispersed her party into safe houses and enlisted Thomas Garrett's help. Garrett arranged for African American bricklayers to hide Tubman's fugitives under bricks and tools in their wagons, allowing them to cross the guarded bridge undetected. Tubman demanded absolute discipline on missions, carrying a pistol and willing to use force when necessary. Once, when a man threatened to return to his plantation during a difficult journey, Tubman aimed her revolver at his head saying "Move or die!"
Her fearlessness became legendary, with Thomas Garrett noting she seemed protected by "a special angel." Tubman relied completely on divine guidance, claiming God spoke directly to her soul. She demonstrated uncanny intuition about danger, describing it as a "flutter, flutter" in her heart that warned her to change course. During one mission, suffering from severe tooth pain, she simply used her pistol to knock out her own infected teeth. Even her narcoleptic "spells" enhanced her mystical reputation.
Chapter 7
From Underground to Battlefield: Civil War Service
As the nation moved toward civil war, Maryland slaveholders grew increasingly desperate to capture Tubman, offering rewards up to $40,000. Following Lincoln's election in 1860, South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Secession in December, with other states joining to form the Confederate nation. Despite growing dangers, Tubman made one last rescue mission in December 1860, smuggling a couple with two children and collecting two more fugitives along the way, before friends in St. Catharines convinced her to suspend her Underground Railroad activities.
When the Civil War began in April 1861, Tubman immediately crossed back into the United States. She informally joined Massachusetts troops under General Benjamin Butler, moving through Maryland toward Fort Monroe. Though initially skeptical of using former slaves as soldiers, Butler offered protection to runaway slaves as "contraband of war." Fort Monroe became a magnet for escaping slaves, with over a thousand contrabands residing there by August 1861. Tubman assisted these refugees with food, clothing, and care-working as cook, laundress, and nurse.
After months of merely nursing the sick, Tubman's extraordinary talents were finally recognized. With support from Colonel Thomas Higginson and Colonel James Montgomery (a former John Brown ally), Tubman established a spy network in early 1863. Operating under Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's authority, she recruited local men like Solomon Gregory and others to infiltrate Confederate territory. Her intelligence operations proved invaluable, leading to successful military actions including the capture of Jacksonville, Florida in March 1863.
The Combahee River Raid was a complete triumph for Tubman and the Union forces. More than 750 slaves were liberated while Confederate defenders managed only four ineffective shots before retreating. The raid devastated prestigious plantations belonging to the Heywards, Middletons, Lowndes, and other elite Carolina families, leaving them "bereft and humiliated." Confederate reports blamed their own troops for allowing "Negro wretches" to march unmolested, while acknowledging the enemy seemed "well guided by persons thoroughly acquainted with the river and country"-a testament to Tubman's intelligence work.
Tubman later recounted comical moments from the raid, including wrestling with a woman's pigs (nicknamed Beauregard and Jefferson Davis) and vowing never again to wear a skirt on military operations. The raid proved the effectiveness of black troops and Tubman's strategic brilliance, as Union commanders had trusted her assessment of enemy positions enough to send untested colored soldiers into combat. The operation struck a powerful symbolic blow, exposing the hypocrisy of Confederate claims about "loyal darkies" while demonstrating that black soldiers were indeed "well worth the trouble."
Chapter 8
Legacy of Liberation: Final Years and Lasting Impact
After the Civil War, Tubman retired from her dangerous work and settled into her Auburn home. Rather than continuing her life on the road, she established a household that became not just a haven for her extended family but a refuge for society's forgotten and abandoned. Her charitable work would become emblematic for reformers, demonstrating how individual determination could create meaningful collective change.
Tubman became a powerful voice in the women's suffrage movement, bluntly stating when questioned about female voting rights: "I suffered enough to believe it." She developed into a spellbinding orator with "great dramatic power" according to preacher James Freeman Clarke. She attended suffrage meetings faithfully in upstate New York and was honored at events like the 1897 New England Women's Suffrage Association fete in Boston.
