Harriet Tubman was born in 1820 on a large plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was the sixth of eleven children. She was born in a very small on-room log hut, that was located behind her families owners house. The huthad a dirt floor, no windows, and no furniture.
Her fater, Benjamin Ross, and mother, Harriet Green, were both slaves. They were from the Ashanti ribe of West Africa. Edward Brodas, Harriet’s owner, hired her out as a laborer by the age of five. The buying and selling of humans was a big deal in America between the late 1600’s and the 1800’s. By 1835 there were over two million black men, women, and children who were slaves. These people were bought and sold.
No one cared if husbands and wives got weparated or if children were separated from their parents. Slaves were not treated like people. No one really cared what happend to them Harriet was beaten by her masters all the time. They saw as a wild child.
One tiem, Harriet saw a bowl filled with lumps of suger and decided to take one. Harriet’s mistress, Miss. Susan, saw her take it and started chasing her with a whip. Harriet ran away and hid out with the pigs. She ahd to go bakc, because she was really hungrey. When she went back she got whipped over and over again.
She said, “Now you know, I never had anything good, no sweet, no suger, and that sugar right by me did look so nice. ” By her early teens, Harriet was no longer allowed to work inside, so she was hired out as a filed hand. She work very hard and long hours out in the fields. There was no such thing as a rest for slaves. In 1835, Harriet came between her owner and a slave who was running away. The owner threw a lead weight, that weighed 2 punds, at the runaway, but it hit Harriet instead.
the hit put hir in a coma and it took months for her to recover. She never fully recovered from the hit and after that suffered from blackouts, really bad headaches, and sleeping spelss for the rest of her life. In 1844, Harriet meet a free black man named John Tubman. They got married, but Harriet was still a slave. They got to stay in his cabin at night.
Harriet’s owner died and she knew she was going to be sold to someone else. She was really afraid of being shipped to the deep south. The deep south was the worse place a slave could go. it was a death sentence for any slave.
Harriet always dreamed about traveling up north where she would be free and she didn’t want her marriage split up by the slave trade. She talked to Hohn about escaping, and he said he would tell on her is she did. She planned out her escape and didn’t tell him about it, because he would tell on her. The only person that knew about was one of her sisters. Harriet escaped at night. She had no money and no food.
She went to the house of a white women who had once offered to help her. The woman told Harriet which house to go to next. Going from house to house, was know as the underground railroad. Harriet’s trip was a success and she was a free woman. She worked as a dishwasher, a cook, and a cleaning woman.
The next year, she went back to Maryland and rescued her sisters family. After that, she made a second trip to get her brother, James, and some of her other friends. She also went back to get her husband in September 1851, but he was remarried and he didn’t want to go with her. Stopping at people’s houses was known as the underground railroad.
Each stop was the house of someone who hated slavery and knew it was wrong. they were willing to help runaway slaves to freedom. A lantern on a hitching post meant it was a safe house. Many slaves were afraid to knock on a white family’s door and trust them. The people th the .
