Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park United States

Legendary

Learn about the life of “Moses” a former slave that helped others escape to freedom in the North.

Photo by F Delventhal

Harriet Tubman didn't just guide people to freedom on foot. In 1863, she planned and led a military raid, becoming the first woman in American history to do so.

Three Union gunboats sailed up the Combahee River in South Carolina on the night of June 2. Tubman had spent weeks gathering information from enslaved people along the riverbanks, including where the Confederates had hidden underwater mines.

More than 700 people escaped slavery that night. Around 100 of the men joined the Union Army almost immediately.

Tubman was born into slavery in this part of Maryland, around 1822. Her birth name was Araminta Ross, and people called her Minty.

She was hired out to work as a small child, checking muskrat traps in freezing water. As a teenager, an overseer threw a heavy weight at another enslaved person and struck her in the head instead.

That injury gave her headaches, seizures, and vivid dreams for the rest of her life. She believed the visions were messages from God.

In 1849, she escaped and travelled north to Philadelphia. She later said that when she crossed into Pennsylvania, she looked at her hands to see if she was the same person.

She could have stayed safe. Instead she went back, again and again, over roughly a decade.

She guided around 70 people out of slavery, including her own parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. People started calling her Moses, after the biblical figure who led his people out of bondage.

She was tough about it. She carried a pistol and told anyone who wanted to turn back that they had to keep going, because one person returning could expose everyone.

She never lost a single person she was guiding. After the Civil War she settled in New York, cared for her elderly parents, and campaigned for women's right to vote.

Walk through the visitor center's exhibits, built to trace her life from childhood through the Underground Railroad years. Drive the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, which winds past the marshes, fields, and waterways she actually knew. Stand on the landscape itself, which looks much as it did when she was navigating it in the dark.