50 Fun Facts About Harriet Tubman

What was Harriet Tubman's name at birth?

Araminta Ross was Minty to her family. She took her mother's name, Harriet, around the time she married John Tubman, about 1844.

Legend credits Tubman with leading 300 people to freedom, but about how many do her biographers now count?

About 70, on some 13 trips. The figure of 300 was her first biographer's estimate; Tubman herself told audiences in the late 1850s that she had rescued 50 or 60.

What biblical nickname did Tubman earn as a conductor on the Underground Railroad?

Moses, after the prophet who led the Hebrews out of Egypt. Eastern Shore slaveholders never realised the rescuer was Minty, the small, injured woman who had fled them years before.

In which state was Tubman born into slavery?

Maryland. Every one of her later rescue missions went back there, where she knew the people and the landscape; none reached the Deep South.

What did an overseer throw that struck young Tubman's head and caused her lifelong seizures?

A two-pound metal weight, thrown in a village store at an enslaved man who had left work, struck her instead. She lay on the seat of a loom for two days without medical care.

Which event in Tubman's life went unrecorded, leaving estimates ten years apart?

Her birth. No record of it was kept, so guesses ran from 1815 to 1825; a $2 payment to a midwife, logged by her enslaver in March 1822, is now taken as the best clue.

What became of Tubman's older sisters Linah, Mariah Ritty and Soph?

Sold away to out-of-state buyers by enslaver Edward Brodess, the three were never seen by the family again; two had to leave young children of their own behind.

What was Tubman's job when, aged five or six, she was hired out to a woman called 'Miss Susan'?

Nursemaid to a baby: she had to rock the cradle and was whipped whenever the child woke and cried, leaving scars she carried for life.

What did the young Tubman have to check in the marshes for planter James Cook, even when sick with measles?

Muskrat traps, which meant wading through cold water. She grew so ill that Cook sent her back, and her mother nursed her to health.

What was the status of John Tubman, whom Harriet married around 1844?

A free black man, yet the marriage had no legal standing: any children would have been enslaved, because a child's status followed the mother's.

Why did Tubman's first escape attempt, in September 1849, end in a return to slavery?

Her brothers turned back, overcome by fear, and made her return with them. Weeks later she set out again alone, and this time she reached free soil.

Despite the legend of a $40,000 bounty, who posted the only known reward for Tubman, $100 in 1849?

Her enslaver's widow, Eliza Brodess, advertised for 'Minty' in a local paper. The $40,000 figure was invented in an 1867 letter backing Tubman's claim for army pay.

To which city did Tubman escape in 1849?

Philadelphia. She travelled by night for about 90 miles to get there, then took domestic work and saved her wages to bring her family out.

What did Tubman say she looked at to see if she was 'the same person' after first reaching free soil?

Her hands. 'There was such a glory over everything,' she recalled, but the joy soon soured: she was alone, and everyone she loved was still enslaved.

Which 1850 federal law led Tubman to take the people she rescued on to Canada?

The Fugitive Slave Act made officials even in free states help capture escapees and punished anyone who sheltered them, so nowhere in the North was safe.

From where was Tubman's niece Kessiah rescued in December 1850, on Tubman's first mission?

A slave auction: her husband, John Bowley, spirited Kessiah and their two children from the auction block and sailed them up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, where Tubman hid them.

What did Tubman discover when she went back in 1851 to fetch her husband John?

He had married another woman, Caroline, and refused to leave. Tubman swallowed her anger, found others who wanted to escape and led them north instead.

Which famous abolitionist likely sheltered Tubman's group of 11 escapees in 1851?

Frederick Douglass, whose Rochester home lay on the route to Canada. He later wrote to her: 'I have wrought in the day – you in the night.'

Why did Tubman prefer to start her escapes on a Saturday night?

Runaway notices waited until Monday, when the newspapers next printed, giving her a head start. She also preferred winter, when long, cold nights kept people indoors.

What did Tubman carry as a disguise when she found herself walking toward a former enslaver?

Two live chickens. Spotting him as she turned a corner, she yanked the strings on their legs and busied herself with the flapping birds until he had passed.

How did Tubman avoid a former enslaver she recognised on a train?

She pretended to read a newspaper. The woman he remembered could not read, so he paid the reader no attention.

Which Wilmington Quaker regularly arranged Tubman's onward transport north from Delaware?

Thomas Garrett. Fined into ruin for aiding fugitives when he was nearly sixty, he told the court to send him anyone who needed shelter, and went on helping them.

Why did Tubman sing spirituals while leading escapes?

To signal safety or danger: she changed the way she sang a spiritual to tell hidden runaways whether to come out. She also carried a pistol, partly to stop anyone giving up.

Tubman said she never did what, in eight years as an Underground Railroad conductor?

'I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,' she told a suffrage convention in 1896. She is said to have threatened to shoot anyone who lost heart, since one returning runaway could endanger them all.

To which Canadian town did Tubman lead her elderly parents in 1857?

