Harriet Tubman’s Christian Faith: The Miracles, Visions & Bold Escapes of the Underground Railroad

American abolitionist and social activist Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, circa March 1822–March 10, 1913). Using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, Tubman made about 13 trips to rescue about 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, after escaping slavery. She was an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Tubman participated in the women’s suffrage movement as an activist in her later years.

Harriet Tubman was beaten and whipped as a child by enslavers in Dorchester County, Maryland, where he was born into slavery. She sustained a severe head injury early in life when a furious overseer threw a heavy metal weight at her instead of another slave. Throughout her life, she experienced dizziness, pain, and episodes of hypersomnia as a result of the injury. Following her injury, Harriet Tubman started having vivid dreams and strange visions, which she believed to be divine premonitions. She became deeply religious as a result of these encounters and her Methodist upbringing.

Harriet Tubman fled to Philadelphia in 1849, but she soon returned to Maryland to save her family. She eventually led dozens of other enslaved people to freedom after gradually bringing family members out of the state, one group at a time. Tubman, also known as “Moses,” traveled in great secrecy at night and claimed to have “never lost a passenger.” She assisted newly freed individuals in finding employment and guided fugitives further north into British North America (Canada) following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. After meeting John Brown in 1858, Tubman assisted him in organizing and enlisting supporters for his Harpers Ferry raid in 1859.

Tubman served in the Union Army at the start of the Civil War, first as a cook and nurse and later as an armed scout and spy. She is recognized as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States due to her leadership of the raid at Combahee Ferry, which freed over 700 enslaved people. She took care of her elderly parents after the war at the family home in Auburn, New York, which she had bought in 1859. She participated in the women’s suffrage movement until she became ill and was admitted to an elderly African American home that she had assisted in founding years before. Many people see Tubman as a symbol of bravery and liberation.

Harriet Tubman Biography

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross to Ben Ross and Harriet (“Rit”) Green, two enslaved parents. Mary Pattison Brodess (and subsequently her son Edward) enslaved Rit. Anthony Thompson, who went on to become Mary Brodess’s second husband and owned a sizable plantation in the Madison region of Dorchester County, Maryland, close to the Blackwater River, enslaved Ben.

The precise year and location of Tubman’s birth are unknown, as is the case with many enslaved individuals in the United States. Although her gravestone states 1820 and her death certificate states 1815, Tubman stated that she was born in 1825. Based on a midwife payment and a number of other historical records, including her runaway advertising, historian Kate Larson’s 2004 biography of Tubman chronicles the year as 1822. More contemporary biographies have acknowledged March 1822 as the most likely date of Tubman’s birth based on Larson’s research.

Modesty, Tubman’s maternal grandmother, came to the United States via slave ship from Africa; her other antecedents are unknown. Although there is no proof to support or refute this ancestry, Tubman was told as a child that her behavioral features made her appear Ashanti. Rit, her mother, worked as a chef for the Brodess family and may have had a white father. Ben, her father, oversaw the forestry work on Thompson’s property and was an expert woodsman. According to court documents, they had nine children together after getting married in 1808: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.

Slavery threatened to split Rit’s family apart, but she battled to keep them together. Three of her daughters—Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph—were sold by Edward Brodess, permanently severing them from the family. With the help of other slaves and freedmen in the neighborhood, Brodess concealed Rit’s youngest son, Moses, for a month when a Georgian trader approached her about purchasing him. She once approached Brodess on the sale. When Brodess and “the Georgia man” finally approached the slave quarters to take the infant, Rit said, “You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.” Brodess retreated and gave up on the transaction.

As a child, Harriet Tubman took care of a younger brother and infant, as was common in large families, because his mother was allocated to “the big house” and had little time for her own family. She was employed by Brodess as a nursemaid for a woman called “Miss Susan” when she was five or six years old. Tubman was told to take care of the infant and rock the cradle while it slept. Tubman was lashed when the infant woke up and started crying. Later on, she described a specific day when she received five whippings prior to breakfast. For the remainder of her life, she had the scars. She discovered strategies to fight back, run away for five days, and cover herself with layers of garments to prevent beatings.

