17 Things You Didn't Know About Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman began resisting slavery from an early age. When she was only a child, Tubman was hired out by her owner to be night nurse to a local infant. She was forced to stay awake all night and whipped if the child woke up during the night. She understood the difficulties of life as an enslaved person and began her quest for justice. At age 12, she put herself between a fugitive enslaved person and the person's overseer and was struck in the head by a weight, which led to a permanent injury.

One of nine children, Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1820. She married freed enslaved person John Tubman in 1844 and took his last name. She also began using her mother's first name of Harriet at some point, though the timeline is unclear.

By 1849, Tubman's owner had died, and it was clear that her family would be broken up and sold off. On September 17, Harriet and two of her brothers escaped. Once a notice was published offering a reward to anyone who could capture and return the trio, Harriet's brothers decided to return in fear to the plantation. She traveled on alone using the Underground Railroad. She went about 90 miles on foot, making it to Philadelphia and freedom. Her husband did not travel with her, and both remarried later.

When the Civil War started in 1861, Tubman continued helping fugitive enslaved people and worked as a nurse, cook, and laundress. In 1862, she moved to Port Royal, SC, to assist the growing displaced population of former enslaved people. By 1863, she also led a network of spies and passed intelligence onto Union forces. It was during the early part of the war that she wasn't sure if President Lincoln was an ally to her cause. Tubman reportedly criticized Lincoln for being too slow to embrace Black emancipation and she disliked the Union army's unequal treatment of Black soldiers. Tubman later changed her tune on Lincoln and expressed regret she didn't meet him.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 brought enormous risk to both escaping enslaved people and those abetting them - even in free states - because it allowed enslaved people in the North to be captured and returned to slavery. But Harriet went back to Maryland (and all of her escapes took place there) despite the danger. She first went to help her niece and her family, and then made many other trips back and forth. Later, she tried to recover her husband, but he had remarried.

Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as her growing notoriety, Tubman's work helping enslaved people escape the North was incredibly dangerous. She used disguises, subterfuge, props, and a gun to aid her. On one mission helping enslaved people escape, she carried live chickens to make her look like she was running errands as a domestic enslaved person in order to go unnoticed in a town. If props didn't work, there was always the pistol she carried to protect herself and others from slave catchers and to threaten enslaved people who got cold feet about escaping. During the Civil War, she also used a sharpshooter's rifle.

While the exact number isn't known, it's likely that Tubman got about 70 enslaved people out of the South through the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Tubman herself estimated that she saved around 50 people by 1860. The number 300 has been circulated as the number of people she rescued, but this is likely an exaggeration from earlier sources.

Tubman was well known for her prophetic visions and dreams, which she said helped guide her in her work helping liberate people. She also had symptoms like intense headaches and seizures. All of this likely stems from the hard blow to the head she took as an adolescent, when she got between an escaped enslaved people and an overseer and was struck by a weight. While she recovered from the wound, it likely left her with a form of brain injury, and she would routinely fall into uncontrollable, motionless states, replete with hallucinations. Harriet herself believed these were religious visions.

Despite just two years passing since Harriet escaped, John Tubman had already moved on. By 1851, he'd remarried to another woman named Caroline and wouldn't go North with Harriet when she tried to bring him along. She never saw John again, and he spent the next two decades with his second wife. In 1867, he was murdered in an argument with a white man in front of his teenage son.

Legend has it that the slaveholders of Maryland were so distressed by Harriet Tubman freeing their people that they offered the staggering sum of $40,000 for her capture, dead or alive. This is certainly a myth. The only known bounty put on Tubman was $100, from her former mistress. In contrast, the US government offered $50,000 for the capture of John Wilkes Booth - and he'd murdered the president. The $40,000 figure comes from a letter written by an anti-slavery activist, Sallie Hollie, who wrote to a newspaper that Tubman should be awarded a pension and back pay from the Union Army for her service.

Sometime in 1858, Tubman met John Brown, the legendary white abolitionist who believed he had been called upon by God to end slavery. Tubman respected Brown greatly and almost helped him to gather former enslaved men to stage a raid, though in the end, did not go through with it. The reasons are unclear - some historians speculate that Tubman thought Brown's plain would fail and put the Underground Railroad in jeopardy. Brown launched the raid without her in 1859, and it failed utterly, with many men - including Brown's own son - killed. Brown was hanged for treason, but the abolitionist cause had been given a martyr.

The June 1863 raid on a group of plantations on the Combahee River cemented Tubman's status as a skillful and brave soldier and made her the first known woman to lead an armed mission in the Civil War. On June 1, 1863, Tubman and others led Union boats steamboats through dangerous waters and mines to land safely on the shore of the river in South Carolina. Escaped enslaved people ran to smaller boats and were transported onto the ships while rebels shot at them. Around 700 people were saved. Union troops also stormed the plantations on shore, burning mansions and fields.

Tubman spent the years after the Combahee River raid performing intelligence work, tending to freed slaves, and acting as a liaison to Black Union units. At last she decided to head to Auburn, NY, to care for her elderly parents. But the country wasn't ready to normalize the treatment of a Black woman - even a war hero. According to several sources, while Tubwan was on the train to Auburn, she was ordered to go to the smoking car where other Black passengers were. Tubman refused, citing her war service. The conductor then grabbed at her, starting a scuffle that ended with Tubman's arm or ribs being broken. Even after that humiliation, she was denied compensation or a pension from the US government. Tubman lived much of her life in poverty.

Typical of a mythic figure of the 19th century, Tubman's legacy is rife with misinformation. The number of people she rescued on the Underground Railroad is usually inflated as high as 300, when it's closer to 70. The "$40,000 bounty" on her never existed, and much of the lore regarding her use of codes and songs during her missions is either exaggerated or simply wrong. There are also a number of quotes attributed to Tubman that she likely never said. The most popular is "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." There is no record of her saying this, and it directly conflicts with her modesty about the number of people she freed.

There's some evidence that Tubman stayed at the home of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass at some point in December 1851. Tubman was leading a group of 11 fugitives north from Maryland - at the exact same time Douglass notes in his memoirs he was housing and helping fund a group of 11 escaped enslaved people. After the Civil War, Douglass wrote her a letter that was effusive in its praise and admiration.

Tubman settled in Auburn, NY, and stayed there the rest of her life. Denied any compensation for her work in the Civil War, she earned money doing odd jobs and taking in boarders. One was a former Union soldier named Nelson Davis, with whom Tubman fell in love and married - despite him being around 20 years younger. Together, they ran a farm and brick business until Davis' passing in 1888 from tuberculosis. An admirer of Tubman, Sarah Bradford published a two-volume biography of her, and while it's the source of numerous tall tales about her, it also brought Tubman much needed income. Still in need of money, Tubman fell victim to a scam involving supposed buried Confederate gold. She was beaten and robbed of the $2,000 she had acquired to get the gold. Public sympathy was on her side in the 1880s when a congressman introduced a bill to pay her $2,000 in recognition of her service to the Union. Sadly, the bill was defeated.

With the abolitionist cause behind her, Tubman became involved in the nascent women's suffrage movement. She attended meetings of groups around the East Coast, speaking about her experiences and working with pioneers like Susan B. Anthony. But typical of her poverty, she had to sell a cow just to attend receptions in her honor in the Boston area. In 1896, she purchased land next to her property and built the Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People, giving the property over in 1903 to the AME Zion Church, with which she had been involved for years. By 1911, she was deathly ill, and admitted to the home that bore her name. She passed in 1913 of pneumonia.