After settling in Auburn, Tubman focused her energies on helping those around her, particularly the needy and poor within the Finger Lakes region. She collected funds for freedpeople's schools and hospitals, and channeled donations to help orphans, disabled veterans, the blind, and other disadvantaged African Americans who had few opportunities in segregated social services. She took in strangers without questioning how she would provide for them alongside her own family.
Tubman launched a thirty-year struggle to obtain compensation for her military service during the Civil War. Though she had made considerable contributions to the Union cause by assisting with housing and hygiene for contrabands and conducting reconnaissance missions, her service lacked proper documentation. In 1867, with mounting financial pressures as the sole support of her aged parents, she renewed her claim with help from prominent supporters like Gerrit Smith. Her friend Sarah Bradford published an authorized biography to raise funds, which eventually yielded Tubman over $1,200.
In October 1867, Tubman learned that John Tubman had been murdered in Cambridge. Within fifteen months after becoming a widow, Harriet married Nelson Davis, a twenty-five-year-old black Union veteran who had initially moved into her home to recover from tuberculosis. Their wedding on March 18, 1869, at Auburn's Central Presbyterian Church was attended by family members and local dignitaries-a stark contrast to her unrecorded slave marriage. Despite their significant age difference (Harriet was at least twenty years his senior), census records often listed them as closer in age, and by all accounts, the difference was insignificant to them.
Tubman never abandoned her dream of establishing a charitable institution for needy African Americans. In 1896, she shocked Auburn by purchasing the old Beardsley estate next door to her property for $1,450 at public auction. With help from AME Zion Church elders who secured a mortgage and fundraised the down payment, she expanded her twenty-five acres of property. By 1903, overwhelmed by managing the property, Tubman donated it to the AME Zion Church with stipulations that she would hold a lifetime deed and the place would serve "aged and indigent colored people." On June 23, 1908, draped in an American flag, Tubman was guest of honor at the grand opening celebration of the Harriet Tubman Home-the only charity outside New York City dedicated to sheltering African Americans in the state.
Chapter 9
A Light That Never Dims: Tubman's Enduring Significance
Harriet Tubman was buried with military honors in Auburn's Fort Hill Cemetery in March 1913. Despite the era being considered the nadir of American race relations, Auburn honored her with a bronze tablet funded by the Auburn Business Man's Association and the Cayuga County Historical Society. At the dedication ceremony in June 1914, Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address, Mary Talbert spoke on Tubman's life, and her grandniece Alice H. Lucas unveiled the plaque-a rare integrated civic event presided over by the mayor.
Tubman's legacy extends far beyond her lifetime into modern institutions and memorials. Her name graces hotlines and shelters for abused women and children, the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora at York University in Ontario, and impressive statues in Boston (the first of a woman on public grounds) and Battle Creek, Michigan. Yet her image remains contested-Maryland officials balked at portraying her with the rifle she carried during the Civil War, while conservatives have sometimes used her prominence to attack perceived "revisionism" in history education.
For thousands of African Americans, Tubman represents not just a mythical figure but the liberator who delivered their ancestors to freedom-a concrete gift that continues through generations. Though her story fell into literary obscurity until a 1943 biography revived interest, the 1950s brought sympathetic reexaminations by Dorothy Sterling and Ann Petry. Children's books about Tubman have proliferated-six in the 1960s, five in the 1970s, six in the 1980s, twenty-one in the 1990s, and sixteen between 2000-2003.
Tubman's enduring message-"If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going"-continues to inspire. Born into slavery's darkness, she freed herself and was reborn, not as a messianic figure but as an instrument of God who believed in the universal light within each person.
As Frederick Douglass noted in 1868, while his antislavery work brought applause, "God bless you" was Tubman's only reward, with "the midnight sky and the silent stars" as witnesses to her devotion and heroism. History itself now stands witness to her heroic deeds, urging us, in her own words, to "Keep Going."
