March 21, 2025 • 12 mins
Harriet Tubman helped people escape slavery, ran intelligence missions for the Union during the Civil War, and set up the first nursing home for Black Americans. Learn more about her in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/harriet-tubman.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstaff Lauren
Volgebaum here. Harriet Tubman stood just five feet tall that's
one and a half meters. She never made much money
in her lifetime and lived humbly, eating mostly food that
she grew in her own garden, but she's one of
(00:24):
the most famous civilians admired black Americans in United States history.
After escaping from enslavement in eighteen forty nine, she became
a conductor on the underground railroad, venturing back into Maryland,
a state where enslavement was legal, thirteen times during the
eighteen fifties, to help numerous other freedom seekers find their
way north. During the Civil War, Tubman traveled south again
(00:47):
to work as a spy, scout, nurse, and cook for
the Union Army. After the conflict, she established the first
nursing home for elderly black Americans. Tubman has grown into
such an American icon that her legend sometimes obscures the
real person behind it. So today let's look at the
facts of her life and some misconceptions about it, as
(01:10):
well as how she became such an enduring symbol of freedom.
Harriet Ross Tudman was born enslaved around eighteen twenty two
in Dorchester County on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Her parents
named her air Minta or Minty for short. She was
the fifth of nine children of Harriet or Writt Green
(01:31):
Ross and her husband Ben Ross, who had met when
they're in slaver's households, had merged in eighteen oh three
in a marriage of their own. Tudman's youth was harsh
and brutal. At an early age, she was set to
work as a field hand. Her father had learned timber inspection,
and their enslavers often sent him away to work. As
(01:52):
the estate was small, Tudman and her siblings and mother
were often hired out, meaning that sometimes Tudman had to
act as a parent to her siblings, and sometimes she
wound up among strangers who whipped her for failing to
do work. She had never been taught. As a teenager
running errands, she once refused to help an overseer who
(02:13):
was tracking an escaped man. When the enslaver threw an
iron weight to attempt to stop the man who was
seeking freedom, it caught her instead, fracturing her skull. The
injury went essentially untreated beyond her mother's modest means and
caused headaches and seizures for the rest of Tubman's life.
(02:33):
Around the age of twenty two, she married a free
black man by the name of John Tubman. Though the
marriage wouldn't last, she kept his surname and began using
her mother's first name as her own, becoming Harriet Tubman.
In March of eighteen forty nine, Tubman's enslaver died, leaving
behind an estate deeply in debt. Tubman had already seen
(02:56):
three of her sisters auctioned off feared being sent to
an even crueler house. When her husband, John refused to
go along, she and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped together.
After a few weeks, the two young men lost their
nerve and returned, but Tumman refused to give up. She
slipped off again, this time alone. She traveled by night,
(03:19):
using the North Star to guide her, and sought refuge
during the day with abolitionist Quaker families who were willing
to break Maryland law to help escapees. She made her
way through Delaware and eventually crossed into Free Pennsylvania. She
later recalled, there was such a glory over everything. The
sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields,
(03:40):
and I felt like I was in heaven. But Tubman's
joy was muted because her family remained behind. After settling
in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved
her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor
on the underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that it
exists did since the eighteen twenties. It was a highly
(04:03):
dangerous mission. Anyone caught helping enslaved people break free faced
the risk of being publicly branded and jailed, and, in
Tumman's case, enslaved once more. A Tumman followed elaborate procedures
to maintain stealth. She wore disguises, communicated with freedom seekers
through third parties, and arranged for them to meet her
(04:24):
miles away from their homes to reduce the chance that
they would lead pursuers to her if all else failed,
She carried a pistol. She warned her underground passengers that
if they tried to turn back, she would shoot them
to prevent them from betraying her and the rest of
the group. A newspaper ad in eighteen forty nine offered
(04:45):
fifty dollars for Tummen's capture in Maryland and one hundred
dollars for her capture outside the state, the equivalent of
thousands of dollars today. In eighteen fifty, Congress passed the
so called Fugitive Slave Act, which made such a efforts
a federal crime. It also made anyone who escaped to
freedom subject to capture and re enslavement if they were caught.
