Harriet Tubman

An Iron Weight Meant for Someone Else

She was born Araminta Ross, enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822, and took the name Harriet Tubman around 1844, when she married John Tubman, a free Black man. As a teenager an overseer, aiming at an enslaved man trying to escape, threw a two-pound iron weight and hit her in the head instead. It left her with seizures and sudden sleeping spells for the rest of her life, and with vivid dreams she understood as instructions from God. She escaped alone in 1849 and then went back roughly thirteen times over ten years, usually in winter when the nights ran longest, guiding escaped slaves north on the Underground Railroad and bringing out about seventy people — her own careful count; the figure of three hundred comes from admiring biographers, not from her. She never lost a passenger. When the Civil War split the country between the slave-holding South and the Union in the North, she worked for the Union as a scout and spy, and in June 1863 she guided three gunboats up the Combahee River past underwater mines laid by the South's own army — a single wartime raid, nothing like her solo trips — and brought out more than seven hundred people in one night.

Thirty Years Fighting for a Pension

She was paid almost nothing for the war and spent thirty years fighting the government for a pension, which she finally received in 1899 at twenty dollars a month. She died of pneumonia on 10 March 1913 in Auburn, New York, in the home for the aged and indigent that she had founded herself and then had to be admitted to. She was buried with military honors. Those present reported her last words as a line from the Bible: I go to prepare a place for you.