Harriet Tubman

Her mother Rit cooked in the big house and her father Ben ran the timber gangs, and between them they had nine children. Edward Brodess sold three of the daughters south and the family never saw them again. When a Georgia trader came for the youngest boy, Rit hid him for a month and told Brodess that the first man through her door would leave with his head split open. The sale did not happen. Araminta Ross was hired out at five or six to rock a stranger's cradle and was whipped five times before breakfast on one morning she remembered all her life. She checked muskrat traps in the marsh while sick with measles. By her teens she was driving oxen and hauling logs.

In December 1850 she went to Baltimore and waited while her niece Kessiah was auctioned off in Cambridge. Kessiah's free husband made the winning bid, and while the auctioneer stepped away for lunch the whole family walked off and sailed 60 miles up the bay in a log canoe. That was the method: patience, kin, other people's money, and weather. John Brown called her General Tubman. Frederick Douglass wrote to her that he had wrought in the day and she in the night. BriefHistory carries the rescues and the war record. This page is the ledger she was left holding.

An overseer once threw a two-pound weight at a man who had slipped off to the store, and hit her instead. She said it broke her skull. She lay on a loom bench for two days without care, and for the next 60 years had seizures, blinding headaches and visions she took as instruction from God. In the late 1890s she went to Massachusetts General and had her head opened, by her own account without anesthesia, biting down on a bullet the way she had watched soldiers do. Money was the second wound. In the 1840s she had paid a white lawyer five dollars to read the old wills and learned that her mother should have been freed at 45 and that she herself should have been born free. No court would hear it.

She could not write, so in 1868 she authorized Sarah Hopkins Bradford to assemble her recollections into a book, with a revised version in 1886. Both cast her as a latter-day Joan of Arc, and the numbers grew with each retelling. Earl Conrad spent four years finding a publisher for a sober account in 1943, and no research biography followed for 60 years, until Jean Humez, Kate Clifford Larson and Catherine Clinton went back to the documents. Edda Fields-Black won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History for a study of the raid. That November the Maryland Army National Guard posthumously commissioned her a brigadier general. In July 2026 the Treasury secretary said the currency portrait is no longer planned.

Harriet Tubman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Cambridge auction rescue mission
  Her niece Kessiah and two children, taken off the block during the auctioneer's lunch and sailed to Baltimore 1850
• The rescue of Ben and Rit Ross mission
  Her elderly parents, both free by then and both in danger, moved north to Canada 1857
• Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman book
  Dictated to Sarah Hopkins Bradford. She hoped to write her own memoir and never did 1869
• Harriet, the Moses of Her People book
  Bradford's rewrite, issued at Tubman's request and revised again in 1901 1886
• Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged company
  Built on 25 acres she bought at auction in 1896 for 1,215 dollars. She opposed its 100 dollar entrance fee 1908

• c. 1828 aged ~6 Hired out as a nursemaid before she is ten She was whipped for the baby's crying and carried the scars for life.
• 1840 aged ~18 Her father is manumitted at 45 under a promise made by his enslaver He went on working the same timber for the same family.
• c. 1844 aged ~22 Marries John Tubman, a free man, and begins calling herself Harriet Any children would have been born enslaved, following her status.
• September 17, 1849 aged 27 Runs with her brothers Ben and Henry, who lose their nerve They turned back within two weeks and made her return with them. She left again alone that autumn.
• December 1850 aged 28 Takes her niece Kessiah and two children out of a Cambridge auction
• 1859 aged ~37 Buys seven acres in Fleming, New York, from the Sewards for 1,200 dollars It gave her somewhere to put her parents, who had been living in Canada.
• March 18, 1869 aged 47 Marries Nelson Davis, a veteran of the 8th U.S. Colored Infantry He died of tuberculosis in 1888. She was granted a widow's pension seven years after that.
• 1873 aged ~51 Swindled by two men promising a buried trunk of Confederate gold They chloroformed her in the woods, took her purse, and left her a trunk of rocks.
• March 10, 1913 aged 91 Dies of pneumonia in the charity home that carries her name She had entered it as a resident two years earlier, ill and without money.

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