100 Fun Facts About Harriet Tubman

What was Harriet Tubman's name at birth?

Araminta Ross was Minty to her family. She took her mother's name, Harriet, around the time she married John Tubman, about 1844.

Legend credits Tubman with leading 300 people to freedom, but about how many do her biographers now count?

About 70, on some 13 trips. The figure of 300 was her first biographer's estimate; Tubman herself told audiences in the late 1850s that she had rescued 50 or 60.

What biblical nickname did Tubman earn as a conductor on the Underground Railroad?

Moses, after the prophet who led the Hebrews out of Egypt. Eastern Shore slaveholders never realised the rescuer was Minty, the small, injured woman who had fled them years before.

In which state was Tubman born into slavery?

Maryland. Every one of her later rescue missions went back there, where she knew the people and the landscape; none reached the Deep South.

What did an overseer throw that struck young Tubman's head and caused her lifelong seizures?

A two-pound metal weight, thrown in a village store at an enslaved man who had left work, struck her instead. She lay on the seat of a loom for two days without medical care.

Which event in Tubman's life went unrecorded, leaving estimates ten years apart?

Her birth. No record of it was kept, so guesses ran from 1815 to 1825; a $2 payment to a midwife, logged by her enslaver in March 1822, is now taken as the best clue.

What became of Tubman's older sisters Linah, Mariah Ritty and Soph?

Sold away to out-of-state buyers by enslaver Edward Brodess, the three were never seen by the family again; two had to leave young children of their own behind.

What was Tubman's job when, aged five or six, she was hired out to a woman called 'Miss Susan'?

Nursemaid to a baby: she had to rock the cradle and was whipped whenever the child woke and cried, leaving scars she carried for life.

What did the young Tubman have to check in the marshes for planter James Cook, even when sick with measles?

Muskrat traps, which meant wading through cold water. She grew so ill that Cook sent her back, and her mother nursed her to health.

What was the status of John Tubman, whom Harriet married around 1844?

A free black man, yet the marriage had no legal standing: any children would have been enslaved, because a child's status followed the mother's.

Why did Tubman's first escape attempt, in September 1849, end in a return to slavery?

Her brothers turned back, overcome by fear, and made her return with them. Weeks later she set out again alone, and this time she reached free soil.

Despite the legend of a $40,000 bounty, who posted the only known reward for Tubman, $100 in 1849?

Her enslaver's widow, Eliza Brodess, advertised for 'Minty' in a local paper. The $40,000 figure was invented in an 1867 letter backing Tubman's claim for army pay.

To which city did Tubman escape in 1849?

Philadelphia. She travelled by night for about 90 miles to get there, then took domestic work and saved her wages to bring her family out.

What did Tubman say she looked at to see if she was 'the same person' after first reaching free soil?

Her hands. 'There was such a glory over everything,' she recalled, but the joy soon soured: she was alone, and everyone she loved was still enslaved.

Which 1850 federal law led Tubman to take the people she rescued on to Canada?

The Fugitive Slave Act made officials even in free states help capture escapees and punished anyone who sheltered them, so nowhere in the North was safe.

From where was Tubman's niece Kessiah rescued in December 1850, on Tubman's first mission?

A slave auction: her husband, John Bowley, spirited Kessiah and their two children from the auction block and sailed them up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, where Tubman hid them.

What did Tubman discover when she went back in 1851 to fetch her husband John?

He had married another woman, Caroline, and refused to leave. Tubman swallowed her anger, found others who wanted to escape and led them north instead.

Which famous abolitionist likely sheltered Tubman's group of 11 escapees in 1851?

Frederick Douglass, whose Rochester home lay on the route to Canada. He later wrote to her: 'I have wrought in the day – you in the night.'

Why did Tubman prefer to start her escapes on a Saturday night?

Runaway notices waited until Monday, when the newspapers next printed, giving her a head start. She also preferred winter, when long, cold nights kept people indoors.

What did Tubman carry as a disguise when she found herself walking toward a former enslaver?

Two live chickens. Spotting him as she turned a corner, she yanked the strings on their legs and busied herself with the flapping birds until he had passed.

How did Tubman avoid a former enslaver she recognised on a train?

She pretended to read a newspaper. The woman he remembered could not read, so he paid the reader no attention.

Which Wilmington Quaker regularly arranged Tubman's onward transport north from Delaware?

