Harriet Tubman: Moses of Her People

Araminta Ross was born enslaved on Maryland's Eastern Shore around 1822. As a teenager, she suffered a severe traumatic brain injury when an overseer threw an iron weight that struck her in the head. She would experience seizures and what she described as vivid religious visions for the rest of her life. She took her mother's first name — Harriet — and her first husband's last name — Tubman — upon her 1849 escape to Philadelphia at the age of roughly twenty-seven.

Tubman returned to Maryland's Eastern Shore thirteen times over the next eleven years. She conducted at least seventy enslaved people — family members, neighbors, strangers — north to freedom in Philadelphia, New York, and, after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made Northern states unsafe, all the way to St. Catharines in Ontario. She carried a revolver. She used a combination of spirituals, forged passes, and intimate knowledge of the Eastern Shore's geography to evade capture. She was never caught, and she never lost a single person on a mission.

The Underground Railroad work, remarkable as it was, was not the whole of Tubman's career. During the Civil War, she served the Union Army as a scout, spy, and armed leader. In June 1863, she planned and led — with Colonel James Montgomery and the Second South Carolina Volunteers — the Combahee River Raid, a gunboat operation that traveled up the Combahee in coastal South Carolina, evaded Confederate torpedoes, and freed approximately seven hundred and fifty people enslaved on rice plantations along the riverbanks. Tubman was the first woman to lead a combat operation in United States military history.

After the war, she settled in Auburn, New York, on land she had bought from Senator William Seward before the war. She opened her home to formerly enslaved people, to the elderly, and to the destitute; she struggled financially for the rest of her life because the federal government refused, for thirty years, to award her a full military pension commensurate with her wartime service. She finally received twenty dollars per month — as a widow — in 1899. She died in 1913.

In 2016, the Treasury Department announced that Tubman would be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. The redesign has been repeatedly delayed and, as of publication, has not been issued. What remains unambiguous is her record: the most successful sustained covert operation in nineteenth-century American history, carried out by a five-foot-tall illiterate woman with a head injury, acting entirely outside the law for eleven years, and never losing a soul.