Harriet Ross Tubman (CA. 1821-1913)

Dubbed “The Moses of Her People,” escaped slave Harriet Tubman assisted hundreds of slaves on the Underground Railroad, leading them from Maryland to safety in Pennsylvania.  Born enslaved in 1821 and raised in Dorchester County, Maryland to Benjamin and Harriett Greene Ross, she was both a field hand and a domestic servant.  As a young girl, she suffered a lifelong injury after her master threw a piece of iron at her, which struck her in the head.  Throughout her life, she suffered bouts of narcoleptic seizures.  In 1844, she married a free black man, John Tubman.  She escaped in 1849 in order to avoid being sold into the Deep South. Her husband refused to go with her.  Several months later, when she returned to get him, she learned he had taken another wife.  He died shortly after the end of the Civil War, and Tubman later married Nelson Davis.

Upon her escape, Tubman trekked northward to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where, like most working class free black women, she found employment as a washer woman and domestic servant.  At the same time, she participated in the Underground Railroad, and as a result, developed networks with both black and white abolitionists.