Reverently called "Moses" by the hundreds of slaves she helped to free in the years preceding the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, was also a Union scout and spy, a humanitarian, and women’s suffrage advocate.

Harriet was born into slavery as Araminta Ross about 1820, in Dorchester County, Maryland, to parents Ben Ross and Harriet “Rit” Green. Like other slaves of the time, the exact place and date of her birth was not recorded. Belonging to the Brodess family, Harriet’s mother worked as a cook in “the big house,” while her father was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on the plantation. One of nine children, she could only watch as her parents struggled in vain to keep the family together. Three of her sisters were sold; however, and she never saw them again.

As a child, Tubman was often hired out to other slave masters in the area and withstood beatings and whippings at their hands. As an adolescent, she suffered a traumatic head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight thrown by an irate overseer, intending to hit another slave.

Harriet Tubman, by H. Seymour Squyer, 1885

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Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner's house, where she lay without medical care for two days. Though the injury caused disabling seizures, blackouts, and severe headaches, which she would suffer for the rest of her life, she was soon sent back into the fields. When her field boss began to complain, the Brodess family tried unsuccessfully to sell her. The injury also caused Tubman to have strange visions and dreams, which she believed were signs from the divine, guiding her “missions” in her later life.

About 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Little is known about him or their marriage, which had to have been complicated by her slave status. Soon afterwards, she adopted her mother’s name of “Harriet.” In 1849, she became very ill and the Brodess family again tried to sell her. She then determined that she would escape, later saying: “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."

Escaping with the help of the Underground Railroad, through an elaborate and secret series of houses, tunnels, and roads set up by abolitionists and free and former slaves, she made her way to Philadelphia.

There, she worked at various odd jobs and joined a large abolitionist group. The next year, she joined the Underground Railroad, and on her first mission in December 1850, returned to Maryland to rescue her sister and her sister’s children. In the Spring of 1851, she headed back to Maryland, freeing her brother Moses and two other men. That fall, she returned to find her husband John, only to discover that he had married another woman. Though Tubman sent word that he should join her, he insisted that he was happy where he was.

Over the next decade she would travel to the South about 18 times, helping some 300 slaves escape via the secret routes and safe houses established by the Underground Railroad. During this time, she also freed three of her brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. As she led more and more individuals out of slavery, she became popularly known as “Moses.” In 1857, though her aging parents had already been freed, she led them north into the Canadian city of St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves, including her brothers, other relatives, and many friends had gathered.