Tubman was also assigned to work for a planter called James Cook during her early years. Even after getting measles, she had to inspect his muskrat traps in neighboring wetlands. She got so sick that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother took care of her. Then Brodess employed her once more. She compared herself to “the boy on the Swanee River” in reference to Stephen Foster’s song “Old Folks at Home” when discussing her intense yearning as a child. She was tasked with farm and forest chores as she grew older and stronger, including plowing, lugging logs, and driving oxen.

When Harriet Tubman was a teenager, he was involved in a fight between an overseer and a male slave who had gone to the store after escaping from labor without authorization, resulting in a serious head injury. The overseer flung a two-pound (1 kg) metal weight at the slave while Tubman and others attempted to protect him. Tubman claimed that the weight “broke my skull” when it struck her instead. She was brought back to her enslaver’s home, bleeding and unconscious, and placed on the seat of a loom for two days without receiving any medical attention. Tubman’s mother was then let to care for her. For weeks following the event, Tubman remained unconscious.

Family and First Husband

At the age of 45, Anthony Thompson made a vow to manumit Tubman’s father. In 1840, Thompson’s son fulfilled his pledge after his father passed away. Tubman’s father remained employed by the Thompson family as a foreman and timber estimate. Harriet Tubman paid a white lawyer $5 (about $170 in 2024) to look into her mother Rit’s legal status later in the 1840s. The attorney found that Mary Brodess’s grandpa, Atthow Pattison, had written in his will that Rit and any children she had would be manumitted at age 45, and that any children born after that age would be freeborn. When the Pattison and Brodess families inherited the enslaved family, they disregarded this clause, but Tubman was unable to take legal action to enforce it.

She wed a free black man named John Tubman in 1844. Her enslavement complicated their union, despite the fact that not much is known about him or their time together. Children’s status was determined by their mother, and Harriet and John’s offspring would be sold into slavery. Such blended marriages — free people of color marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. There were both free and enslaved members in the majority of African-American families. Larson speculates that they may have intended to purchase Tubman’s release.

It’s unknown when exactly Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet after being married. Clinton argues that this coincided with Tubman’s preparations to flee slavery, whereas Larson suggests that it occurred immediately following the wedding. She may have taken on her mother’s name to honor a relative or as part of a religious conversion.

Escape from Slavery

Harriet Tubman fell ill once more in 1849, which made her less valuable to slave dealers. Despite his best efforts, Edward Brodess was unable to locate a buyer for her. Tubman was furious with him for attempting to sell her and for still enslaving her relatives, so he started asking God to change Brodess’s behavior. She continued: “I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me.” Tubman modified her prayer when it seemed like a deal was being finalized:“First of March I began to pray, ‘Oh Lord, if you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way’.” When Brodess passed away a week later, Tubman apologized for her previous feelings.

Brodess’s passing raised the possibility that Tubman would be sold and her family would be split up, as is the case with many estate settlements. Eliza, his widow, started trying to sell the family’s slaves. Despite her husband’s attempts to talk her out of it, Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her destiny. She subsequently stated that “there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other”.

On September 17, 1849, Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, managed to free themselves from slavery. Tubman was employed by Anthony Thompson, the son of her father’s previous employer, who ran a sizable plantation in the nearby Caroline County neighborhood of Poplar Neck. It is probable that her brothers also worked for Thompson. Eliza Brodess most likely didn’t realize their absence was an attempt to flee for a while because they were rented out. She published a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat two weeks later, offering a reward of up to US$100 each (about $3,780 in 2024) for their apprehension and return to slavery. Tubman’s brothers had second thoughts after they were gone. Ben might have felt bad about leaving his kids and wife. Tubman had to accompany the two men back.

Tubman made another escape, this time without her brothers, sometime around October or November. She sung a farewell song before departing in the hopes that Mary, a reliable fellow slave, would understand her intentions: “I’ll meet you in the morning,” she intoned, “I’m bound for the promised land.” Harriet Tubman used the network known as the Underground Railroad, however her precise journey is unknown. Black individuals, both free and enslaved, white abolitionists, and other activists made up this unofficial structure. Quakers, who belonged to the Religious Society of Friends, were the most well-known of the latter in Maryland at the time. There was a sizable Quaker colony in the Preston region close to Poplar Neck, which was likely a crucial initial stop on Tubman’s escape route. From there, she most likely followed a typical path taken by many escaping slavery: northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware, and finally north into Pennsylvania. It would have taken five days to three weeks to walk the almost ninety miles (145 km).

