Harriet Tubman: Home

This concise biography of Harriet Tubman, the African American abolitionist, explores her various roles as an Underground Railroad conductor, Civil War scout and nurse, and women's rights advocate.
Includes detailed maps, primary sources, and photographs.

Harriet Tubman's name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children's literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez's comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life--a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women.

In the winter of 1852, a group of Philadelphia abolitionists dedicated to assisting runaway slaves in their flight to freedom formed a new assistance group to be part of the Underground Railroad--the General Vigilance Committee. William Still, himself a son of slaves, was named its secretary and executive director. Deeply moved by the stories of the fugitive slaves he helped conduct northward, Still took his committee record-keeping to a higher level. He wrote down, in eloquent narrative form, every detail of their stirring, often heartbreaking histories. Second only to the great Harriet Tubman in the number of freedom-seeking "passengers" he conducted through the Underground Railroad, Still let the words of former slaves speak for themselves. In his journals, he painstakingly reproduced vivid accounts he heard from their very lips. And he added excerpts from letters, newspapers, and legal documents to the already arresting biographical sketches, creating unforgettable portraits of the slaves' deadly struggles, brutal hardships, and narrow escapes. When the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, William Still published his journals as The Underground Railroad. It is considered the most complete firsthand account ever written of the men, women, and children who rode the legendary "Railroad" to freedom.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North. Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.

If you loved the movie Harriet, you'll love The Tubman Command, a novel based on a thrilling chapter of Civil War history and African American history, how Harriet Tubman led a Union raid to free 750 slaves. It's May 1863. Outgeneraled and outgunned, a demoralized Union Army has pulled back with massive losses at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fort Sumter, hated symbol of the Rebellion, taunts the American navy with its artillery and underwater mines. In Beaufort, South Carolina, one very special woman, codenamed Moses, is hatching a spectacular plan. Hunted by Confederates, and revered by slaves, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers. A bounty on her head, she has given up husband and home for the noblest cause: a nation of, by, and for the people. The Tubman Command tells the story of Tubman at the height of her powers, when she devises the largest plantation raid of the Civil War. General David Hunter places her in charge of a team of black scouts even though skeptical of what one woman can accomplish. For her gamble to succeed, "Moses" must outwit alligators, overseers, slave catchers, sharpshooters, and even hostile Union soldiers to lead gunships up the Combahee River. Men stand in her way at every turn--though one reminds her that love shouldn't have to be the price of freedom.

An Artistic Tribute to Harriet Tubman reminds us that faith inspires the extraordinary in ordinary people. An inspiring must-read.

They left in the middle of the night—often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, Jeanine Michna-Bales presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border— a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by Michna-Bales; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by Fergus M. Bordewich, Robert F. Darden, and Eric R. Jackson.