Our StoryMaker of the Past this month is Harriet Tubman. Harriet’s life is a wild story, full of adventure and bravery, and God was with her through it all.
Harriet was actually named Araminta Ross at birth. She was one of eight siblings, born to two enslaved people, Harriett Green, and Benjamin Ross. Sometime between 1820 and 1822 in Dorcester County, Maryland. At age 12, she intervened in a fight between an overseer and enslaved man and was hit with a weight causing a head injury that affected her for the rest of her life. She had regular headaches and narcolepsy (which means she randomly fell asleep) but she also began to experience visions of God and hear his voice.
In 1849, when she was around 27, she learned the plantation owners planned to sell her and two of her brothers to a plantation further South, away from freedom. She probably first used the Underground Railroad, a series of safe hours and escape routes to travel to Philadelphia, out of slavery, and into the free North. When she arrived, she realized she knew no one in the city. Lonely and helpless, she prayed, ‘Oh, dear Lord, I ain’t got no friend but you. Come to my help, Lord, for I’m in trouble!’
She made friends and met other abolitionists. Harriet could have stayed safely in the North but, she knew that her family and other enslaved people were still suffering. So, she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Over the course of the next eleven years, she returned to the South and helped dozens of enslaved people escape. She often traveled in the winter, when the longer nights provided more cover. She used owl calls to communicate secretly. Her nickname was “Moses” because she led her people out of slavery. She was so successful at helping people escape that there was a $40,000 bounty for her capture.
Harriet always said her “train never went off the track and she never lost a passenger.” Her valor and courage were gifts from the Lord. She told her friend, “I always told God, I’m going to hold steady on you, and you’ve got to see me through.”
When the Civil War began, Harriet joined the Union Army as a laundress, scout, and spy. Because she was a small woman, no one believed she was capable of running a spy ring. But she did. She never learned to read, but memorized all of the locations and information about the Confederate troops and even led the Combahee Ferry Raid, an armed expedition on a series of plantations that rescued over 700 slaves.
After the war, Harriet founded the “Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes” in Auburn, New York, to provide medical care and housing for formerly enslaved people. She eventually moved there and died in 1913.