(05:08):
That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back
into Maryland and helped her niece spend her two children escape.
Over the next decade, she repeated that mission a dozen
more times, cautiously confining her efforts to farms that she
knew on Maryland's eastern shore. As word got around of
Tubman's successful missions, she became a sought after speaker at
(05:31):
abolitionist fundraiser meetings. She also became a target of mercenaries
who earned money catching people who had managed to escape.
Their failure to apprehend her only added to her legend.
Her admirers nicknamed her General Tubman. In eighteen sixty, she
pulled off an even more daring feat by thwarting federal
(05:52):
marshals in Troy, New York. They were attempting to deport
a freedom seeker back to Virginia. Tubman disguised herself as
an elderly woman and slipped into a government building. When
the prisoner and his captors stepped out into the street,
Tubman shouted a signal from an upper story window, and
a mob of abolitionists converged on them and seized the prisoner,
(06:12):
who they spirited away to a waiting riverboat. Numbers reported
contemporarily seemed to have been inflated, but according to research
by historian Caate Clifford Larsen, Tubman led about seventy people
to freedom and provided instructions that enabled another seventy or
so to flee on their own. Tubman claimed, I never
(06:33):
ran my train off the track, and I never lost
a passenger. After the Civil War broke out in eighteen
sixty one, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a fervent abolitionist,
contacted Tubman, a friend of his, and told her that
the Union forces needed her help. He arranged transportation for
Tubman to travel to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she
(06:56):
went to work for Major General David Hunter. Ostensibly, her
mission was to help provide food and clothing to the
escaped enslaved people who were flocking to the Union Army's camps,
but that seems to have been a cover story for
her real work in gathering intelligence. With a budget of
one hundred dollars in secret Service money, she recruited a
(07:17):
small team of escaped people to scout for the Union forces,
who were experienced riverboat pilots and knew every inch of
the South Carolina coast line. After President Abraham Lincoln authorized
the recruiting and deployment of Black troops in the summer
of eighteen sixty two, Tubman and her spies provided intelligence
for the new units. In January of eighteen sixty three,
(07:39):
her team's efforts helped Union forces evade Confederate guards and
stage a nine day covert operation to seize needed supplies.
Her team operated as a kind of special forces a,
sneaking into enemy territory to gather information on their troop
movements and fortifications. In June of eighteen sixty three, accompanied
(08:00):
a Union colonel and his forces into the southern low
country of South Carolina and helped lead a crucial raid.
Tubman and her scouts sailed up river and stealthily went
ashore to talk to the enslaved people who had placed
mines in the water for Confederate forces, so that they
could map the locations and locate the enemy's storehouses. Then
she helped guide the Union crafts around the deadly mines.