Thomas Garrett. Fined into ruin for aiding fugitives when he was nearly sixty, he told the court to send him anyone who needed shelter, and went on helping them.

Why did Tubman sing spirituals while leading escapes?

To signal safety or danger: she changed the way she sang a spiritual to tell hidden runaways whether to come out. She also carried a pistol, partly to stop anyone giving up.

Tubman said she never did what, in eight years as an Underground Railroad conductor?

'I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,' she told a suffrage convention in 1896. She is said to have threatened to shoot anyone who lost heart, since one returning runaway could endanger them all.

To which Canadian town did Tubman lead her elderly parents in 1857?

St. Catharines, Ontario, where her brothers and other freedom seekers had already settled. Its winters proved too hard on her parents, and within two years she moved them back across the border.

Which abolitionist asked Tubman to recruit fighters in Canada and called her 'General Tubman'?

John Brown. She helped him plan and raise money for the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, but she was not with him when he struck, perhaps because of illness.

Which politician's family sold Tubman the farm near Auburn, New York, that became her home?

Senator William H. Seward, later Lincoln's Secretary of State. Tubman settled her ageing parents on the farm, and it became a refuge for relatives and friends.

What did Tubman find on her last rescue mission, in 1860, when she went back for her sister Rachel?

Rachel had died, and Tubman could not bring out the two children she left. She led the Ennalls family north instead, their baby drugged to keep it quiet as patrols passed.

Tubman began her Civil War service in 1862 among freed refugees at Port Royal, on the coast of which state?

South Carolina. Sent south with the backing of the governor of Massachusetts, she nursed soldiers and refugees with remedies made from local plants, then turned to scouting behind enemy lines.

Up which river did Tubman guide Union gunboats in an 1863 raid that freed more than 700 people?

The Combahee. Her scouts had found out where the Confederates had laid mines, so the boats slipped past them, and hundreds of people ran down to the shore to be taken aboard.

Tubman is widely credited as the first woman in US history to do what?

Lead an armed military operation: the 1863 river raid she guided freed more than 700 people, and many of the men promptly enlisted in the Union army.

Tubman reportedly served which colonel his last meal before the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner?

Robert Gould Shaw, who died in the assault at the head of the black 54th Massachusetts. Of the battle she said: 'we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling.'

Barely paid by the Union army, how did Tubman support herself?

Selling pies and root beer, which she made at night after nursing all day. She had given up her army rations so that no one could say she was favoured.

What happened to Tubman on a train home from her war service in October 1865?

Dragged out of her seat by the conductor and other men, she was thrown into another car with her arm badly hurt. No passenger took her side.

Before he married Tubman in 1869, what had Nelson Davis been to her?

Her lodger: to pay the bills she took in boarders, and Davis, a veteran of the US Colored Troops about twenty years her junior, was one of them.

Why did Sarah Bradford write the 1869 biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman?

To raise money for Tubman: Bradford wrote it in great haste because the mortgage on Tubman's home was about to cost her the house. Its inflated tally of 300 rescues became legend.

In 1873 swindlers lured Tubman into the woods with a promise of what?

A trunk of gold coins, supposedly smuggled out of the South and going cheap. The men chloroformed her and took the cash she had borrowed; the trunk held only rocks.

When Tubman first won a federal pension, it recognised her as what?

Widow: the pension came through her second husband's army service. Congress later added a nurse's allowance, but never paid her as the scout and spy she had been.

Asked whether women should have the vote, how did Tubman reply?

Her reply, 'I suffered enough to believe it', went to a white woman who had asked. In old age she spoke at suffrage conventions, working alongside Susan B. Anthony.

What did Tubman have to sell to afford a train ticket to receptions in her honour in Boston in 1897?

A cow. A lifetime of giving to others had left her so poor that the guest of honour could not otherwise pay her own fare.

Which rule did Tubman object to when the church opened her home for the aged in 1908?

An entrance fee of $100. 'They make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars,' she complained; she had meant the home for people with no money at all.

What did Tubman reportedly bite on during brain surgery without anaesthesia in the late 1890s?

A bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do during amputations. The Boston surgeon, she said, 'sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable.'

Of what illness did Tubman die in March 1913?

Pneumonia. She had spent her last two years as a resident of the home for the aged that she herself had founded, and she died there among family and friends.

In 1978 Tubman became the first African-American woman to appear on what?

A US postage stamp, the first in the Black Heritage series. A generation earlier, in 1944, the National Council of Negro Women had campaigned successfully for a Liberty ship to carry her name.

