The Peridot’s Women’s History Fact of the Day is dedicated to Harriet Tubman, the legendary American abolitionist, born into slavery Araminta Ross around 1820 in Dorchester County, Maryland, later adopted her mother’s first name Harriet. Also known as Moses, she escaped to freedom and “led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroad - an elaborate secret network of organized safe houses.”
From 1862 to 1865 she served as a scout, as well as nurse and laundress, for Union forces in South Carolina during the Civil War. For the Second Carolina Volunteers, under the command of Col. James Montgomery, Harriet Tubman spied on Confederate territory. When she returned with information about the locations of warehouses and ammunition, Montgomery’s troops were able to make carefully planned attacks. For her wartime service Tubman was paid so little that she had to support herself by selling homemade baked goods.
After the Civil War Harriet Tubman settled in Auburn, New York and began taking in orphans and the elderly, a practice that eventuated in the Harriet Tubman Home for Indigent Aged Negroes. The home later attracted the support of former abolitionist comrades and the citizens of Auburn, and it continued in existence for some years after her death. Harriet Tubman also became involved in various other causes, including women’s sufferage. In the late 1860s and again in the late 1890s she applied for a federal pension for her work during the Civil War. Some 30 years after her service a private bill providing for $20 monthly was passed by Congress.
“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.”
Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913 in Auburn, New York
*Passage quoted directly from Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Tubman