Harriet Tubman slips away from a Maryland plantation, bound for Pennsylvania
By the fall of 1849, Harriet Tubman had reason to believe her family was about to be scattered for good. Edward Brodess, the man who claimed to own her, had tried and failed to sell her after an illness cut her market value; when he died, his widow Eliza began preparing to sell off the people she held in bondage. On September 17, 1849, Tubman escaped with her brothers Ben and Henry from Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County, Maryland, where they had been hired out to work. The brothers lost their nerve and went back. Tubman did not.
Tubman's walk out of Dorchester County was the first of what became roughly thirteen return trips that pulled about seventy people north, and it made her the Underground Railroad's best-known conductor. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 raised the stakes of every mission that followed, pushing her routes further, into Canada, where she became known in American memory as "Moses."
QWhat price did the Cambridge Democrat put on Harriet Tubman's head after her first escape attempt?
Two weeks after Tubman fled with her brothers Ben and Henry on September 17, 1849, a runaway notice ran in the Cambridge Democrat offering a reward of up to $100 each for their capture and return. That bounty applied to all three siblings, meaning Eliza Brodess was prepared to pay as much as $300 total to get her property back. That printed notice, with its specific dollar figure and date, is one reason historians can date the escape so precisely. Ben and Henry's decision to turn themselves back in came directly on the heels of that public bounty going into circulation, not before it.
QWhat did Harriet Tubman say she prayed for before her enslaver Edward Brodess died?
Tubman said she prayed nightly for Brodess starting in late February, asking God to change his heart so he would stop trying to sell her. When that didn't happen, her prayer shifted: on the first of March she asked God to kill him instead and take him out of the way if his heart could not be softened. Brodess died shortly afterward, a sequence Tubman herself recounted and connected in her own mind, later expressing regret over having prayed for a man's death. His death did not free her. His widow Eliza moved instead to sell off the people he had held in bondage.
QWhat role did Harriet Tubman take on for the Union Army during the Civil War, beyond guiding escapees?
Tubman served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, a military role that went well beyond the guide work she'd done on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. This came after roughly thirteen rescue missions in which she personally led about seventy enslaved people to freedom, including her own aging parents, whom she eventually settled with her in Auburn, New York. After the war she stayed politically active, joining the women's suffrage movement in her later years. The same willingness to walk toward danger that carried her out of Dorchester County in 1849 later put her in a Union uniform.
