Harriet Tubman Biography

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery to Bengamin Ross and Harriet Greene—both slaves of Edward Brodas—as their 11th child. Her birth name was Araminta and was called “Minty” as a child. By the time she reached adulthood, she was calling herself Harriet. She was born on Edward Brodas’ plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Her exact date of birth is not known, because slaves holders didn’t record birth days of their slaves; and different accounts list her to be born in the year 1820 or 1821. Because of her status, Harriet Tubman was denied an education, considering the fact that slave owners did not want their slaves to know how to read or write.
Like most slaves, Harriet began working at an early age. At five years old, she was “loaned out” to another plantation to check muskrat traps in ice cold rivers. She quickly became too sick to keep working there, from being malnourished and suffering from the cold, and was returned home. Once she was better, she was loaned out again, this time to work as a nurse to the planter’s infant child. By the age of 12, she was working as a field hand, hauling and plowing wood. When she was 13, she was hit in the head with a two-pound weight, as she was defending a fellow slave who tried to run away. Because of this, she had recurring narcoleptic seizures, that plagued her for the rest of her life.
At about 25 years of age(1844), Harriet married a freeman named John Tubman. She got permission from her owners to live in his cabin, but she still had to work for her master. On one of her first return trips to Maryland, she went to John’s cabin to ask to go North with her; finding out that he had married someone else. Later she married Nelson Davis in 1869. Harriet Tubman never had any children.
The Biblical story of Exodus in which Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Israel, saw repetition in the years before the Civil War when Harriet Tubman freed over 300 blacks from slavery in the South to freedom