(08:24):
The resulting raid not only struck a devastating blow to
Confederate forces, but also resulted in freedom for seven hundred
enslaved people, many of whom Tubman recruited to serve for
the Union. After the Civil War ended in the Union's
victory in eighteen sixty five, Tubman left her position and
set out for the town of Auburn, New York, where
(08:45):
she and her family settled on property that the state's
former governor had sold her on generous terms. But on
the way she got a rough reminder that the struggle
for true freedom wasn't over. On a literal train north,
a train conductor refused to honor Tubman's soldiers pass as
a train ticket. They got into an argument, and he
(09:06):
and several passengers threw her into the baggage car, breaking
her arm and three ribs. She was unable to work
for months. This woman, who had helped defeat the Confederacy,
was compelled to accept handouts from neighbors and local grocers
just to feed her family and elderly parents. Once she healed,
(09:27):
she began growing vegetables and raising chickens. She did domestic
work and took in borders. She fell in love with
one of her guests, a former enslaved man and Union
veteran by the name of Nelson Davis, and the two
married in eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen seventy four, the
couple adopted a baby girl named Gerdy, but Davis's ill
(09:48):
health and other setbacks meant that Tubman and her family
continued to struggle to make ends meet. The federal government
wouldn't give her a pension for her wartime service as
a spy, but after Davis's death in eighteen eighty eight,
she was able to collect a widow's stipend and eventually
received a pension for having worked as a nurse in
the latter part of the war, and she was determined
(10:11):
to keep helping others. In eighteen ninety six, she scraped
together enough money to buy a second plot of land
alongside her Auburn property, where she started a home for
elderly black Americans. Seven years later, as Tumman aged, she
turned the property over to the African Methodist aposcople Zion Church,
which she was a member of, with the understanding that
(10:32):
they would continue to run the home. Tumman lived next
door until her own health began to decline, at which
point she became one of the residents at the home
she had founded. She passed away there in nineteen thirteen
at the age of ninety years, but her influence did
not end there. Tumman's friends included many prominent figures like
(10:56):
Frederick Douglas, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha coffin Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Thomas Garrett, and Susan B. Anthony. She was buried with
military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The city
commemorated her legacy with a plaque on the courthouse. During
World War II. After a successful war bond drive by
(11:16):
an African American women's group, a liberty ship was christened
the S. S. Harriet Tubman in her honor. She became
the subject of numerous biographies and children's books, and the
Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged was recognized as a
National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of
Historic Places in nineteen seventy four. Four years later, she
(11:37):
became the first black woman to appear on a US
postage stamp. A tag team of lawmakers have been trying
to have her image replace President Andrew Jackson's on the
twenty dollar bill for over a decade now, though they
haven't yet been successful, as she did appear on a
limited edition uncirculated silver dollar in twenty twenty four. Spend
(12:00):
it as a dollar, but it's worth a good bit
more than that on the collector's market. The US meant
paid proceeds from it to the National Underground Railroad Freedom
Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and to the Harriet Tubman Home
in Auburn, New York. Today's episode is based on the
(12:21):
article Harriet Tubman's life and impact on the Underground Railroad
on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer.
Brainstuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. But
four more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstaff Lauren
Volgebaum here. Harriet Tubman stood just five feet tall that's
one and a half meters. She never made much money
in her lifetime and lived humbly, eating mostly food that
she grew in her own garden, but she's one of
(00:24):
the most famous civilians admired black Americans in United States history.
After escaping from enslavement in eighteen forty nine, she became
a conductor on the underground railroad, venturing back into Maryland,
a state where enslavement was legal, thirteen times during the
eighteen fifties, to help numerous other freedom seekers find their
way north. During the Civil War, Tubman traveled south again
(00:47):
to work as a spy, scout, nurse, and cook for
the Union Army. After the conflict, she established the first
nursing home for elderly black Americans. Tubman has grown into
such an American icon that her legend sometimes obscures the
real person behind it. So today let's look at the
facts of her life and some misconceptions about it, as
(01:10):
well as how she became such an enduring symbol of freedom.
Harriet Ross Tudman was born enslaved around eighteen twenty two
in Dorchester County on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Her parents
named her air Minta or Minty for short. She was
the fifth of nine children of Harriet or Writt Green
(01:31):
Ross and her husband Ben Ross, who had met when
they're in slaver's households, had merged in eighteen oh three
in a marriage of their own. Tudman's youth was harsh
and brutal. At an early age, she was set to
work as a field hand. Her father had learned timber inspection,
and their enslavers often sent him away to work. As
(01:52):
the estate was small, Tudman and her siblings and mother
were often hired out, meaning that sometimes Tudman had to
act as a parent to her siblings, and sometimes she
wound up among strangers who whipped her for failing to
do work. She had never been taught. As a teenager
running errands, she once refused to help an overseer who
(02:13):
was tracking an escaped man. When the enslaver threw an
iron weight to attempt to stop the man who was
seeking freedom, it caught her instead, fracturing her skull. The
injury went essentially untreated beyond her mother's modest means and
caused headaches and seizures for the rest of Tubman's life.
