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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 a spy for the Union Army, a nurse, a scout behind Confederate lines, and had led the Combahee River Raid that liberated over seven hundred enslaved people in a single night in June 1863.

For none of this was I paid. The pension I applied for was denied for thirty years and granted six months before my death. The country for which I had risked my life nineteen times over was not in a hurry to acknowledge the debt.