In 2016 the US Treasury announced plans to put Tubman's portrait on which banknote?

The $20 bill, with Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, moved to the back. The redesign was put off again and again, and ten years on no Tubman note had been issued.

To what rank was Tubman posthumously commissioned by her home state's National Guard in 2024?

Brigadier general. The one-star commission, conferred on Veterans Day 2024, honoured the Civil War service as scout and spy for which the army never paid her as a soldier.

Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Tubman in the 2019 film Harriet?

Cynthia Erivo, who also co-wrote and sang the film's closing song, 'Stand Up'. It earned her a second nomination alongside the one for acting.

After her head injury, Tubman had vivid dreams and visions; what did she believe they were?

Messages from God. She trusted them to warn her of danger on rescue missions, and a Quaker ally said he never met anyone with more confidence in the voice of God.

What marked the 1913 burial of Tubman, who was never paid as a soldier?

Military honours, at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York. Just before she died she told those at her bedside, in the words of John's Gospel, that she was going to prepare a place for them.

As a child, Tubman was told she seemed to come from which West African people?

Ashanti, the people of present-day Ghana, though no record confirms the link. Her one known African-born forebear is her grandmother Modesty, who arrived on a slave ship.

Which weapon did Harriet Tubman carry on rescue missions, partly to stop frightened runaways from turning back?

A small pistol went with Tubman on every mission, for protection from slave catchers and to urge on the faint-hearted; the sharpshooter's rifle of legend came later, during the Civil War.

On which holiday in 1854 did Harriet Tubman lead her brothers Ben, Henry and Robert out of slavery?

Christmas Day was when she slipped away with all three, after a coded letter sent to a free Black friend warned them to be ready to 'step aboard'.

Which animals taken aboard Union boats after Harriet Tubman's 1863 river raid were named Beauregard and Jeff Davis?

Two pigs got the names of a Confederate general and the Confederate president: a fleeing woman carried a white one and a black one aboard, and Tubman said she laughed and laughed at the sight.

Which kind of World War II vessel named for Harriet Tubman in 1944 was the first to honour a Black woman?

A Liberty ship, the SS Harriet Tubman, slid into the water at South Portland, Maine, after the National Council of Negro Women petitioned for the name and ran a war bond drive.

Which guide in the night sky did Harriet Tubman say God had set in the heavens to lead her to freedom?

The North Star kept Tubman pointed toward free soil on her night journeys; she also followed rivers that snaked northward and relied on trusted helpers, Black and white.

Harriet Tubman told the interviewer Benjamin Drew in 1855 that slavery was 'the next thing to' what?

Hell was the nearest comparison she could find, speaking as a free woman in Canada; she added that she had grown up 'like a neglected weed', with no experience of freedom.

Besides nursing and cooking, which undercover wartime work did Harriet Tubman do for the Union army around Port Royal?

Spying and scouting behind Confederate lines, under Major General David Hunter, grew out of her nursing: she had first come south to care for Black soldiers and civilians.

Which actress played Harriet Tubman in a two-part 1978 NBC drama narrated by Orson Welles?

Cicely Tyson took the role in one of the earliest screen dramatizations of Tubman's life, adapted from a Marcy Heidish novel about four decades before Hollywood made a feature film.

What was the Underground Railroad along which Harriet Tubman guided escaping families in the 1850s?

A secret escape network of routes and safe houses is all it was: no tracks and no trains, just helpers who borrowed railway words like 'stations' for their hiding places.

Which president used the Antiquities Act to create a Harriet Tubman national monument on the Eastern Shore?

Barack Obama signed the proclamation in 2013, a century after her death; part of the monument was later designated a national historical park.

In whose honour did the future Harriet Tubman probably take the first name Harriet around the time she married?

Her mother was Harriet 'Rit' Green, who bore nine children and nursed the young Tubman back to health each time a cruel master sent her back sick.

What did the enslaved Harriet Tubman buy with wages she kept after paying her master a yearly fee?

A pair of oxen let Tubman take on more hauling and field work for pay; she handed over sixty dollars a year for the right to hire herself out.

What skilled job did Harriet Tubman's father, Ben Ross, hold on the plantation where she was born?

Timber inspector was a post of real trust: Ben Ross managed his owner's logging business, and through the Black sailors who shipped the wood his daughter learned the hidden ways to free soil.