(02:33):
Around the age of twenty two, she married a free
black man by the name of John Tubman. Though the
marriage wouldn't last, she kept his surname and began using
her mother's first name as her own, becoming Harriet Tubman.
In March of eighteen forty nine, Tubman's enslaver died, leaving
behind an estate deeply in debt. Tubman had already seen
(02:56):
three of her sisters auctioned off feared being sent to
an even crueler house. When her husband, John refused to
go along, she and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped together.
After a few weeks, the two young men lost their
nerve and returned, but Tumman refused to give up. She
slipped off again, this time alone. She traveled by night,
(03:19):
using the North Star to guide her, and sought refuge
during the day with abolitionist Quaker families who were willing
to break Maryland law to help escapees. She made her
way through Delaware and eventually crossed into Free Pennsylvania. She
later recalled, there was such a glory over everything. The
sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields,
(03:40):
and I felt like I was in heaven. But Tubman's
joy was muted because her family remained behind. After settling
in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved
her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor
on the underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that it
exists did since the eighteen twenties. It was a highly
(04:03):
dangerous mission. Anyone caught helping enslaved people break free faced
the risk of being publicly branded and jailed, and, in
Tumman's case, enslaved once more. A Tumman followed elaborate procedures
to maintain stealth. She wore disguises, communicated with freedom seekers
through third parties, and arranged for them to meet her
(04:24):
miles away from their homes to reduce the chance that
they would lead pursuers to her if all else failed,
She carried a pistol. She warned her underground passengers that
if they tried to turn back, she would shoot them
to prevent them from betraying her and the rest of
the group. A newspaper ad in eighteen forty nine offered
(04:45):
fifty dollars for Tummen's capture in Maryland and one hundred
dollars for her capture outside the state, the equivalent of
thousands of dollars today. In eighteen fifty, Congress passed the
so called Fugitive Slave Act, which made such a efforts
a federal crime. It also made anyone who escaped to
freedom subject to capture and re enslavement if they were caught.
(05:08):
That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back
into Maryland and helped her niece spend her two children escape.
Over the next decade, she repeated that mission a dozen
more times, cautiously confining her efforts to farms that she
knew on Maryland's eastern shore. As word got around of
Tubman's successful missions, she became a sought after speaker at
(05:31):
abolitionist fundraiser meetings. She also became a target of mercenaries
who earned money catching people who had managed to escape.
Their failure to apprehend her only added to her legend.
Her admirers nicknamed her General Tubman. In eighteen sixty, she
pulled off an even more daring feat by thwarting federal
(05:52):
marshals in Troy, New York. They were attempting to deport
a freedom seeker back to Virginia. Tubman disguised herself as
an elderly woman and slipped into a government building. When
the prisoner and his captors stepped out into the street,
Tubman shouted a signal from an upper story window, and
a mob of abolitionists converged on them and seized the prisoner,
(06:12):
who they spirited away to a waiting riverboat. Numbers reported
contemporarily seemed to have been inflated, but according to research
by historian Caate Clifford Larsen, Tubman led about seventy people
to freedom and provided instructions that enabled another seventy or
so to flee on their own. Tubman claimed, I never
(06:33):
ran my train off the track, and I never lost
a passenger. After the Civil War broke out in eighteen
sixty one, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a fervent abolitionist,
contacted Tubman, a friend of his, and told her that
the Union forces needed her help. He arranged transportation for
Tubman to travel to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she
(06:56):
went to work for Major General David Hunter. Ostensibly, her
mission was to help provide food and clothing to the
escaped enslaved people who were flocking to the Union Army's camps,
but that seems to have been a cover story for
her real work in gathering intelligence. With a budget of
one hundred dollars in secret Service money, she recruited a
(07:17):
small team of escaped people to scout for the Union forces,
who were experienced riverboat pilots and knew every inch of
the South Carolina coast line. After President Abraham Lincoln authorized
the recruiting and deployment of Black troops in the summer
of eighteen sixty two, Tubman and her spies provided intelligence
for the new units. In January of eighteen sixty three,
(07:39):
her team's efforts helped Union forces evade Confederate guards and
stage a nine day covert operation to seize needed supplies.
