Some people are born into calm waters. Harriet Tubman was born into the fiercest storm of her time. She was born into slavery, she was hurt, she was hunted, and she still chose to walk back into danger again and again so that others could be free.
Born Into the Storm
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross, around March 1822, in Dorchester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her parents, Ben and Harriet “Rit” Ross, were enslaved. As a child she watched three of her sisters sold away from the family, according to the National Archives.
When she was about 13, she was struck on the head and nearly killed. She recovered, but the injury left her with seizures for the rest of her life. Yet she grew more determined than ever to be free. Smithsonian Magazine notes that she understood some of what she experienced afterward as religious visions.
In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took the name Harriet.
Walking Toward Freedom
In 1849, Harriet learned that she and her brothers Ben and Henry were about to be sold. The three first set out together, but the brothers had second thoughts and turned back. Soon after, Harriet went alone. She traveled through Maryland and Delaware into Pennsylvania and reached Philadelphia, the National Park Service and National Archives report. An advertisement offered a $100 reward for her capture.
She later recalled to her biographer, Sarah Bradford, that after crossing into freedom she “looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.”
Going Back for Others
Over about ten years she made about 13 trips back into Maryland, leading roughly 70 people to freedom, most of them family and friends. She also gave instructions to dozens of others who escaped on their own.
She did this even after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the danger far worse, requiring that suspected freedom seekers be reported and arrested. Abolitionists came to call her “Moses.”
A note on the numbers: You may have heard that she rescued 300 people in 19 trips, or that a $40,000 bounty was on her head. Maryland’s official Tubman historians say the records do not support those figures. The true story is heroic enough. A well-known line, “I never lost a passenger,” is often attributed to her from an 1896 women’s suffrage gathering, but it is best shared as attributed rather than as a documented quote.
How did she do it? Trusted helpers, disguises, rivers, the stars, songs sung at different tempos as signals, and, as Maryland’s historians put it, her faith.
A Faith That Would Not Quit
The National Park Service describes Harriet Tubman’s “lifelong, fierce, and unwavering faith in God.” Thomas Garrett, a Delaware abolitionist who helped her, said he had never met anyone with “more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.”
She could not read or write, yet a hymnal inscribed “Harriet Tubman Davis Book” was kept by her family. It is now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
(Psalm 46:1, KJV)
Serving in the Civil War
In early 1862, Tubman went to South Carolina to help the Union cause. She served as a nurse, cook, scout and spy. She used a network of scouts and spies to gather information behind Confederate lines.
On June 1 and 2, 1863, she joined Colonel James Montgomery and Black Union troops in a raid along the Combahee River. She helped organize the escape of the people on the plantations, getting them onto the boats. More than 700 enslaved people were freed in that one operation. The National Archives calls her “the only woman to lead a military action during the War.”
Still Serving in Her Later Years
Tubman made her home in Auburn, New York, on land she bought from William Seward in 1859. After the war she married Union veteran Nelson Davis, supported women’s right to vote, and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged to care for elderly people in need.
Recognition came slowly. She received a widow’s pension after Davis died, and only in 1899 did Congress raise her pension to $20 a month in recognition of her own service as a nurse.
Harriet Tubman died in Auburn on March 10, 1913, and was buried with military honors.
What Her Life Teaches Us
- Freedom is meant to be shared. She could have stayed safe. She went back.
- Our wounds do not get the final word. An injury that could have stopped her became part of her story of dependence on God.
Through every storm, we rise together. Harriet Tubman rose, and then she reached back to lift others with her.
Who in your family’s story reached back to help others rise? Share in the comments below.
Sources: National Park Service, “Harriet Tubman” and “Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad”; National Park Service, “We Called Ourselves Combee” (February 4, 2025); National Archives, “Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913)” and “Claim of Harriet Tubman”; Smithsonian Magazine, “Harriet Tubman’s Hymnal Evokes a Life Devoted to Liberation”; Visit Maryland, “Myths & Facts About Harriet Tubman”; American Battlefield Trust, “Harriet Tubman.”
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