(b. ca. 1820; d. March 10, 1913) Former slave and conductor on the Underground Railroad, Civil War nurse and spy.

Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad, personally escorted as many as seventy or eighty former slaves to freedom in the North after her own daring flight from slavery in 1849. Frederick Douglass, whose Rochester, New York, home served as an Underground Railroad station, wrote to her in 1868, "Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have" (Bradford, 1869). During the Civil War, she again risked her life in the antislavery cause by joining the Union Army in coastal South Carolina and Florida as a spy, scout, and nurse. Less well known but equally heroic was her postwar work, managing a small subsistence farm to support a large extended family in Auburn, New...