The Woman They Called Moses

On a dark night in the autumn of 1849, a woman slipped away from a farm in Maryland and began to walk north.

She had no map. She could not read or write. She had a little food, the clothes she wore, and the knowledge her father had taught her: how to move quietly through the woods, and how to find the North Star, which always points the way north.

North, across the border into Pennsylvania, slavery was against the law. Behind her, if she was caught, there would be whipping, or worse, and she would almost certainly be sold far away to the Deep South.

Her name was Harriet Tubman. She was about twenty-seven years old.

Born enslaved

She was born around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, and named Araminta Ross. Her parents, Ben Ross and Harriet Green, were both enslaved, and so, by law, were all their children. They could be bought and sold like cattle.

Three of Araminta's older sisters were sold away to distant plantations. The family never saw them again. It was the great fear that hung over every enslaved family: that at any moment, a child, a parent or a wife could be taken.

Araminta was hired out to work for other people from the age of about five or six. She cared for babies, checked muskrat traps in freezing marshes, and later worked in the fields and the forests, cutting timber and hauling logs. She grew small but very strong.

When she was a young teenager, an overseer threw a heavy iron weight at another enslaved man who was running away. It struck Araminta on the head instead. She nearly died. For the rest of her life she suffered from headaches, seizures and sudden spells of deep sleep. She also had vivid dreams and visions, which she believed came from God.

Around 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and she began to use her mother's first name, Harriet.

The road north

In 1849 the man who held her in slavery died, and Harriet feared she would be sold. She decided to run.

She travelled by night and hid by day. She was helped along the way by people who secretly opposed slavery: free Black families, white Quakers and others. This hidden network of safe houses and helpers came to be called the Underground Railroad. It had no tracks and no trains. Its "stations" were barns, attics and kitchens. Its "conductors" were people who guided runaways from one to the next.

After walking about a hundred miles, Harriet crossed into Pennsylvania. She later said that when she knew she was free, she looked at her own hands to see if she was the same person. Everything seemed to shine.

But she was alone. Her family was still in slavery.

Going back

Harriet found work in Philadelphia, cooking and cleaning, and saved her money. Then she did something almost nobody else did. She went back.

In 1850, a new law, the Fugitive Slave Act, made it a crime anywhere in the country to help people escaping slavery. Runaways now had to travel all the way to Canada to be safe. Still Harriet returned to Maryland, again and again.

Over about eleven years, she made around thirteen journeys and led about seventy people to freedom, among them her brothers, her parents, and other family members and friends. She gave directions to around seventy more, who found their own way north.

She chose winter nights, when darkness was long. She often set out on a Saturday night, because notices about runaways could not be printed in the newspapers until Monday. She used songs to signal danger or safety. She carried a gun, both for protection and to make sure no one in her group turned back and put the others in danger.

People began to call her Moses, after the prophet who led his people out of slavery. She later said, with pride, that on all her journeys she never lost a single passenger.

The war, and after

During the American Civil War, Harriet worked for the Union army as a nurse, a scout and a spy. In June 1863 she helped lead an armed raid along the Combahee River in South Carolina, which freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single night.

After the war she lived in Auburn, New York, caring for her elderly parents and for anyone who needed a home. She campaigned for women's right to vote. She opened a home for poor and elderly Black people, and lived there herself at the end of her life.

Harriet Tubman died on 10 March 1913, aged about ninety-one. She had never learned to read. But she had read the night sky well enough to lead dozens of people out of slavery.

Want to read more?

Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land is a carefully researched biography that separates fact from legend, and is the source of the numbers in this story. Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom is another fine account.