Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad’s “conductors.”  During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom.  And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.”

Tubman was born a slave in Maryland’s Dorchester County around 1820.  At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant.  Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields.  In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away.  She set out one night on foot.  With some assistance from a friendly white woman, Tubman was on her way.  She followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money.  The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom.  She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men.  On her third return, she went after her husband, only to find he had taken another wife.  Undeterred, she found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North.

Becoming friends with the leading abolitionists of the day, Tubman took part in antislavery meetings.  During the Civil War Harriet Tubman worked for the Union as a cook, a nurse, and even a spy. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she would spend the rest of her long life. She died in 1913.