Her team operated as a kind of special forces a,
sneaking into enemy territory to gather information on their troop
movements and fortifications. In June of eighteen sixty three, accompanied
(08:00):
a Union colonel and his forces into the southern low
country of South Carolina and helped lead a crucial raid.
Tubman and her scouts sailed up river and stealthily went
ashore to talk to the enslaved people who had placed
mines in the water for Confederate forces, so that they
could map the locations and locate the enemy's storehouses. Then
she helped guide the Union crafts around the deadly mines.
(08:24):
The resulting raid not only struck a devastating blow to
Confederate forces, but also resulted in freedom for seven hundred
enslaved people, many of whom Tubman recruited to serve for
the Union. After the Civil War ended in the Union's
victory in eighteen sixty five, Tubman left her position and
set out for the town of Auburn, New York, where
(08:45):
she and her family settled on property that the state's
former governor had sold her on generous terms. But on
the way she got a rough reminder that the struggle
for true freedom wasn't over. On a literal train north,
a train conductor refused to honor Tubman's soldiers pass as
a train ticket. They got into an argument, and he
(09:06):
and several passengers threw her into the baggage car, breaking
her arm and three ribs. She was unable to work
for months. This woman, who had helped defeat the Confederacy,
was compelled to accept handouts from neighbors and local grocers
just to feed her family and elderly parents. Once she healed,
(09:27):
she began growing vegetables and raising chickens. She did domestic
work and took in borders. She fell in love with
one of her guests, a former enslaved man and Union
veteran by the name of Nelson Davis, and the two
married in eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen seventy four, the
couple adopted a baby girl named Gerdy, but Davis's ill
(09:48):
health and other setbacks meant that Tubman and her family
continued to struggle to make ends meet. The federal government
wouldn't give her a pension for her wartime service as
a spy, but after Davis's death in eighteen eighty eight,
she was able to collect a widow's stipend and eventually
received a pension for having worked as a nurse in
the latter part of the war, and she was determined
(10:11):
to keep helping others. In eighteen ninety six, she scraped
together enough money to buy a second plot of land
alongside her Auburn property, where she started a home for
elderly black Americans. Seven years later, as Tumman aged, she
turned the property over to the African Methodist aposcople Zion Church,
which she was a member of, with the understanding that
(10:32):
they would continue to run the home. Tumman lived next
door until her own health began to decline, at which
point she became one of the residents at the home
she had founded. She passed away there in nineteen thirteen
at the age of ninety years, but her influence did
not end there. Tumman's friends included many prominent figures like
(10:56):
Frederick Douglas, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha coffin Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Thomas Garrett, and Susan B. Anthony. She was buried with
military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The city
commemorated her legacy with a plaque on the courthouse. During
World War II. After a successful war bond drive by
(11:16):
an African American women's group, a liberty ship was christened
the S. S. Harriet Tubman in her honor. She became
the subject of numerous biographies and children's books, and the
Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged was recognized as a
National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of
Historic Places in nineteen seventy four. Four years later, she
(11:37):
became the first black woman to appear on a US
postage stamp. A tag team of lawmakers have been trying
to have her image replace President Andrew Jackson's on the
twenty dollar bill for over a decade now, though they
haven't yet been successful, as she did appear on a
limited edition uncirculated silver dollar in twenty twenty four. Spend
(12:00):
it as a dollar, but it's worth a good bit
more than that on the collector's market. The US meant
paid proceeds from it to the National Underground Railroad Freedom
Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and to the Harriet Tubman Home
in Auburn, New York. Today's episode is based on the
(12:21):
article Harriet Tubman's life and impact on the Underground Railroad
on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer.
Brainstuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. But
four more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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