Using the North Star as a guide, Harriet Tubman had to travel at night while attempting to elude slave catchers who were eager to collect rewards for escaped slaves. In order to stay safe, the “conductors” of the Underground Railroad employed deceit. In order to give the impression that Tubman was working for the family, the lady of the home gave him instructions to sweep the yard during an early halt. The family took her to the next friendly house after hiding her in a cart when night fell. Tubman probably hid in the area’s marshes and forests during the day because she was familiar with them. The specifics of her initial voyage are unknown; Tubman would not talk about them until much later in life because other slaves had used the same routes. Relieved and in wonder, she crossed into Pennsylvania. Years later, she remembered the experience:

When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.

Nicknamed “Moses”

Tubman considered her family after arriving in Philadelphia. “I was a stranger in a strange land,” she said remarked. “My mother, father, siblings, and friends were all in Maryland. However, they ought to be free, just as I was. While Tubman worked odd jobs in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey, to save money, the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which severely penalized aiding and abetting escape and required law enforcement to assist in the capture of escaped slaves, even in states where slavery was illegal. Due to the increasing hazards posed by the law, many people who had fled slavery sought safety in Southern Ontario, where slavery had been outlawed.

As free blacks and impoverished Irish immigrants fought for jobs in Philadelphia, racial tensions were also rising.

Harriet Tubman received a warning in December 1850 that her niece Kessiah and her children would be sold in Cambridge, Maryland, shortly. Tubman moved to Baltimore, where she was concealed until the sale by her brother-in-law, Tom Tubman. The winning bid for Kessiah’s wife was placed by her husband, John Bowley, a free black man. John, Kessiah, and their kids fled to a nearby safe house while the auctioneer went to eat lunch. When darkness struck, Bowley took the family 60 miles (97 km) in a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met Tubman, who then transported them to Philadelphia.

She went back to Maryland early the following year to help other family members leave. Moses, her youngest brother, and two other men were found during her second journey. Her family had been inspired by her adventures, and she grew more self-assured with every visit to Maryland.

For the first time since her escape, Tubman went back to Dorchester County in late 1851, this time in search of her husband John. When she got there, she discovered that John had wed Caroline. He argued that he was content where he was, despite Tubman’s message that he should accompany her. She spotted some enslaved persons who wanted to flee and escorted them to Philadelphia while suppressing her rage.

Many escapees started moving to Southern Ontario because the Fugitive Slave Law made it more dangerous for persons fleeing slavery to stay in the northern United States. Tubman led an unknown party of eleven escapees—possibly including the Bowleys and a few others she had previously assisted in rescuing—northward in December 1851. Evidence suggests that Tubman and her company made a stop to Frederick Douglass’s house, a former slave and abolitionist. As they fought against slavery, Douglass and Tubman had a tremendous deal of respect for one another. He compared his efforts with hers years later, writing:

Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

Tubman believed that slavery would soon be abolished when the Civil War started in 1861. Slaves in the vicinity of Union positions started fleeing in significant numbers more quickly. These fugitives were placed to labor, initially unpaid, at Fort Monroe in Virginia when General Benjamin Butler declared them to be “contraband”—property taken by northern forces. At Fort Monroe and other Union strongholds, the number of “contrabands” quickly grew. Tubman started assisting refugees in the camps, especially in Port Royal, South Carolina, in January 1862 after volunteering to support the Union cause.

Tubman met abolitionist General David Hunter in South Carolina. He started assembling former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers after declaring all “contrabands” in the Port Royal district free. President Abraham Lincoln of the United States chastised Hunter for his conduct because he was not yet ready to impose emancipation on the southern states. For both ethical and pragmatic reasons, Tubman denounced Lincoln’s response and his overall reluctance to think about abolishing slavery in the United States:

God won’t let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he’s a great man, and I am a poor negro; but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free.

As a nurse at Port Royal, Tubman helped soldiers with infectious infections and diarrhea by making cures from indigenous plants. She initially got government rations for her labor, but in order to dispel the impression that she was receiving preferential treatment, she relinquished her entitlement to these supplies and earned money in the evenings by selling pies and root beer.