St. Catharines, Ontario, where her brothers and other freedom seekers had already settled. Its winters proved too hard on her parents, and within two years she moved them back across the border.

Which abolitionist asked Tubman to recruit fighters in Canada and called her 'General Tubman'?

John Brown. She helped him plan and raise money for the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, but she was not with him when he struck, perhaps because of illness.

Which politician's family sold Tubman the farm near Auburn, New York, that became her home?

Senator William H. Seward, later Lincoln's Secretary of State. Tubman settled her ageing parents on the farm, and it became a refuge for relatives and friends.

What did Tubman find on her last rescue mission, in 1860, when she went back for her sister Rachel?

Rachel had died, and Tubman could not bring out the two children she left. She led the Ennalls family north instead, their baby drugged to keep it quiet as patrols passed.

Tubman began her Civil War service in 1862 among freed refugees at Port Royal, on the coast of which state?

South Carolina. Sent south with the backing of the governor of Massachusetts, she nursed soldiers and refugees with remedies made from local plants, then turned to scouting behind enemy lines.

Up which river did Tubman guide Union gunboats in an 1863 raid that freed more than 700 people?

The Combahee. Her scouts had found out where the Confederates had laid mines, so the boats slipped past them, and hundreds of people ran down to the shore to be taken aboard.

Tubman is widely credited as the first woman in US history to do what?

Lead an armed military operation: the 1863 river raid she guided freed more than 700 people, and many of the men promptly enlisted in the Union army.

Tubman reportedly served which colonel his last meal before the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner?

Robert Gould Shaw, who died in the assault at the head of the black 54th Massachusetts. Of the battle she said: 'we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling.'

Barely paid by the Union army, how did Tubman support herself?

Selling pies and root beer, which she made at night after nursing all day. She had given up her army rations so that no one could say she was favoured.

What happened to Tubman on a train home from her war service in October 1865?

Dragged out of her seat by the conductor and other men, she was thrown into another car with her arm badly hurt. No passenger took her side.

Before he married Tubman in 1869, what had Nelson Davis been to her?

Her lodger: to pay the bills she took in boarders, and Davis, a veteran of the US Colored Troops about twenty years her junior, was one of them.

Why did Sarah Bradford write the 1869 biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman?

To raise money for Tubman: Bradford wrote it in great haste because the mortgage on Tubman's home was about to cost her the house. Its inflated tally of 300 rescues became legend.

In 1873 swindlers lured Tubman into the woods with a promise of what?

A trunk of gold coins, supposedly smuggled out of the South and going cheap. The men chloroformed her and took the cash she had borrowed; the trunk held only rocks.

When Tubman first won a federal pension, it recognised her as what?

Widow: the pension came through her second husband's army service. Congress later added a nurse's allowance, but never paid her as the scout and spy she had been.

Asked whether women should have the vote, how did Tubman reply?

Her reply, 'I suffered enough to believe it', went to a white woman who had asked. In old age she spoke at suffrage conventions, working alongside Susan B. Anthony.

What did Tubman have to sell to afford a train ticket to receptions in her honour in Boston in 1897?

A cow. A lifetime of giving to others had left her so poor that the guest of honour could not otherwise pay her own fare.

Which rule did Tubman object to when the church opened her home for the aged in 1908?

An entrance fee of $100. 'They make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars,' she complained; she had meant the home for people with no money at all.

What did Tubman reportedly bite on during brain surgery without anaesthesia in the late 1890s?

A bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do during amputations. The Boston surgeon, she said, 'sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable.'

Of what illness did Tubman die in March 1913?

Pneumonia. She had spent her last two years as a resident of the home for the aged that she herself had founded, and she died there among family and friends.

In 1978 Tubman became the first African-American woman to appear on what?

A US postage stamp, the first in the Black Heritage series. A generation earlier, in 1944, the National Council of Negro Women had campaigned successfully for a Liberty ship to carry her name.

In 2016 the US Treasury announced plans to put Tubman's portrait on which banknote?

The $20 bill, with Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, moved to the back. The redesign was put off again and again, and ten years on no Tubman note had been issued.

To what rank was Tubman posthumously commissioned by her home state's National Guard in 2024?

Brigadier general. The one-star commission, conferred on Veterans Day 2024, honoured the Civil War service as scout and spy for which the army never paid her as a soldier.

Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Tubman in the 2019 film Harriet?

Cynthia Erivo, who also co-wrote and sang the film's closing song, 'Stand Up'. It earned her a second nomination alongside the one for acting.

After her head injury, Tubman had vivid dreams and visions; what did she believe they were?

Messages from God. She trusted them to warn her of danger on rescue missions, and a Quaker ally said he never met anyone with more confidence in the voice of God.

What marked the 1913 burial of Tubman, who was never paid as a soldier?

Military honours, at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York. Just before she died she told those at her bedside, in the words of John's Gospel, that she was going to prepare a place for them.

As a child, Tubman was told she seemed to come from which West African people?

Ashanti, the people of present-day Ghana, though no record confirms the link. Her one known African-born forebear is her grandmother Modesty, who arrived on a slave ship.