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Harriet Tubman
Traveling cautiously by night with the North Star as her guide, this frightened yet determined slave headed North toward the Mason-Dixon Line, the line separating the land of freedom from the land of slavery.
It was early one morning when Harriet finally arrived on free soil in Pennsylvania. "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven," she later related to others.
Harriet Ross was born 27 years earlier when Dorchester farms produced abundant harvests of grain and fruit, and barnyards were full of animals. But the most profitable crop was that of human livestock, and for more than two centuries, planters lived here comfortably on the labor of their slaves.
Ben Ross (Harriet Tubman's father) lived on Anthony Thompson's plantation near Woolford from the early 1800s until about 1847. Tubman was the fifth of nine children of Harriet "Rit" Green and Benjamin Ross, both slaves. Originally named Araminta, or "Minty," Harriet Tubman was probably born in early 1822. Edward Brodess, the stepson of Anthony Thompson, claimed ownership of Rit and her children through his mother Mary Pattison Brodess Thompson. Ben Ross, the slave of Anthony Thompson, was a timber inspector who supervised and managed a vast timbering operation on Thompson's land. In 1823 Brodess took Green and her 5 oldest (including baby Araminta) with him to his own farm in Bucktown, a small agricultural village ten miles to the east. Brodess often hired Tubman out to temporary masters, some who were cruel and negligent, while selling other members of her family illegally to out of state buyers, permanently fracturing her family.
Harriet Tubman's grandmother, Modesty, was probably born in Africa, possibly of Ashanti heritage. She was forcibly brought here in shackles, enduring the deadly Middle Passage during the mid-1700s. For centuries, Ashanti leaders had fought British invasions on the West Coast of Africa, resisting colonization until 1896 when England successfully crushed Ashanti warriors. Ashanti courage and great skill had long been legendary in the United States, perhaps contributing early on to Harriet's sense of rebellion.
Edward Brodess had too many enslaved people to profitably use on his own plantation, so he hired them out frequently. Harriet was first hired out around the age of six to a local farmer and his wife, to help tend to their newborn baby and to help set muskrat traps in the marsh. This family, and other temporary masters to whom Tubman was hired out to, were incredibly cruel and negligent, often beating and starving her until she had to be returned home and nursed back to health by her mother Rit. Scars from these beatings remained visible until the day she died over eighty years later.
Around 1835, while working as a field hand for another temporary master, Tubman was called to the local village dry goods store to help the plantation cook purchase items for the kitchen. When they approached the store, they were met by an angry overseer in hot pursuit of a defiant enslaved young man. The overseer ordered Tubman to prevent the young man from leaving the store, but she refused. As the young man ran out the door, the overseer picked up a 2 pound weight from the counter and threw it, intending to hit the young man. But the weight struck Harriet, instead, with such force that it shattered her skull, nearly killing her. This sever injury left her suffering from headaches, seizures and sleeping spells that plagued her for the rest of her life.
Tubman's spiritual life was an intensely personal experience, rooted in West African cultural and spiritual traditions passed down from her grandmother and other Africans in her community. These traditions were blended with a variety of Christian teaching gleaned from the religious faiths practiced by enslavers. Tubman's deep faith guided her throughout her long life, and she believed that God never sent her on a mission without his protection.
During the late 1830s and early 1840s, Tubman was hired out to John Trevalian Stewart, a Madison merchant and shipbuilder, bringing her back to the familial and social community near where her father lived and where she had been born. She regained much of her strength, working on the docks and in the forests with her father. Here she met African American mariners who taught her about the North Star, and who may have told her about safe places in the North. Her father taught her how to survive in the forest.
Eventually Edward Brodess allowed her to hire her own time after paying him $60 per year for her labor. With the extra money she was able to save, she purchased a pair of oxen, further maximizing her earning potential. She was extremely proud of her physical strength, boasting that she could easily carry a barrel of produce over her shoulder, and chop half a cord of wood a day. About 1844 she married a local free black named John Tubman, shedding her childhood name Minty in favor of Harriet. No doubt she and John hoped to earn enough money to buy her freedom from Brodess.
In 1840, Harriet's father, Ben Ross, was set free through a provision in the will of his enslaver, Anthony Thompson, who had died in 1836. Rit, however, remained enslaved by Edward Brodess, even though she should have been free as well. According to a will, written in 1791 by Atthow Pattison, Rit was supposed to be set free when she reached the age of forty-five. This meant that she should have been a free woman sometime around 1830. Edward Brodess, Pattison's great-grandson, did not honor the instructions in this will and kept Rit illegally enslaved. Tubman paid a lawyer to research this will, and when she discovered the truth, she became very angry. But slaves had no rights and there was nothing Rit or Harriet could do about it.
On March 7, 1849, Edward Brodess died at the age of 47 years old. He left behind his wife Eliza Ann and eight children. He also left his family deeply in debt, so Eliza looked to the one asset she possessed as a means to pay off these obligations: her slaves. When Harriet and her family heard this, they became frightened. Edward Brodess had already sold away three of Harriet's sisters to the Deep South, and Harriet, her siblings, and her nieces and nephews, knew it was only a matter of time before they would be sold away from family and friends, too.
