Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery around 1822 as Araminta 'Minty' Ross in Dorchester County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Her parents, Harriet 'Rit' Green and Ben Ross, were held as property by different enslavers. Three of her sisters were sold to plantations further south, which tore the family apart.

As a child she was hired out to other households, where she was beaten and made to do heavy work. As a teenager she was struck on the head with a heavy weight by an overseer; afterwards she suffered for the rest of her life from headaches, sleeping spells and visions, which she interpreted religiously. Around 1844 she married John Tubman and took the name Harriet.

In 1849, after her enslaver's death and fearing she would be sold, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made escaped people unsafe in the North too, she took people on to Canada, using St. Catharines in Ontario as a base. She worked with other abolitionists, including William Still and Thomas Garrett.

According to historians who have reconstructed her journeys, she returned to Maryland about thirteen times and directly helped about seventy people, including relatives, to escape; she gave instructions to dozens of others. She usually travelled at night and in winter. Her nickname 'Moses' referred to the biblical liberator.

During the Civil War Tubman worked for the Union army in South Carolina as a cook, nurse, scout and spy. On 2 June 1863 she led, with Colonel James Montgomery and Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, a raid along the Combahee River that freed more than 700 people. This made her one of the first women in American history to help lead an armed military operation.

In the mid-19th century the United States was deeply divided over slavery, which formed the basis of the plantation economy in the South. In 1860 almost four million people lived in slavery. The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act required northern states too to return people who had escaped, which heightened tensions.

The abolitionist movement included Black and white activists, religious groups such as the Quakers and writers such as Frederick Douglass. The network known as the Underground Railroad was not a central organisation but a loose web of helpers, safe houses and routes. Women played an important but long overlooked role in it.

Tubman's rescue missions directly freed dozens of people and made her a well-known figure in abolitionist circles. Through her intelligence work and the Combahee River Raid she contributed to the Union's war effort in the South, where freeing enslaved people also became a military objective.

Despite her service she long received no military pension. Only in 1899 did she obtain an increased pension, partly as the widow of her second husband, the veteran Nelson Davis. After the war she worked for freed people, for women's suffrage and for the care of poor and elderly Black Americans.

Tubman died on 10 March 1913 in Auburn, New York, in the home for the aged she had founded on her land, and was buried with military honours. Biographies by Sarah Bradford (1869 and 1886) made her known during her lifetime but also contained exaggerations; later historians such as Kate Clifford Larson have reconstructed her life through archival research.

In the United States she is regarded as one of the best-known figures of the struggle against slavery. National historical parks in Maryland and in Auburn are dedicated to her. In 2016 the Treasury Department announced that her portrait would appear on the 20-dollar bill; that plan has not yet been carried out.