In 1849, Araminta Ross — who had renamed herself Harriet Tubman — escaped from enslavement on a Maryland plantation and walked approximately ninety miles north to Philadelphia. She was twenty-seven years old. She had a traumatic brain injury from a childhood beating that caused her to lose consciousness without warning for the rest of her life. She was alone. She had no map, no guide, and no guarantee that anyone who helped her could be trusted. When she crossed into Pennsylvania and stood in free territory for the first time, she later said she felt like she was in heaven — and then immediately felt the absence of everyone she had left behind. She went back to get them.
Over the next decade, Harriet Tubman made at least thirteen return trips into the slave states and liberated approximately seventy people — family members, neighbors, and strangers who had heard of her and trusted their lives to her judgment. She used the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses, abolitionists, and Black community members who provided shelter, food, and guidance to freedom seekers. She moved at night, in winter, through terrain that was actively patrolled. She carried a gun. She told the people she was leading that if any of them lost their nerve and turned back, they endangered everyone — and that she would shoot them before she let them expose the route. No one turned back. She never lost a single person.
The methods Tubman used were shaped by her faith. She described her ability to navigate, to sense danger, and to move undetected as a direct experience of divine guidance. She said God spoke to her directly. Her visions and auditory experiences — which may have been partly related to her brain injury — she interpreted entirely as spiritual communication. This was not incidental to her work. It was the source of her extraordinary calm in situations that would have paralyzed most people. She told Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery himself and understood its costs, that she had never run her railroad off the track and had never lost a passenger. Douglass wrote back that he knew no one who had done more for the liberation of the enslaved than she had.
When the Civil War began, Tubman offered her services to the Union Army. She served as a spy and intelligence gatherer, using her network of contacts and her knowledge of the terrain in South Carolina and Maryland to provide military information to Union commanders. In 1863 she led the Combahee River Raid — guiding Colonel James Montgomery and 150 Black Union soldiers up the Combahee River in South Carolina, evading Confederate mines whose locations she had obtained through her intelligence network, and liberating over 700 enslaved people in a single night. It was the first military operation in American history planned and led by a woman. The people freed in the raid streamed onto the Union boats — men, women, children, pigs, chickens, bags of rice. Tubman described the chaos with characteristic humor. She received no pay for her intelligence work. She spent the rest of her life fighting to receive it.
Harriet Tubman lived until 1913. After the Civil War she continued organizing — running a home for elderly African Americans in Auburn, New York, working with Susan B. Anthony on women’s suffrage, and never stopping her public advocacy for the rights of Black Americans and women. She applied for a military pension for her service as a spy and scout and nurse for the Union Army for thirty years before Congress finally approved it — at the rate of twenty dollars a month. The United States Treasury announced in 2016 that Tubman’s face would replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. As of 2026 the redesigned bill has not been released. Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who signed the Indian Removal Act and was responsible for the Trail of Tears, remains on the currency. Harriet Tubman, who risked her life at least thirteen times to liberate the enslaved, does not. That fact is also part of this record.