harriet tubman and the underground railroad story

#Harriet tubman and the underground railroad story series

Her land soon became a haven for relatives and boarders alike, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north. She soon moved her parents out of the harsh Canadian winters to her place in New York, as well as other family members and friends. In the meantime, Tubman had purchased a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, a city known for its antislavery activism. Tubman would later tell a friend that “He done more in dying than 100 men would in living.” John Brown was convicted of treason and hanged in December. However, she was not present at the attack that failed on October 16, 1859. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Though she didn’t agree with his tactics, she supported his goals and helped him plan and recruit for the raid at Harpers Ferry. In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the radical abolitionist John Brown, who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery. That fall, she returned to John, only to discover that he had married another woman. Though Tubman sent word that to her husband that he should join her, he insisted that he was happy where he was. In the Spring of 1851, she headed back to Maryland, freeing her brother Moses and two other men. The next year, she joined the Underground Railroad, and on her first mission in December 1850, returned to Maryland to rescue her sister and her sister’s children. There, she worked at various odd jobs and joined a large abolitionist group.

#Harriet tubman and the underground railroad story series

She then determined that she would escape, later saying: “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.”Įscaping with the help of the Underground Railroad, through an elaborate and secret series of houses, tunnels, and roads set up by abolitionists and free and former slaves, she made her way to Philadelphia. Soon afterward, she adopted her mother’s name of “Harriet.” In 1849, she became very ill and the Brodess family again tried to sell her. Little is known about him or their marriage, which had to have been complicated by her slave status. The injury also caused Tubman to have strange visions and dreams, which she believed were signs from the divine, guiding her “missions” in her later life.Ībout 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. When her field boss began to complain, the Brodess family tried unsuccessfully to sell her. Though the injury caused disabling seizures, blackouts, and severe headaches, which she would suffer for the rest of her life, she was soon sent back into the fields. As an adolescent, she suffered a traumatic head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight thrown by an irate overseer, intending to hit another slave.īleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner’s house, where she lay without medical care for two days. Three of her sisters were sold however, and she never saw them again.Īs a child, Tubman was often hired out to other slave masters in the area and withstood beatings and whippings at their hands. One of nine children, she could only watch as her parents struggled in vain to keep the family together. Like other slaves of the time, the exact place and date of her birth was not recorded.īelonging to the Brodess family, Harriet’s mother worked as a cook in “the big house,” while her father was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on the plantation. Harriet was born into slavery as Araminta Ross about 1820, in Dorchester County, Maryland, to parents Ben Ross and Harriet “Rit” Green. Reverently called “Moses” by the hundreds of slaves she helped to free in the years preceding the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, was also a Union scout and spy, a humanitarian, and women’s suffrage advocate.