Field Trips

Born into slavery in early 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Tubman gained international acclaim during her lifetime as an Underground Railroad agent, abolitionist, Civil War spy and nurse, suffragist, and humanitarian. Disabled by a near fatal head injury while enslaved, Tubman rose above horrific childhood adversity to emerge with a will of steel. Tubman transcended victimization to achieve personal and physical freedom from her oppressors.

During the decades preceding the Civil War, when the United States struggled to define itself, no issue more divided and plagued its people than slavery. Even among those who had doubts about its morality, slavery was debated as part of a complex set of interlocking philosophical, social, economic, and political concerns too difficult to resolve and too intertwined with the fate of the nation to consider abolishing.

15 years before slavery was abolished in the United States and a little more than 100 miles from the safety of Pennsylvania, Harriet Tubman operated on the edge of freedom. Born in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1822, Tubman emancipated herself from slavery in 1849 at age 27. She earned the nickname “Moses” for risking her own life about 13 times to guide more than 70 people—many of them family and friends she had left behind—from lives in slavery to new lives in freedom.

Tubman’s deep faith sustained her as nurse and a spy for the Union army. Tubman eventually settled with her extended family in Auburn, New York, was active in the women’s suffrage movement and founded a home for the elderly and disadvantaged.

Family was central to Harriet Tubman's life. As she wrote, "I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free." What compelled Tubman to return for her loved ones on multiple trips to guide them to freedom?

Stay or go? Obey or resist? For slaves, every choice had life-altering impacts. When choosing to seek her own freedom, Harriet Tubman risked her life and health and left behind the only community she had ever known. To stay meant she risked sale and continued to live in the limited and brutal conditions of slavery. To return so her loved ones could experience freedom risked a return to slavery but offered new life. What factored into a slave's choices?