Harriet Tubman: Difference between revisions

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Wasn't scared of nothing neither Didn't come in this world to be no slave And wasn't going to stay one either.''

Harriet Tubman was born [[Vague Age|sometime in the 1820s]], a slave on an American plantation in Maryland. She started life as a house slave, and when she grew up was assigned to work in the fields and forests. One day when she was still quite young, she was running an errand at a dry-goods store and was caught in the pursuit of a runaway slave. She was left with a violent head injury, and for the rest of her life she suffered seizures and narcoleptic fits that would leave her unconscious and unable to be woken up.

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In 1849, she successfully escaped from Maryland into the free state of Pennsylvania.

{{quote| ""When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. 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."}}

{{quote|""When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. 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."}}

However, she soon decided that it wasn't enough to have won her own freedom: She wanted the freedom of her parents, siblings and friends. So, over the course of 11 years, she returned 13 times to the South, risking increasing danger each time, and never using the same route twice. She never once was caught nor lost a passenger. Legend tells that she held a runaway who got cold feet and was about to return to his plantation at gunpoint, saying, "You go on or die." She became the most famous conductor that the [[Underground Railroad]] has ever known, rescuing over 70 slaves through a network of safe houses, railroads and secret paths. She survived the [[Civil War]], and died in 1913 of pneumonia, when she must have been at least well into her 80s. Today she is rightly remembered as one of the great American heroes.