Harriet Tubman

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they had known they were slaves. I do not say this to condemn them. I say it because the most formidable chain is the one a man does not feel. The body can be enslaved by an overseer's whip. The mind can be enslaved by persuading a man that his condition is natural, or God's will, or...

I made nineteen trips back into Maryland after my own escape in 1849. I brought out over seventy people. I never lost a single one.

This photograph was taken around 1885, forty years after I last went back. I was over sixty years old by then, though no one knew precisely how old — like Douglass, I was not told the date of my birth. By this time I had been...

I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors cannot say: I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger. That sentence is not a boast. It is a record of discipline, secrecy, danger, prayer, and the refusal to turn back.

I had reasoned this out in my mind: there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other. No person should be able to take me alive. Freedom was not a metaphor. It was breath, body, road, and risk.

This photograph was taken after the war. I am wearing my best dress. I look like a respectable woman, which I was. People are sometimes surprised by this — they expect someone who spent years in swamps and back roads to look like a fugitive. I was a fugitive. I was also a spy, a nurse, a soldier, and a conductor. I was many things. I dressed carefully for...

At Combahee River, freedom did not come as an argument. It came as gunboats, scouts, signals, and nearly eight hundred people stepping out of slavery while Confederate property burned behind them. Liberation required intelligence as much as courage.

Oh, dear Lord, I haint got no friend but you. Come to my help, Lord, for I'm in trouble!

When the men who followed her would give out and drop on the ground, groaning that they could not take another step, then the revolver carried by this bold and daring pioneer would come out, while pointing it at their heads she would say, 'Dead folks tell no tales; you go on or die!'

Oh, Lord! You've been wid me in six troubles, don't desert me in de seventh!

She rose singing, 'My people are free! My people are free!' She could not eat. The dream or vision filled her whole soul. When Mr. Garnet said she would never see the day, she replied: 'I tell you, sir, you'll see it, and you'll see it soon. My people are free!'

I'm gwine to hole stiddy on to you, an' you've got to see me trou.

'Why, Harriet! didn't you almost feel when you were lying alone, as if there was no God?' 'Oh, no! missus,' said Harriet, looking up in her child-like, simple way, 'I jest asked Jesus to take keer of me, an' He never let me git frost-bitten one bit.'