Tubman, Harriet

Impact on the world

Already renowned for her thirteen Underground Railroad rescue missions before the Civil War, Tubman traveled to Union-occupied South Carolina in 1862 to nurse Black soldiers and civilians, then built and led a network of eight or nine scouts and river pilots who gathered intelligence behind Confederate lines for Major General David Hunter. On June 1-2, 1863, working with Colonel James Montgomery and roughly 300 soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers — a Black regiment — Tubman piloted Union gunboats up the mined Combahee River from memory, since she could not read or write, guiding the raid that burned Confederate rice plantations and supply depots and freed more than 700 enslaved people, nearly 200 of whom enlisted in the Union Army; contemporary newspapers credited “a black woman” with guiding the “gallant band of Black soldiers,” making her the first woman known to have planned and led an armed U.S. military operation. Despite this record, she was denied a soldier's pay or pension for decades, eventually receiving one only as the widow of a Union veteran she married after the war.

Life & background

Born into slavery around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, as Araminta “Minty” Ross, Tubman survived a severe head injury inflicted by an overseer at around age 13 that caused lifelong seizures, which she came to interpret as religious visions. She escaped slavery alone in 1849 after her enslaver's death threatened her with sale, then returned to the South roughly thirteen times over the following decade, personally guiding about seventy enslaved people — including much of her own family — to freedom via the Underground Railroad, and giving instructions that helped some seventy more escape independently, earning her the nickname “Moses.” During the Civil War she served the Union cause in South Carolina as nurse, scout, spy, and finally raid leader before continuing humanitarian work for newly freed people; after the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she championed women's suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony and opened a home for elderly and indigent Black Americans on land she owned. She died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913, in Auburn, and was buried with military honors; in 2025, historian Edda L. Fields-Black's account of the Combahee River Raid won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Sources

1. National Park Service; History.com; U.S. Army; Smithsonian Magazine; Civil War Monitor