Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstaff Lauren Volgebaum here. Harriet Tubman stood just five feet tall that's one and a half meters. She never made much money in her lifetime and lived humbly, eating mostly food that she grew in her own garden, but she's one of the most famous civilians admired black Americans in United States history.
After escaping from enslavement in eighteen forty nine, she became a conductor on the underground railroad, venturing back into Maryland, a state where enslavement was legal, thirteen times during the eighteen fifties, to help numerous other freedom seekers find their way north. During the Civil War, Tubman traveled south again to work as a spy, scout, nurse, and cook for the Union Army. After the conflict, she established the first
nursing home for elderly black Americans. Tubman has grown into such an American icon that her legend sometimes obscures the real person behind it. So today let's look at the facts of her life and some misconceptions about it, as well as how she became such an enduring symbol of freedom. Harriet Ross Tudman was born enslaved around eighteen twenty two in Dorchester County on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Her parents
named her air Minta or Minty for short. She was the fifth of nine children of Harriet or Writt Green Ross and her husband Ben Ross, who had met when they're in slaver's households, had merged in eighteen oh three in a marriage of their own. Tudman's youth was harsh and brutal. At an early age, she was set to work as a field hand. Her father had learned timber inspection,
and their enslavers often sent him away to work. As the estate was small, Tudman and her siblings and mother were often hired out, meaning that sometimes Tudman had to act as a parent to her siblings, and sometimes she wound up among strangers who whipped her for failing to do work. She had never been taught. As a teenager running errands, she once refused to help an overseer who was tracking an escaped man. When the enslaver threw an iron weight to attempt to stop the man who was
seeking freedom, it caught her instead, fracturing her skull. The injury went essentially untreated beyond her mother's modest means and caused headaches and seizures for the rest of Tubman's life. Around the age of twenty two, she married a free black man by the name of John Tubman. Though the marriage wouldn't last, she kept his surname and began using her mother's first name as her own, becoming Harriet Tubman. In March of eighteen forty nine, Tubman's enslaver died, leaving
behind an estate deeply in debt. Tubman had already seen three of her sisters auctioned off feared being sent to an even crueler house. When her husband, John refused to go along, she and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped together. After a few weeks, the two young men lost their nerve and returned, but Tumman refused to give up. She
slipped off again, this time alone. She traveled by night, using the North Star to guide her, and sought refuge during the day with abolitionist Quaker families who were willing to break Maryland law to help escapees. She made her way through Delaware and eventually crossed into Free Pennsylvania. She later recalled, there was such a glory over everything. The sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven. But Tubman's
joy was muted because her family remained behind. After settling in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor on the underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that it exists did since the eighteen twenties. It was a highly dangerous mission. Anyone caught helping enslaved people break free faced the risk of being publicly branded and jailed, and, in
Tumman's case, enslaved once more. A Tumman followed elaborate procedures to maintain stealth. She wore disguises, communicated with freedom seekers through third parties, and arranged for them to meet her miles away from their homes to reduce the chance that they would lead pursuers to her if all else failed, She carried a pistol. She warned her underground passengers that if they tried to turn back, she would shoot them to prevent them from betraying her and the rest of
the group. A newspaper ad in eighteen forty nine offered fifty dollars for Tummen's capture in Maryland and one hundred dollars for her capture outside the state, the equivalent of thousands of dollars today. In eighteen fifty, Congress passed the so called Fugitive Slave Act, which made such a efforts a federal crime. It also made anyone who escaped to freedom subject to capture and re enslavement if they were caught.
That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back into Maryland and helped her niece spend her two children escape. Over the next decade, she repeated that mission a dozen more times, cautiously confining her efforts to farms that she knew on Maryland's eastern shore. As word got around of Tubman's successful missions, she became a sought after speaker at abolitionist fundraiser meetings. She also became a target of mercenaries who earned money catching people who had managed to escape.
