Born 1820 or 1821
Dorchester County, Maryland
Died March 10, 1913
Auburn, New York
Fugitive slave, abolitionist, Underground Railroad conductor, and Union army spy
Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, was the most famous of all “conductors” on the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was an elaborate system of safe houses and secret routes through which slaves escaped to freedom beginning in the 1840s. The escape routes stretched from southern slave states (primarily Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland), to northern states and Canada, where slavery was illegal. “Conductors” were people who ventured into the American South to pick up slaves and lead them to freedom.
After her escape in 1849, Tubman returned to the South nineteen times and rescued hundreds of slaves. Among the slaves she liberated were her elderly parents and ten of her brothers and sisters. Tubman never lost a passenger. She was never captured, despite a $40 thousand bounty placed on her head by slave owners. Tubman was considered the “Moses” of her people because, like the biblical Moses, she led her people to freedom.
Harriet Tubman was one of eleven children born to plantation slaves Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green.
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