Harriet Tubman Trivia
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50 free Harriet Tubman trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Harriet Tubman trivia quiz covers a life that reads like several: an enslaved girl called Minty on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a head injury that gave her lifelong visions, an escape to Philadelphia in 1849, thirteen return trips that freed some 70 people without losing one, a friendship with John Brown, service as a Union nurse, scout and spy who guided the Combahee River Raid, decades of poverty and activism in Auburn, New York, and a posthumous commission as a brigadier general in 2024. The easy questions cover the nickname 'Moses', the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. The medium ones ask about her family, her methods, her husbands, her farm and the raid that freed more than 750 people. The hard ones dig into the runaway advertisement, the reward myth, the gold-coin swindle, her pension fight, the brain surgery she endured biting a bullet, and the books and films about her. It suits a Black History Month lesson, a women's history round or anyone who wants to know the real person behind the icon. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Harriet Tubman's name at birth?
Araminta Ross
Araminta Ross was Minty to her family. She took her mother's name, Harriet, around the time she married John Tubman, about 1844.
Q 02Legend credits Tubman with leading 300 people to freedom, but about how many do her biographers now count?
About 70
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.
Q 03What biblical nickname did Tubman earn as a conductor on the Underground Railroad?
Moses
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.
Q 04In which state was Tubman born into slavery?
Maryland
Maryland. Every one of her later rescue missions went back there, where she knew the people and the landscape; none reached the Deep South.
Q 05What did an overseer throw that struck young Tubman's head and caused her lifelong seizures?
A two-pound metal weight
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.
Q 06Which event in Tubman's life went unrecorded, leaving estimates ten years apart?
Her birth
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.
Q 07What became of Tubman's older sisters Linah, Mariah Ritty and Soph?
Sold away
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.
Q 08What was Tubman's job when, aged five or six, she was hired out to a woman called 'Miss Susan'?
Nursemaid to a baby
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.
Q 09What did the young Tubman have to check in the marshes for planter James Cook, even when sick with measles?
Muskrat traps
Muskrat traps, which meant wading through cold water. She grew so ill that Cook sent her back, and her mother nursed her to health.
Q 10What was the status of John Tubman, whom Harriet married around 1844?
A free black man
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.
Q 11Why did Tubman's first escape attempt, in September 1849, end in a return to slavery?
Her brothers turned back
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.
Q 12Despite the legend of a $40,000 bounty, who posted the only known reward for Tubman, $100 in 1849?
Her enslaver's widow
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.
Q 13To which city did Tubman escape in 1849?
Philadelphia
Q 21How did Tubman avoid a former enslaver she recognised on a train?
She pretended to read a newspaper
She pretended to read a newspaper. The woman he remembered could not read, so he paid the reader no attention.
Q 22Which Wilmington Quaker regularly arranged Tubman's onward transport north from Delaware?
Thomas Garrett
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.
Q 23Why did Tubman sing spirituals while leading escapes?
To signal safety or danger
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.
Q 14What did Tubman say she looked at to see if she was 'the same person' after first reaching free soil?
Her hands
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.
Q 15Which 1850 federal law led Tubman to take the people she rescued on to Canada?
Fugitive Slave Act
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.
Q 16From where was Tubman's niece Kessiah rescued in December 1850, on Tubman's first mission?
A slave auction
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.
Q 17What did Tubman discover when she went back in 1851 to fetch her husband John?
He had married another woman
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.
Q 18Which famous abolitionist likely sheltered Tubman's group of 11 escapees in 1851?
Frederick Douglass
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.'
Q 19Why did Tubman prefer to start her escapes on a Saturday night?
Runaway notices waited until Monday
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.
Q 20What did Tubman carry as a disguise when she found herself walking toward a former enslaver?
Two live chickens
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.
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.
Q 24Tubman said she never did what, in eight years as an Underground Railroad conductor?
Lost a passenger
'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.
Q 25To which Canadian town did Tubman lead her elderly parents in 1857?
St. Catharines
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.
Q 26Which abolitionist asked Tubman to recruit fighters in Canada and called her 'General Tubman'?
John Brown
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.
Q 27Which politician's family sold Tubman the farm near Auburn, New York, that became her home?
Senator William H. Seward
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.
Q 28What did Tubman find on her last rescue mission, in 1860, when she went back for her sister Rachel?
Rachel had died
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.
Q 29Tubman began her Civil War service in 1862 among freed refugees at Port Royal, on the coast of which state?
South Carolina
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.
Q 30Up which river did Tubman guide Union gunboats in an 1863 raid that freed more than 700 people?
Combahee
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.