Born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849 and then returned roughly thirteen times over the next decade to lead about seventy people, most of them family and friends, out of bondage. During the Civil War she served the Union Army as a scout, spy, and nurse, and in June 1863 she guided an armed raid up South Carolina’s Combahee River that freed more than 700 enslaved people — an operation the National Park Service describes as the first armed raid in U.S. military history planned and led by a woman.
At a Glance
- Born
- c. March 1822 (exact date unknown), Dorchester County, Maryland
- Died
- 10 March 1913, Auburn, New York
- Birth name
- Araminta Ross
- Known for
- Underground Railroad conductor (1850s); Combahee River Raid, South Carolina (1–2 June 1863); Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, Auburn, New York
- Fields
- Abolition · Military
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Tubman was born Araminta Ross, called Minty, in Dorchester County, Maryland, to Harriet “Rit” Green and Ben Ross, both enslaved. Her exact birth date is unknown; historians date her birth to about March 1822 from a ledger entry of her enslaver, Edward Brodess, recording a payment to a midwife for Rit that month, and from an 1849 runaway notice describing her as about twenty-seven. She was one of nine children, and she watched Brodess sell several of her sisters away from the family.
Hired out from early childhood, she worked as a nursemaid, field hand, and timber worker. As an adolescent she was struck in the head by a two-pound weight that an overseer had thrown at another enslaved person who was fleeing. The injury nearly killed her and left her with lifelong seizures, headaches, and sleeping spells, which she often described in religious terms as visions. Around 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took the name Harriet, after her mother.
Life and Work
After Brodess died in March 1849 and his estate threatened to sell her, Tubman fled in the fall of 1849, traveling alone, mostly at night, to Philadelphia. Within a year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made free states unsafe for anyone who had escaped. Tubman went back anyway. Between 1850 and 1860 she made about thirteen trips into Maryland and guided roughly seventy people to freedom, including several of her brothers and, in 1857, her aged parents, whom she brought to St. Catharines, Canada West. Because the 1850 law reached every free state, she often moved people on to Canada, beyond the reach of American courts and slave catchers. Later accounts inflated her rescues to the hundreds; the lower figures rest on the documentary work of modern historians.
In 1859 she bought a house and land in Auburn, New York, from Senator William H. Seward, and settled her parents there. In April 1858 she met John Brown in St. Catharines as he planned his raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and helped him look for recruits among formerly enslaved people living in Canada, though she did not take part in the October 1859 attack.
In 1862 Tubman traveled to Union-occupied Port Royal, South Carolina, where she nursed soldiers and formerly enslaved refugees and organized a network of scouts who gathered intelligence behind Confederate lines. On the night of 1–2 June 1863 she guided Colonel James Montgomery and about 150 Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers aboard Union gunboats up the Combahee River. Drawing on information from local enslaved people about the positions of Confederate mines, she directed the boats to landings where people were waiting. The raiders burned rice plantations and freed more than 700 people; the figure most often given is about 750. Montgomery held formal command, but contemporary reports credited Tubman with planning and guiding the expedition. On 18 July 1863 she was on Morris Island when the 54th Massachusetts Infantry assaulted Fort Wagner; by her own later account she served the regiment’s men a meal before the attack, and afterward she nursed the wounded at Beaufort.
Despite this service, Tubman was never regularly paid by the army. After the war she returned to Auburn, where in 1869 she married Nelson Davis, a Black Union veteran. That same year Sarah H. Bradford published Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, whose proceeds helped support her. Only after Davis died in 1888 did she receive a federal widow’s pension; Congress later increased it in partial recognition of her own wartime nursing. She also campaigned for women’s suffrage, speaking at meetings in New York and elsewhere.
Legacy
In her last decades Tubman worked to create a home for elderly and poor Black Americans on land adjoining her own. She transferred the property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1903, and the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged formally opened in 1908. She lived there herself at the end of her life and died of pneumonia on 10 March 1913. After a funeral at Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church, whose construction she had helped fund, she was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Her life is now commemorated by two units of the National Park System: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Dorchester County, proclaimed on 25 March 2013 and later made a national historical park, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, established on 10 January 2017. The site includes her residence, the Home for the Aged, and the Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church. In 2016 the Treasury Department announced plans to place her portrait on the $20 note.
Because Tubman could not read or write, much of her story reached print through white intermediaries such as Bradford, whose books mixed documented events with embellishment. Biographies by Kate Clifford Larson and Catherine Clinton, both published in 2004, rebuilt her life from court records, ledgers, pension files, and letters, separating the documented record from the legend while confirming the scale of what she did.
Harriet Tubman’s documented record as liberator, spy, and soldier is remarkable enough without legend, and historians have worked to separate the two. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- c. March 1822 Born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland.
- c. 1844 Marries John Tubman, a free Black man, and takes the name Harriet.
- Fall 1849 Escapes alone to Philadelphia.
- 1850 – 1860 Makes about thirteen trips into Maryland, guiding roughly seventy people to freedom.
- 1859 Buys a house and land in Auburn, New York, from William H. Seward.
- 1862 Arrives at Port Royal, South Carolina, to serve as nurse, scout, and spy.
- 1–2 June 1863 Guides the Combahee River Raid, freeing more than 700 enslaved people.
- 1869 Marries Nelson Davis; Sarah Bradford publishes Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman.
- 1908 Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged formally opens in Auburn.
- 10 March 1913 Dies of pneumonia in Auburn, New York.
Sources and Further Reading
- National Park Service, “Harriet Tubman,” Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. Link
- National Park Service, “Determining Harriet Tubman’s Birth Year.” Link
- Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, N.Y.: W. J. Moses, 1869). Link
- Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).
- Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).
- U.S. Department of the Interior, “Secretary Jewell Formally Establishes Harriet Tubman National Historical Park,” 10 January 2017. Link
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