10 x 14"
Watercolor, ink, chalk

Harriet Tubman

1819/1820-1913

Harriet Tubman was born in Maryland, a slave. She was fed on cornmeal, whipped, and sent to work — weaving, checking muskrat traps, caring for children — when she was six years old. At twenty-five, she married John Tubman, a free Black who did not share her interest in escaping to the North. But five years later, on her own, she made her way to Philadelphia by the secret paths and safehouses called the Underground Railroad:

When I found I had crossed the [Mason-Dixon] line, I looked at my hands to see if I were the same person . . . the sun came like gold through the tree and over the field, and I felt like I was in heaven.

In Philadelphia, while supporting herself as a maid, Tubman became a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. Over the next ten years she made nineteen trips to the South, liberating close to 300 slaves and helping them escape into Canada on a handmade suspension bridge over Niagara Falls. Plantation owners offered $40,000 for Tubman’s capture, but she was never caught and she never lost a passenger — except, in a sense, her husband when she tried to retrieve him on one of her trips south. He had remarried and did not want to be rescued.

During the Civil War, Tubman served as a hospital nurse and spy for the Union army. When the war was over, she married again and spent the rest of her life living peacefully in Auburn, New York.