Harriet Tubman
The Moses of her people
A timeline of Harriet Tubman's Life:
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1819 Birth -Araminta Ross [Harriet Tubman] was born into slavery in 1819 or 1820, in Dorchester County, Maryland. Given the names of her two parents, both held in slavery, she was of purely African ancestry.
Read more about Harriet's childhood -
1844 Marriage -At the age of 25, she married John Tubman, a free African American who did not share her dream. Since she was a slave, she knew there could be a chance that she could be sold and her marriage would be split apart. Harriet dreamed of traveling north. There, she would be free and would not have to worry about having her marriage split up by the slave trade.
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1849 Escape -Harriet was given a piece of paper by a white abolitionist neighbor with two names, and told how to find the first house on her path to freedom. At the first house she was put into a wagon, covered with a sack, and driven to her next destination and kind enough to give her directions to safe houses and names of people who would help her cross the Mason-Dixon line.
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1850 Conductor -In September of the same year, Harriet was made an official "conductor" of the UGRR. This meant that she knew all the routes to free territory and she had to take an oath of silence so the secret of the Underground Railroad would be kept secret.
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1851 Canada -Harriet's third trip was in September 1851. She went to get her husband, John, but he had remarried and did not want to leave. So she went back up North. Harriet went to Garret's house and found there were more runaways (which were referred to as passengers) to rescue than anticipated. That did not stop her though. She gave a baby a sedative so he would not cry and took the passengers into Pennsylvania. The trip was long and cold but they did reach the safe house of Frederick Douglas.
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1857 Auburn -On the road between Syracuse and Rochester, were a number of sympathetic Quakers and other abolitionists settled at Auburn. Here also was the home of US Senator and former New York State Governor William H. Seward (and known for Seward's folly). Sometime in the mid-1850s, Tubman met Seward and his wife Frances. Mrs. Seward provided a home for Tubman's favorite niece, Margaret, after Tubman helped her to escape from Maryland.
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1861 Civil War -Tubman returned to the U.S. from living in Canada in 1861. The Civil War had begun and was enlisting all men as soldiers and any women who wanted to join as cooks and nurses. Tubman enlisted into the Union army as a "contraband" nurse in a hospital in Hilton Head, South Carolina and for a time serving at Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis would later be imprisoned.. Contrabands were blacks who the Union army helped to escape from the Southern compounds.
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1869 Second Marriage -After the war, Harriet returned home to Auburn. In 1869, she married Nelson Davis and together they shared a calm, peaceful 19 year marriage until he died.
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1913 Death -Before she died on March 10, 1913, she gave her home for the elderly to the Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Tubman was buried with military rites in Fort Hill Cemetery, a short drive from the home. A year after her death, Auburn declared a one-day memorial to its anti-slavery hero. Residents of the city that day unveiled the Harriet Tubman Plaque, which remains on display at the entrance of the Cayuga County Court House. She has since received man honors, including the naming of the Liberty Ship Harriet Tubman, christened in 1944 by Eleanor Roosevelt.
“What we think we know about Tubman really only consists of a decade of her life,” said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of the new biography She Came to Slay.
--Author Erica Armstrong