HArriet Tubman is the Underground Railroad's best-known layout chief. For ten years she made 19 trips to the South and escorted more than 300 slaves to freedom, to the free states or to Canada. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, during all her trips she never lost a single passenger “never lost a single passenger”.
His early childhood
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland around 1820, of slave parents, her ancestors were of pure African race, her birth name is Araminta Ross. She lived her early childhood with her grandmother who was too old to work. When she was five or six years old, her teacher Edward Brodas loaned her to a couple where she worked sewing, she was frequently beaten. A little later she was setting rat traps. Fired, she was then a domestic worker and babysitter. As was the custom on the plantations, when she was 11, she began to wear a light colored bandana to indicate that she was no longer a child. At around 12, she took her mother's first name, Harriet. So she was sent to work in the fields. She was still a teenager when she suffered injuries that would follow her for the rest of her life. An angry white foreman kicked him on the head for refusing to help him stop a man who was trying to escape.
His wedding
Around 1844, she married a free African American named John Tubman who did not share her dream. Since she was a slave, she knew there would be a chance that she would be sold and her marriage was a dilemma. Harriet dreamed of traveling north. There, she could be free and wouldn't have to worry about a divorce made with slave traditions. But, John didn't want her to go north. He said he was fine where he was and that he had no reason to go north. And John didn't want her to go north. He threatened to report her to her master. But, listening only to her need for freedom, she left her husband and escaped to Philadelphia.
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