Araminta Ross of Dorchester County
She was born Araminta Ross on Maryland's Eastern Shore, probably around 1822; enslaved people's births were recorded loosely or not at all, and her exact year remains uncertain. Hired out as a small child to check muskrat traps and mind infants, she was beaten by employers and sent back sick. In her teens an overseer threw an iron weight at another enslaved man; it struck her head instead. She suffered seizures, headaches and sudden sleeping spells for the rest of her life, along with vivid visions she understood as messages from God.
Around 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took the name Harriet after her mother. Her legal status did not change. When her owner died in 1849 and the estate faced sale, she made her decision quickly: sale south meant permanent separation from everyone she knew. She walked out alone, following the Choptank River and the North Star roughly ninety miles to Philadelphia, guided in part by people whose names she never recorded. She was free, and immediately began planning to come back.
Thirteen journeys, not nineteen
The familiar figures, nineteen trips and three hundred people rescued, come from Sarah Bradford's admiring 1869 biography, written partly to raise money for Tubman in poverty. Careful modern research, notably by the historian Kate Clifford Larson, puts it closer to thirteen missions and about seventy people brought out personally, with instructions given to perhaps seventy more who escaped on their own. The revision costs nothing. Each journey meant walking voluntarily back into a state where her capture meant torture or death, and doing it again after each success.
She worked in winter, when nights were long, and often started on Saturdays because runaway notices could not be printed until Monday. She used disguises, forged passes, sedatives for crying babies, and above all a network: the free Black communities of the Eastern Shore, the Quaker ironmaster Thomas Garrett in Wilmington, William Still's vigilance committee in Philadelphia. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made northern cities unsafe, she extended the route to St. Catharines in Canada. The Underground Railroad was never one woman; she was its most relentless conductor.
Scout, soldier, and a pension long refused
When the Civil War came she went to the South Carolina coast as a nurse, cook and then scout, recruiting formerly enslaved men who knew the rivers. In June 1863 she guided Union gunboats up the Combahee River past Confederate mines with Colonel James Montgomery. The raid burned plantations and carried away roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who waded out to the boats as the whistles blew. Newspapers of the day credited a Black woman with helping to lead an armed military operation, an almost unheard-of report in that era.
The government was slower to pay than to use her. Her wartime compensation was minimal and disputed; only after decades of petitions, and largely as the widow of a veteran, did she receive a monthly pension of twenty dollars in 1899. She settled in Auburn, New York, on land bought from Senator William Seward, took in the elderly and destitute, worked with the AME Zion church, and spoke for women's suffrage. She died in 1913, in the home for the aged she had founded herself.