On September 17, 1849, Harriet and her two brothers, Ben and Henry, tried to escape. They stayed away for two or three weeks, but became fearful of being caught, so they returned. But Harriet knew she had no choice, so later that fall, Tubman took her own liberty. Since 1847, Tubman had been working for Dr. Anthony C. Thompson, Anthony Thompson's son. Dr. Thompson owned a home in Cambridge in addition to a vast plantation at Poplar Neck in Caroline County, where Ben Ross supervised Thompson's timbering operations. It was from one of these properties that Tubman fled, bravely singing a coded good-bye song to her family and friends in the slave quarters as Dr. Thompson rode nearby.
In December 1850, Tubman conducted her first rescue mission. Her niece, Kessiah Jolley Bowley and her two children were set to be auctioned to the highest bidder at the County Court House. Kessiah's free husband, John Bowley, devised a plan with Tubman to bring Kessiah and the children away before they could be sold. On the day of the auction, John bid on his wife and children, even though he did not have the money to pay for them. Before the auctioneer could call for payment, John quickly and safely hid his family in a nearby home. That night, he secretly sailed them to the Baltimore waterfront where Tubman, other family and friends, secreted them until Tubman could safely bring them on to Philadelphia.
Her dangerous missions continued throughout the 1850s, as she sought to bring away her sister Rachel (who died before she could be rescued), her brothers Robert, Ben, Henry and Moses, her parents, and other friends and family members. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 left most refugee slaves vulnerable to recapture and many fled to the safety and protection of Canada. Indeed, Tubman brought many of her charges to St. Catharines, Ontario, where they settled into a growing community of freedom seekers.
Underground Railroad activity was dangerous business, particularly in the South. If caught, Underground Railroad participants risked heavy fines, imprisonment, sale into slavery, and even death. The Underground network that Tubman relied upon and participated in was dominated by free and enslaved African Americans, like Jacob Jackson and Samuel Green, and William Still of Philadelphia, who risked their lives to assist freedom seekers, reach safety in the North. The network was also supported by white abolitionists, including Quakers Jonah Kelley and Jacob Leverton, and Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware. Tubman used a variety of routes; some overland through Caroline County into Delaware, another by water through the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and beyond. She employed various strategies to fool pursuing slave catchers: acting as an old woman, dressing like a man, traveling south to throw hunters of their tracks, and she used coded songs, like "Go Down Moses" and "Bound For the Promised Land", to signal to her charges that it was safe to come out of their hiding places. She also carried a pistol for protection and to encourage weary and hesitant fugitives who wanted to turn back.
She won the admiration of black and white abolitionists throughout the North who sometimes provided her with funds to continue her activities. William Lloyd Garrison, the famous anti-slavery activist, called Tubman "Moses" for her remarkable success in leading bondsmen and woman out of Maryland. In 1858, Tubman met with the legendary freedom fighter, John Brown, in her North Street home in St. Catharines. Impressed by his passion for ending slavery, she committed herself to helping him recruit former slaves to join him on his planned raid at Harper's Ferry, VA Though she hoped to be at his side when the raid took place in October 1859, illness may have prevented her from joining him. In 1859, William Henry Seward, Lincoln's future Secretary of State, sold Tubman a home on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, where she eventually settled her aged parents and other family members. On her way to Boston in April 1860, Tubman became the heroine of the day when she helped rescue a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle of Troy, NY, from the custody of United States Marshals charged with returning him to his Virginia master.
In early 1862, after the Civil War had started, Tubman continued her battle for freedom by joining Northern abolitionists as they traveled to the South in support of Union activities at Port Royal, in the Hilton Head District of South Carolina. Throughout the Civil War she provided badly needed nursing care to black soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated slaves who crowded Union camps. Tubman's military service expanded to include spying and scouting behind Confederate lines. In early June 1863, she became the first woman to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina black regiment up the Combahee River, routing out Confederate outposts, destroying stockpiles of cotton, food and weapons, and liberating over 750 slaves.
After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn, New York. There she began another career as a community activist, humanitarian, and suffragist. In 1869, Sarah Bradford published a short biography of Tubman called "Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman," bringing brief fame and financial relief to Tubman and her family. She married Nelson Davis, a veteran, that same year; her husband John Tubman had been killed in 1867 in Dorchester County, Maryland. She struggled financially the rest of her life, however. Denied payment for her scouting and spying services to the Union Army, she eventually received a widow's pension as the wife of Nelson Davis, and, later, a Civil War nurse's pension. Her home remained a refuge for orphans, the homeless, the sick and disabled. She lived mostly on the brink of poverty, preferring to share or give away whatever little she had to help someone else.
The Moses of Her People
In June, 1944, the United States navy launched a Liberty Ship called the S.S. Harriet Tubman, one of the very few to be named after an African American.
Friends and fellow slaves of Harriet Tubman have descendants who return to Bucktown every June to gather at Bazzel Methodist Episcopal Church for a service in memory of Harriet Tubman.
Accomplishments
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One night, in the late fall of 1849, 
She tapped into an Underground Railroad that was already functioning well on the Eastern Shore, and, in fact, scores of slaves had been running away from Dorchester and the neighboring counties of Talbot and Caroline for decades. Traveling by night, using the North Star and instructions from white and black helpers, she found her way to Philadelphia. She sought work as a domestic, saving her money to help the rest of her family escape. From 1850 to 1860, Tubman conducted approximately thirteen 
Her humanitarian work triumphed with the opening of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, located on land abutting her own property in Auburn, which she successfully purchased by mortgage and then transferred to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1903. Active in the suffrage movement since 1860, Tubman continued to appear at local and national suffrage conventions until the early 1900s. She died at the age of 91 on March 10, 1913 in Auburn, New York.