Their failure to apprehend her only added to her legend. Her admirers nicknamed her General Tubman. In eighteen sixty, she pulled off an even more daring feat by thwarting federal marshals in Troy, New York. They were attempting to deport a freedom seeker back to Virginia. Tubman disguised herself as
an elderly woman and slipped into a government building. When the prisoner and his captors stepped out into the street, Tubman shouted a signal from an upper story window, and a mob of abolitionists converged on them and seized the prisoner,
who they spirited away to a waiting riverboat. Numbers reported contemporarily seemed to have been inflated, but according to research by historian Caate Clifford Larsen, Tubman led about seventy people to freedom and provided instructions that enabled another seventy or so to flee on their own. Tubman claimed, I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost
a passenger. After the Civil War broke out in eighteen sixty one, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a fervent abolitionist, contacted Tubman, a friend of his, and told her that the Union forces needed her help. He arranged transportation for Tubman to travel to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she
went to work for Major General David Hunter. Ostensibly, her mission was to help provide food and clothing to the escaped enslaved people who were flocking to the Union Army's camps, but that seems to have been a cover story for her real work in gathering intelligence. With a budget of one hundred dollars in secret Service money, she recruited a small team of escaped people to scout for the Union forces, who were experienced riverboat pilots and knew every inch of
the South Carolina coast line. After President Abraham Lincoln authorized the recruiting and deployment of Black troops in the summer of eighteen sixty two, Tubman and her spies provided intelligence for the new units. In January of eighteen sixty three, her team's efforts helped Union forces evade Confederate guards and stage a nine day covert operation to seize needed supplies. Her team operated as a kind of special forces a, sneaking into enemy territory to gather information on their troop
movements and fortifications. In June of eighteen sixty three, accompanied a Union colonel and his forces into the southern low country of South Carolina and helped lead a crucial raid. Tubman and her scouts sailed up river and stealthily went ashore to talk to the enslaved people who had placed mines in the water for Confederate forces, so that they could map the locations and locate the enemy's storehouses. Then she helped guide the Union crafts around the deadly mines.
The resulting raid not only struck a devastating blow to Confederate forces, but also resulted in freedom for seven hundred enslaved people, many of whom Tubman recruited to serve for the Union. After the Civil War ended in the Union's victory in eighteen sixty five, Tubman left her position and set out for the town of Auburn, New York, where she and her family settled on property that the state's
former governor had sold her on generous terms. But on the way she got a rough reminder that the struggle for true freedom wasn't over. On a literal train north, a train conductor refused to honor Tubman's soldiers pass as a train ticket. They got into an argument, and he and several passengers threw her into the baggage car, breaking her arm and three ribs. She was unable to work
for months. This woman, who had helped defeat the Confederacy, was compelled to accept handouts from neighbors and local grocers just to feed her family and elderly parents. Once she healed, she began growing vegetables and raising chickens. She did domestic work and took in borders. She fell in love with one of her guests, a former enslaved man and Union veteran by the name of Nelson Davis, and the two
married in eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen seventy four, the couple adopted a baby girl named Gerdy, but Davis's ill health and other setbacks meant that Tubman and her family
continued to struggle to make ends meet. The federal government wouldn't give her a pension for her wartime service as a spy, but after Davis's death in eighteen eighty eight, she was able to collect a widow's stipend and eventually received a pension for having worked as a nurse in the latter part of the war, and she was determined
to keep helping others. In eighteen ninety six, she scraped together enough money to buy a second plot of land alongside her Auburn property, where she started a home for elderly black Americans. Seven years later, as Tumman aged, she turned the property over to the African Methodist aposcople Zion Church, which she was a member of, with the understanding that
they would continue to run the home. Tumman lived next door until her own health began to decline, at which point she became one of the residents at the home she had founded. She passed away there in nineteen thirteen at the age of ninety years, but her influence did not end there. Tumman's friends included many prominent figures like Frederick Douglas, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha coffin Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Garrett, and Susan B. Anthony. She was buried with
military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The city commemorated her legacy with a plaque on the courthouse. During World War II. After a successful war bond drive by an African American women's group, a liberty ship was christened the S. S. Harriet Tubman in her honor. She became the subject of numerous biographies and children's books, and the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged was recognized as a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of
Historic Places in nineteen seventy four. Four years later, she became the first black woman to appear on a US postage stamp. A tag team of lawmakers have been trying to have her image replace President Andrew Jackson's on the twenty dollar bill for over a decade now, though they haven't yet been successful, as she did appear on a limited edition uncirculated silver dollar in twenty twenty four. Spend it as a dollar, but it's worth a good bit
more than that on the collector's market. The US meant paid proceeds from it to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and to the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, New York. Today's episode is based on the article Harriet Tubman's life and impact on the Underground Railroad on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer. Brainstuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. But four more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.