The marriage was not good, and the knowledge that two of her brothers—Ben and Henry—were about to be sold provoked Harriet to plan an escape. The brothers, however, changed their minds and went back. With the help of the Underground Railroad , Harriet persevered and traveled 90 miles north to Pennsylvania and freedom. The Fugitive Slave Act allowed fugitive and freed workers in the north to be captured and enslaved. She often drugged babies and young children to prevent slave catchers from hearing their cries.
Over the next ten years, Harriet befriended other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass , Thomas Garrett and Martha Coffin Wright, and established her own Underground Railroad network.
When the Civil War broke out in , Harriet found new ways to fight slavery. She was recruited to assist fugitive enslave people at Fort Monroe and worked as a nurse, cook and laundress. Harriet used her knowledge of herbal medicines to help treat sick soldiers and fugitive enslaved people.
In , Harriet became head of an espionage and scout network for the Union Army. She provided crucial intelligence to Union commanders about Confederate Army supply routes and troops and helped liberate enslaved people to form Black Union regiments. Though just over five feet tall, she was a force to be reckoned with, although it took over three decades for the government to recognize her military contributions and award her financially. She married former enslaved man and Civil War veteran Nelson Davis in her husband John had died and they adopted a little girl named Gertie a few years later.
Harriet had an open-door policy for anyone in need. She supported her philanthropy efforts by selling her home-grown produce, raising pigs and accepting donations and loans from friends. In June , under the leadership of Col. James Montgomery, she served as a key adviser for an operation in Combahee Ferry, South Carolina, in which a regiment of soldiers, whom she accompanied, set fire to a large plantation, forced Confederate soldiers to retreat, and used gunboats to rescue hundreds of enslaved people.
The Bucktown Village Store, where Harriet Tubman suffered a traumatic head injury at the hands of an overseer. Tubman underwent brain surgery in and chose not to receive anesthesia during the procedure. When Tubman was a child, an overseer hit her in the head with a heavy weight after she refused to restrain a field hand who had left his plantation without permission.
She suffered severe trauma from the event and experienced headaches and seizures for the rest of her life. By the late s, the pain in her head had affected her ability to sleep, and she found a doctor in Boston willing to operate on her brain. Instead of receiving anesthesia while the doctor cut open her skull and performed the surgery, she chose to bite on a bullet — something she had seen soldiers do during the Civil War when they suffered pain on the battlefield.
It is unclear whether the surgery improved her condition. Very few African Americans or women have national park sites dedicated to them. Harriet Tubman has two. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, tells the story of her later life and includes the house she owned and eventually donated to become a home for the ill and the elderly, as well as the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which she raised money to build. But her own individual freedom did not satisfy her.
She traveled back into southern slave states more than a dozen times as a leader of the famed Underground Railroad, a secret route by which slaves, aided by white allies, escaped from bondage.
During the Civil War, she was also a spy for the Union Army, traveling into the Confederacy on dangerous reconnaissance missions.
In , she helped lead a military raid at Combahee River, S. As Frederick Douglass told her: "Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you.
Then in , the Fugitive Slave Act empowered Southern slave hunters to capture alleged runaways without a jury trial, and Tubman began conducting slaves hundreds of miles farther north — across the Canadian border. By the time Tubman began her epic mission, the Underground Railroad had expanded dramatically from its humble origins in the s.
Historian John Hope Franklin cited estimates that at the peak as many as 3, people participated, helping runaway slaves in one way or another — donating money, providing food, hiding slaves in haystacks, taking them across rivers, and so on. Tubman was rated the outstanding conductor, personally accompanying perhaps more runaway slaves than anyone else. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a scout and spy. For example, she was the scout for the Combahee River Raid that liberated some slaves in South Carolina.
The more slaves she conducted to freedom, the faster word spread that it really was possible to be free, and the more slaves took initiative to free themselves.
Ultimately, the fatal weakness of the slave system was the determination of multitudes to take matters into their own hands.
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