Harriet Tubman was born as Araminta "Minty" Ross around March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, in the United States. Her parents, Harriet and Ben Ross, were enslaved, as was she. Her maternal grandmother, Modesty, had arrived in America on a slave ship from Africa. The family was divided between two different owners: her mother belonged to the Brodess family, and her father to Anthony Thompson, who later became Mary Brodess’s second husband. As was common among enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact date nor the precise location of Harriet’s birth could be determined with certainty—historians debate between 1820, 1822, and 1825 as possible years.
From earliest childhood, Harriet lived under the brutal weight of slavery. At five or six years old, she was rented out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan," with the duty of rocking a baby’s cradle while it slept. If the baby woke and cried, she was whipped. In a single day, she was lashed five times before breakfast. The physical and emotional scars of those years stayed with her for life. As a young woman, she suffered a severe head injury when an enslaver threw a heavy metal weight at a fleeing captive and struck Harriet instead. The injury caused dizziness, intense pain, and episodes of involuntary sleep that never left her. After this incident, she also began having visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as messages from God, deepening a Methodist spirituality that would be central to her journey.
Harriet’s instinct for resistance was also shaped by her mother. When a Georgia trader tried to buy Moses, Rit’s youngest son and Harriet’s brother, her mother hid him for an entire month. When the owners finally came to the slave quarters to take the child by force, Rit declared she would split the head of anyone who entered. The sale was called off. For Harriet, this moment became one of the foundations of her belief that resistance was both possible and necessary.
In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. But individual freedom was not enough. She repeatedly returned to Maryland, leading family members, friends, and strangers out of their enslavers’ reach. Over 19 documented missions, she helped around 300 people escape slavery through a clandestine network of activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. Traveling only at night, with extreme secrecy and under constant risk of capture, she never lost a single "passenger," as those she guided were called. Among the enslaved, she became known as "Moses," the liberator. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which required Northern authorities to return escaped enslaved people, she began guiding refugees even farther north, to Canada, beyond the reach of U.S. laws.
Harriet Tubman met John Brown in 1858 and contributed to the planning and recruitment of supporters for the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. When the American Civil War broke out, she offered her skills to the Union Army, first serving as a cook and nurse, then as an armed scout and spy. In June 1863, she led the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, becoming the first woman to command an armed expedition in the United States. The operation freed over 700 enslaved people in a single night.
After the war, Harriet settled in Auburn, New York, on a property she had purchased in 1859. There, she cared for her elderly parents and continued working for social causes. She actively engaged in the women’s suffrage movement, publicly advocating for women’s right to vote until her health prevented her from continuing. In her final years, she was admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she herself had helped establish years earlier. She died on March 10, 1913, in Auburn, at the age of ninety.
Harriet Tubman’s legacy transcends any historical boundary. Born into the chains of slavery, she not only freed herself but dedicated her life to liberating hundreds of others, risking her own life time and again. Her courage, strategy, and unwavering devotion made her one of the greatest symbols of resistance and humanity in American history—a figure who continues to inspire generations worldwide.