Harriet Tubman

Hillary and Chelsea

The year was 1860. Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave, was getting ready to stand trial in Troy, New York. The authorities weren’t letting any of the protesters who had gathered outside the courthouse into the proceedings. But an elderly-looking woman wrapped in a shawl, carrying a food basket, seemed innocuous. She had found a spot at the back of the room. When the judge announced that Charles Nalle would be sent back to Virginia, she suddenly rushed forward. She threw off her shawl, revealing that she wasn’t an old woman at all—she was thirty-four years old. She grabbed Nalle and rushed him out of the room, taking advantage of the guards’ surprise. As the two ran down the stairs, she fended off blows from policemen’s clubs. Finally, she put her passenger onto a waiting ferry.

Victory was short-lived. The policemen waiting on the other side of the water brought him right back and shut him in the judge’s office. But the young woman wasn’t going to give up so easily. She rallied the people of Troy, and on her signal, the crowd stormed the office, freed Nalle, and put him on a wagon heading west. It was Harriet Tubman’s first public rescue of a runaway slave.

Araminta Ross, as she was originally known, was born into slavery around 1820 in Maryland. Part of a big family, she was sent at age five to a neighbor who wanted “a young girl to help take care of a baby.” She was so small she had to sit on the floor in order to safely hold the baby. One of her jobs was staying up nights to rock the cradle. When she fell asleep, she was whipped. She was homesick; she missed her mother desperately. By the time she was returned to her family, she was sickly and weak. A few years later, an overseer threw an iron weight at a fleeing slave; it hit Harriet in the head, leaving her with a scar above her eyebrow and fainting spells that would last the rest of her life.

Living in the shadow of constant violence, cruelty, and racism, Harriet developed remarkable self-reliance and physical endurance. In her twenties, she married John Tubman, a free black man. Five years later, her master died, throwing her future, and that of her family, into uncertainty. Deeply spiritual, she prayed for guidance. Like Sojourner Truth, she decided passive prayer wasn’t enough; to live out God’s will, she needed to combine her faith with action. “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said later. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other.”

That September, Harriet set out for unfamiliar territory, leaving behind her parents and her husband. Within weeks, her master’s family was running ads in the paper, offering a reward to anyone who found her and brought her back. She followed the North Star, relying on an “underground railroad” of safe houses and hiding places she hoped were waiting for her. She offered a favorite quilt to a sympathetic white woman in exchange for directions to the first house as well as a piece of paper with two names of people who could help her written on it. Harriet was illiterate, so she couldn’t read the names; she could only hand the paper to the next person she encountered and hope he or she would hide her.

Catherine Clinton writes in her biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom: “Since the earliest days of bondage, those captured and enslaved spent enormous reservoirs of energy trying to unchain themselves. The vast majority of slaves hoped in vain. They prayed for freedom but resorted to seeking salvation in the afterlife.” Harriet risked everything to escape to freedom: the threat of bloodhounds on her trail, of slave catchers desperate to earn the bounty placed on her head, of danger and disease waiting for her in rivers and the woods, of the possibility that the door on which she knocked was not home to an abolitionist at all. She made her way almost entirely on foot, by night, across state lines. Most fugitive slaves, especially those who risked the dangerous journey on their own, were men; she was a young woman in her twenties.

When she arrived safely in Philadelphia, like many other freed slaves, she chose a new name to go along with her new life. There, she found a community of like-minded people, a network of black churches, and an open forum to discuss abolition. She spoke publicly about her personal experiences with slavery and found paid work to support herself.

Then one day, she heard a rumor that the wife of her former master was getting ready to sell Harriet’s favorite niece, Kizzy. Here, her story goes from courageous to heroic. She made up her mind to turn around and go back, braving the dangers all over again, in order to try to rescue Kizzy and her two children. Though the details of the escape are unknown, we do know that Harriet succeeded. She brought the family to Baltimore and hid them there until she could find a way to transport them to the North.

In 1851, Harriet made her second trip back, rescuing not only one of her brothers but two of his coworkers. In the meantime, the U.S. had passed a fugitive slave law, making an already dangerous mission even more frightening: Even in free states, enslaved people were required by law to be returned to their masters. Anyone who aided an enslaved person could be thrown in jail or fined. Still, once again, Harriet was successful. But she had one more mission to undertake—this one deeply personal. On her third trip, Harriet sought out her husband, intent on persuading him to come with her. She made the unhappy discovery that he had remarried and had no plans to leave with her. At first, she said later, she thought “she would go right in and make all the trouble she could.” In the end, she concluded, “if he could do without her, she could do without him.”

