Harriet

Harriet Tubman was one of the outstanding heroines of the antebellum and Civil War eras. Her efforts on the Underground Railroad leading enslaved black men and women to freedom earned her iconic status among nineteenth-century African Americans and all those opposing slavery and advocating racial equality. She personified courage in difficult and desperate situations, which was inspired by faith and a willingness to combat injustice at all costs. Tubman was born between 1820 and 1822 on Maryland's Eastern Shore to Harriet Greene and Benjamin Ross. She married a free black man, John Tubman, in 1849. Fearing that she would be sold after the death of her owner, she escaped to Pennsylvania. Between 1849 and 1860 she led at least seventy people to freedom on at least fourteen trips to Maryland's Eastern Shore. In 1862 she went south to aid the Union war effort, where she worked as a nurse, cook, scout, spy, and liberator of slaves. She went up the Combahee River and helped more than seven hundred slaves to freedom. The ubiquitous Tubman was on Morris Island, South Carolina in 1863 when the Massachusetts Regiment attacked Battery Wagner. These episodes in her life and career on the Underground Railroad were boldly depicted in the film. She finally received a pension, based on the Union war record of her second husband, Nelson Davis. White Union officer and commander of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, called her “the greatest heroine of the age... Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary. I have known her for some time ...—the slaves call her Moses” (Mary Thatcher Higginson, ed., Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1921, p. 81

Adventure · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Battle · Charge (physics · Courage · Injustice · Officer · Political science · Sociology · South carolina · Spanish Civil War · Underground Railroad · White (mutation · History · Law