Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist, political activist, and Union Army Civil-War spy whose four-decade career produced one of the foundational figures of mid-19th-century American abolitionist movement — particularly her 1850–1860 Underground Railroad conducting work, across which she rescued approximately 70 enslaved persons across approximately 13 round-trip Underground Railroad missions to the American South. She was born Araminta Ross around 1820–1822 (the precise date is unknown due to incomplete slave-birth records), in Dorchester County, Maryland, into an enslaved African-American family. Her father Ben Ross was an enslaved Maryland-area lumber-cutter, and her mother Harriet "Rit" Green was an enslaved Maryland-area cook.

Her childhood was shaped by multiple severe injuries and abuse — particularly her 1832 head injury (when an enslaver overseer threw a two-pound metal weight at another fleeing enslaved person and struck the 12-year-old Harriet instead, producing her lifelong narcoleptic seizure-and-vision condition).

Her 1844 first marriage to free Black Maryland-area resident John Tubman (after which she adopted her current legal surname Tubman) and her 1849 self-emancipation escape from her Maryland enslaver — across the foundational 90-mile Underground-Railroad route from Dorchester County, Maryland to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — launched her 1849 self-emancipation biographical narrative.

Her 1850–1860 Underground Railroad conducting work — across approximately 13 round-trip Underground Railroad missions from Philadelphia to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware — produced her mid-19th-century American abolitionist public profile. She personally led approximately 70 enslaved persons (including her own family members) to freedom across the 1850–1860 conducting period. The 1859 Saint Catharines, Ontario relocation under fellow African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (who at one point referred to Tubman as "the most-self-sacrificing person" he had ever met) produced her later international abolitionist public profile. Her 1862–1865 Civil-War service as a Union Army nurse, scout, and spy — particularly her June 2, 1863 leadership of the Combahee River Raid, which liberated approximately 750 enslaved persons in Beaufort County, South Carolina — produced her Civil-War-era African-American military public profile. She died on March 10, 1913, at approximately age 91, in Auburn, New York, of pneumonia.

Her name Harriet derives from the medieval English form of Henry (from the Old Germanic root meaning "home-ruler"). Harriet has been climbing in American naming since the 2010s.