She was born into slavery on a plantation in Dorchester county, Md.
At an early age she was put to work as a field hand. She received no education, and never learned to read or write.
In 1844, Harriet was forced by her owner to marry a fellow slave, John Tubman. Leaving her husband behind, she escaped in 1849 to the North, and thereafter.
helped lead other slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. She undertook the most hazardous missions, and employed stern measures, including the.
threat of death, against frightened fugitives who wanted to give up the flight and return to bondage. Quaker sympathizers helped her on her 20 dangerous journeys.
to the South to collect new groups of fugitives, and John Brown was one of her friends. In 1857 she rescued her parents, setting them up in a house in Auburn,.
N.Y. A $40,000 bounty was put on her head, but Harriet was never captured and reportedly never lost a "passenger" on the Underground Railroad. In all, she is.
credited with helping more than 300 slaves to win freedom. Between trips she worked as a cook, spoke in Boston at antislavery meetings, and supplied material.
to the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City.
When the Civil War began, Harriet Tubman was attached to the Union Army in South Carolina, serving as a cook, nurse, scout for raiding parties, and spy.
behind Confederate lines. After the war she settled in Auburn and continued to work for the black freedmen. Her story was first told by Sarah Bradford in 1869,.
published for Tubman's benefit, and later revised as Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (1886). She died in Auburn, N.Y., on March 10, 1913, and.
she was buried with full military honors. The citizens of Auburn raised a monument in her memory and for some years maintained the Harriet Tubman Home for.
needy blacks, of which she had been the founder.
he term Underground Railroad arose as a colloquialism during America's pre-Civil War.