In which port city did Harriet Tubman wait to hide her niece's family on her first rescue mission in 1850?

Baltimore was as far south as she went that time: the niece's free husband sailed his wife and children up the Chesapeake by boat, and Tubman took over from there.

In which Eastern Shore village's general store did the young Harriet Tubman suffer a near-fatal blow to the head?

Bucktown is where she refused to help an overseer stop a fleeing man and took the blow meant for him; near death, she was sent straight back to work in the fields.

Which state's governor, John Andrew, backed sending Harriet Tubman south to aid the Union war effort?

Massachusetts Governor Andrew reasoned that the skills she had learned in Eastern Shore marshes would serve just as well in the similar coastal lowlands the Union had occupied.

Which Union colonel, a veteran of Bleeding Kansas, led the Black regiment Harriet Tubman guided on her 1863 river raid?

James Montgomery had fought pro-slavery forces as a Kansas guerrilla before the war; the regiment he led up the river with Tubman was made up of men who had themselves been enslaved.

In which New York city did Harriet Tubman join a crowd that freed the fugitive Charles Nalle from custody in 1860?

Troy saw a running street battle: the crowd got Nalle across the Hudson, he was seized again on the far bank and freed again, and locals then raised the money to buy him out of slavery.

Which president proclaimed March 10, the date of Harriet Tubman's death, as the first Harriet Tubman Day?

George H. W. Bush issued the proclamation in 1990 after Congress passed a joint resolution; the Episcopal Church later added Tubman to its calendar of saints.

Where did the ailing Harriet Tubman move in 1911, to be cared for during the last two years of her life?

Her own rest home took her in as a patient: she had opened it to shelter poor and elderly Black neighbours, and at the end she needed the charity she had created.

Which camp disease did Harriet Tubman treat among Union soldiers with a medicine she brewed from local roots?

Dysentery was killing men 'like sheep' at Fernandina, Florida, when an officer sent for her: she was known for curing it with roots that grew near the very waters that spread it.

After tearing her long skirt on the 1863 river raid, which garment did Harriet Tubman ask Boston friends to send?

A bloomer dress of coarse, strong cloth was her request, dictated in a letter weeks after the raid: she had tripped on her hem running for the boat and arrived with little left of it but shreds.

Over which river's suspension bridge did Harriet Tubman ride trains into Canada with the people she had rescued?

The Niagara crossing was the finish line: Tubman knew by the rise at the middle of the bridge that the train was over the border, and shook a despairing companion to tell him he was free.

In which New Jersey seaside resort did Harriet Tubman work in hotel kitchens to pay for her early rescue trips?

Cape May wages funded the missions: Tubman saved what she earned in the drudgery of the kitchen, then slipped back to the Eastern Shore each time she had enough to cover expenses.

Which borrowed surname did Harriet Tubman sometimes lecture under in the 1850s to throw slave catchers off her trail?

Harriet Garrison was the name she used at abolition meetings around Boston and central New York, where she told her story to raise funds for her family and her missions.

Which Black abolitionist, later called the Father of the Underground Railroad, gave Harriet Tubman early support?

William Still gave her material help and encouragement as she began her rescues, and kept careful diaries of the freedom seekers he aided that he published in 1872.

In which cemetery in upstate New York was Harriet Tubman buried in 1913, close to her longtime home?

Fort Hill Cemetery holds her granite headstone, put up by a federation of women's clubs in 1937 and carved on the back with the words 'Servant of God, Well Done'.

To which church did Harriet Tubman hand her 25-acre property in 1903 so it could run a home for the elderly?

The AME Zion Church, where she worshipped, took over when she could no longer pay for the land, and decades later it rebuilt the house as a memorial to her.

What happened in 1880 to the wooden house near Auburn that Harriet Tubman had owned for two decades?

It burned down in 1880 and was quickly replaced, with her supporters' help, by a brick house that is now part of a national historical park created in 2017.

Which national wildlife refuge preserves the Eastern Shore marshes where Harriet Tubman laboured as a child?

Blackwater shows visitors the landscape she knew: the wetland skills Tubman learned there as an enslaved labourer later helped her find her own way to freedom.

Who directed and co-wrote the 2019 Harriet Tubman biopic Harriet, which premiered at the Toronto film festival?

Kasi Lemmons shared the script credit with Gregory Allen Howard, and the film turned a $17 million budget into $43 million at the box office and two Academy Award nominations.

