What was harriet tubmans job




















Tubman returned to the South again and again. She devised clever techniques that helped make her "forays" successful, including using the master's horse and buggy for the first leg of the journey; leaving on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn't be placed in newspapers until Monday morning; turning about and heading south if she encountered possible slave hunters; and carrying a drug to use on a baby if its crying might put the fugitives in danger.

Tubman even carried a gun which she used to threaten the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back, telling them, "You'll be free or die. On one occasion, she overheard some men reading her wanted poster, which stated that she was illiterate.

She promptly pulled out a book and feigned reading it. The ploy was enough to fool the men. Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by , including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as "Moses," Frederick Douglass said, "Excepting John Brown -- of sacred memory -- I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman].

On the way to such a meeting in Boston in , in an incident in Troy, New York, she helped a fugitive slave who had been captured. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she would spend the rest of her long life. She died in When Edward Brodess died in March , the security of Harriet and John's life together was threatened.

Knowing she was about to be sold, Tubman fled to freedom without him. She soon learned he was not interested in joining her in the North, and he married another woman in the community - a free woman named Caroline with whom he had four free children. Broken hearted, Tubman, refusing to sacrifice her freedom by returning and fighting for her marriage, instead committed herself to liberating her family and friends. From to , Tubman would return to Maryland to rescue scores of family and friends.

For more information on her own escape and rescue missions along the Underground Railroad, click on the tabs "Harriet Tubman's Flight to Freedom" and "Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad" above. I n the early spring of , Tubman met the legendary John Brown, a radical abolitionist and fiery freedom fighter, at her home in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, where she had settled with her brothers, parents and other runaways from American slavery.

Brown and most of his small band of fighters were killed or later hanged for treason. Tubman believed, however, that Brown was a martyr for freedom, and that he was the greatest white man she had ever met. The winters in St. Money was a constant worry for her, though.

Tubman turned to the antislavery lecture platform as a means to raise money for both her family and her missions. Increased vigilance on the part of slaveholders on the Eastern Shore made her more vulnerable to capture, and return trips to rescue the rest of her family became too risky. But she continued to fight against the slave system. On her way to Boston in April , Tubman became the heroine of the day when she helped rescue a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the custody of United States Marshals charged with returning him to his Virginia master under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of see: Freeing Charles by Scott Christianson for more exciting details of this remarkable story.

A trustworthy network of active reformers, such as abolitionists and suffragists Lucretia Mott, Susan B. They were devoted to equality and justice, and they often risked their own lives and livelihoods to defend and protect runaway slaves. Among them she found respect and the financial and personal support she needed to pursue her private war against slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

The ideologies of racial and gender equality, which Tubman incorporated into her life during the s, would become central to her activism for the remainder of her life.

Eventually, she became the first American woman ever to lead an armed raid into enemy territory. Throughout the Civil War she provided badly needed nursing care to black soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated slaves who crowded Union camps.

In early June , she became the first woman to command an armed military raid when she guided Colonel James Montgomery and his Second South Carolina Black regiment up the Combahee River, routing out Confederate outposts, destroying stockpiles of cotton, food and weapons, and liberating over seven hundred slaves. The injured were transported to Beaufort, where Tubman provided nursing and comfort to hundreds of casualties. After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn, New York.

There she began another career as a community activist, humanitarian, and suffragist. In , a local author named Sarah Bradford published a short biography titled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman , bringing brief fame and financial relief to Tubman and her family. Tubman married Nelson Davis, a veteran, that same year; her husband John had been killed in in Dorchester County, Maryland. She struggled financially the rest of her life, however.

Her humanitarian work triumphed with the opening of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, located on land abutting her own property in Auburn, which she successfully purchased by mortgage and then transferred to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in She also experienced intense dream states, which she classified as religious experiences.

The line between freedom and slavery was hazy for Tubman and her family. Nonetheless, Ben had few options but to continue working as a timber estimator and foreman for his former owners. Although similar manumission stipulations applied to Rit and her children, the individuals who owned the family chose not to free them. Despite his free status, Ben had little power to challenge their decision. In , Harriet married a free Black man named John Tubman.

At the time around half of the African American people on the eastern shore of Maryland were free, and it was not unusual for a family to include both free and enslaved people.

Little is known about John or his marriage to Harriet, including whether and how long they lived together. John declined to make the voyage on the Underground Railroad with Harriet, preferring to stay in Maryland with a new wife. In , the couple adopted a baby girl named Gertie. Between and , Tubman made 19 trips from the South to the North following the network known as the Underground Railroad. Tubman first encountered the Underground Railroad when she used it to escape slavery herself in Following a bout of illness and the death of her owner, Tubman decided to escape slavery in Maryland for Philadelphia.

She feared that her family would be further severed and was concerned for her own fate as a sickly slave of low economic value. Two of her brothers, Ben and Harry, accompanied her on September 17, Tubman had no plans to remain in bondage. Seeing her brothers safely home, she soon set off alone for Pennsylvania. Making use of the Underground Railroad, Tubman traveled nearly 90 miles to Philadelphia.

There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven. Rather than remaining in the safety of the North, Tubman made it her mission to rescue her family and others living in slavery via the Underground Railroad. In December , Tubman received a warning that her niece Kessiah was going to be sold, along with her two young children.

Tubman then helped the entire family make the journey to Philadelphia. This was the first of many trips by Tubman. The dynamics of escaping slavery changed in , with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This law stated that escaped slaves could be captured in the North and returned to slavery, leading to the abduction of former slaves and free Black people living in Free States. Law enforcement officials in the North were compelled to aid in the capture of slaves, regardless of their personal principles.

In response to the law, Tubman re-routed the Underground Railroad to Canada, which prohibited slavery categorically. In December , Tubman guided a group of 11 fugitives northward. There is evidence to suggest that the party stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass.

In April , Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown , who advocated the use of violence to disrupt and destroy the institution of slavery.



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