Originally set on bringing her own family to safety, Harriet turned her attention to others who were in the same desperate situation. In December 1851, she officially became part of the Underground Railroad. “The Lord told me to do this,” she said later. “I said, ‘Oh Lord, I can’t—don’t ask me—take somebody else.’ ” According to her, the answer came back in no uncertain terms: “It’s you I want, Harriet Tubman.” So she went, bringing back a band of eleven fugitives that included another brother and several strangers. At this point, she decided to take her “passengers” to Canada, reasoning: “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer.” She settled there, eventually rescuing her entire family, including her elderly parents. She later moved the entire household to Auburn, New York, where she spent her later years.

“I was a conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say: I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

—HARRIET TUBMAN

All told, Harriet is credited with bringing hundreds of slaves to freedom. She traveled alone, risking her freedom and her life to liberate others. As word of her missions spread, she earned the nickname “Moses.” She was single-minded, setting her own fear aside in order to bring her passengers on the “liberty lines.” She carried a pistol, which she used more than once to frighten a fugitive on the verge of losing his or her nerve into staying the course. On one trip, she was distracted by a painful dental infection. She grabbed her pistol, knocked out the problem teeth, and kept going.

Harriet was also creative and a master of misdirection. Once she hid in plain sight in a town near her former Maryland home, covering her face with a sunbonnet and carrying two live chickens. When one of her former masters came toward her, she yanked the strings she had tied to the legs of the chickens, causing them to squawk and flap their wings. She rushed off, tending to the birds, and managing to avoid eye contact with the man. On another trip, she spotted another former master in a train car. Used to being underestimated or ignored, she passed herself off as an elderly woman, conveying instructions to hidden passengers through the spirituals she sang.

When the Civil War broke out, Harriet once again felt called. She had befriended the abolitionist John Brown (who called her “General Tubman”) and was galvanized by his unsuccessful siege on Harpers Ferry. She believed her place was at the center of the battle. She traveled with Union troops to South Carolina, where she tended to sick and wounded soldiers, drawing on her knowledge of herbal medicine. In 1863, she was appointed head of an espionage and scout network for the Union Army. Even though she was a wanted woman, she went behind enemy lines in South Carolina, building a whisper network of scouts to help track Confederate operations. In 1863, she led the famous Combahee River Raid, resulting in the liberation of as many as seven hundred former slaves. She told the story of the raid again and again, thrilling audiences with her death-defying courage and making them laugh with her colorful observations. (After climbing into a boat to make her escape, she recounted, she would never again wear a skirt on a military expedition.)

“Tubman never waited for a man to affirm her. Tubman reveled in defying men, defying governments, defying slavery, defying Confederate armies and slave catchers who put a $40,000 bounty on her head. This black woman who stood 5 feet tall was utterly and completely fearless.”

—DENEEN L. BROWN, THE WASHINGTON POST

In 1864, in failing health, she returned to New York to care for her aging parents. Though she was recognized by her fellow Union soldiers as a hero, her battle was far from over. On a train trip in 1865, the conductor refused to believe that a black woman could be carrying legitimately obtained soldiers’ papers. He demanded that she give up her seat. When she refused, it took four men to remove her. They left her in the baggage car, where she stayed for the rest of the trip.

In Auburn, New York, she opened the doors of her home, taking in anyone in need of help. She channeled donations to orphans, the elderly, and people with disabilities. She traveled the country speaking out in favor of women’s suffrage, alongside her friends Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. She remarried, this time to Civil War veteran Nelson Davis, and they adopted a little girl named Gertie. She fought for decades to receive any compensation for her military service, though when community members offered donations, she immediately passed them along to anyone she believed was more in need than she was.

Hillary

Years later, as senator for New York, I was proud to secure funding to restore the Harriet Tubman Home: a symbolic $11,750, which was the equivalent of the additional widow’s pension she should have received after the death of her husband. I was delighted when I learned that she would be depicted on the twenty-dollar bill—the first time a black person would appear on U.S. currency. However, it remains to be seen whether the current administration will follow through on this long-overdue recognition.

Chelsea

When I was a little girl, one of the first heroes I remember my mom telling me about was Harriet Tubman. We also learned about her throughout elementary school, in history and social studies classes. Her courage, conviction, and lifelong belief in putting her faith into action represent the best of humanity, and her story is one every child should know.

The wisdom she shared with her passengers has stayed as relevant as ever. The rule for all of her Underground Railroad missions was to keep going. Once you started—no matter how scared you got or how dangerous it became—you were not allowed to turn back. On the path to freedom, Harriet had one piece of advice: “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see torches in the woods, keep going. If they are shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want to taste freedom, keep going.” Even in the darkest moments, that is what we all must do: Keep going.