Which New Jersey city put up a 25-foot Harriet Tubman monument, Shadow of a Face, in a square named for her?

Newark unveiled the monument in 2023, one of several cities to honour her in sculpture since Jane DeDecker's statue of Tubman leading a child went up in Mesa, Arizona, in 1995.

Which folk singer wrote The Ballad of Harriet Tubman, a musical tribute later joined by a Wynton Marsalis instrumental?

Woody Guthrie's ballad is one of many works about her: operas, novels and paintings have all retold her story, and stage plays about her date back to the 1930s.

Which long-running strategy video game series made Harriet Tubman a playable leader in its seventh main instalment?

Civilization VII, from Sid Meier's series, lets players guide a whole society through history with a character based on Tubman as their leader.

Harriet Tubman appears as a character in which 2019 novel by the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates?

The Water Dancer is one of several novels to cast her, alongside James McBride's The Good Lord Bird and Elizabeth Cobbs's The Tubman Command, which follows her 1863 river raid.

Which painter of The Migration Series also made a late-1930s series of paintings on Harriet Tubman's life?

Jacob Lawrence painted 31 panels on her life just before the series that made his name, and returned to her story in 1968 with the picture book Harriet and the Promised Land.

Which spiritual gives its name to Alison Saar's 13-foot bronze memorial to Harriet Tubman in Manhattan?

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot lends the statue its title; Saar showed Tubman striding forward while roots, standing for slavery, pull at the back of her skirt.

Which promise in an old will did Harriet Tubman's legal owner, Edward Brodess, refuse to keep to Rit Green?

To set her free at 45 was required by the will of Rit's first owner; her daughter later paid a lawyer five dollars to dig up the document and prove it.

Why did Harriet Tubman hurry to bring her elderly parents out of the Eastern Shore two years after her brothers?

They faced arrest for helping others escape: her father, a free man by then, had been betrayed by someone he had aided.

Why did Harriet Tubman move her aged parents out of Canada to a house in upstate New York in 1859?

The winters were too harsh for the old couple, so she settled them on a farm among abolitionist neighbours who supported and protected the family.

Why did Harriet Tubman's father tie a handkerchief over his eyes when he walked his escaping sons to the road?

To say he never saw them was no idle trick: when searchers came asking, Old Ben could answer truthfully that he had not laid eyes on one of his children that holiday.

How was one of Harriet Tubman's rescue parties smuggled across a police-guarded bridge at Wilmington?

In wagons full of bricklayers, who sang and shouted as if on a frolic while the hidden party lay flat on the wagon floors; the guards let them pass without suspicion.

How did Harriet Tubman keep a baby quiet while her final rescue party hid in woods from passing slave patrols?

Drugged it with paregoric so that it slept as the patrols went by; the baby belonged to the Ennals family, the last people Tubman ever guided out, in December 1860.

In which Eastern Shore county was Harriet Tubman born, on Anthony Thompson's plantation south of Madison?

Dorchester is also where she went back about thirteen times for family and friends; she never ran rescues in places where she did not know the people and the land.

Harriet Tubman was a founder in 1896 of which group, whose motto was 'Lifting as we climb'?

National Association of Colored Women was the name taken when Black women's clubs merged in Washington to demand equality and the vote; Mary Church Terrell was its first president.

What was the name of the daughter Harriet Tubman and her second husband, Nelson Davis, adopted in Auburn?

Gertie stands beside the couple in a family photograph taken at Auburn around 1887, with boarders and neighbours gathered round them.

In dreams before her escape, whom did Harriet Tubman see reaching out to pull her across a line into freedom?

Ladies dressed in white stretched out their arms to her in the dream; once in the North, she said, she recognised some of the women who befriended her as the very ones she had seen.

Which popular story about hidden Underground Railroad signals do historians such as Kate Clifford Larson call a myth?

The quilt code is a modern legend: Tubman relied instead on trusted people, disguises, bribes and rivers that ran northward.

Which Scottish composer wrote a Harriet Tubman opera that premiered at the Virginia Opera in 1985?

Thea Musgrave's opera is one of several on Tubman's life: Nkeiru Okoye's two-act work followed in 2014, and Hilda Paredes's opened in Amsterdam in 2018.

Which actress starred as Harriet Tubman in a 1963 episode of the CBS anthology series The Great Adventure?

Ruby Dee was followed in the part by Alfre Woodard in a 1994 television film and by Aisha Hinds in the drama series Underground.