Harriet Tubman - Simple English Wikipedia

# Harriet Tubman

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Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) has been considered one of the greatest of all American heroes. She lived during a time in this country when the winds of change began to blow for slavery and the southern way of life. She was born into slavery, and with hard work, on her own time, she washed clothes, grew gardens of vegetables for sale, and even took up her hands as a blacksmith, to raise the money to purchase her own freedom for $200. When she presented it to her owner, he refused to set her free, knowing that his profit and respect of his peers came at the hands of this woman. It was then that she heard the voice of her ancestors and that of the Lord God saying, IF MY PEOPLE WHO ARE CALLED BY MY NAME WOULD BUT HUMBLE THEMSELVES AND PRAY, SEEK MY FACE, AND TURN FROM THEIR WICKED WAYS, THEN WILL I HEAR FROM HEAVEN, FORGIVE THEIR SINS, AND HEAL THEIR LANDS. She called on the Lord God saying "Make me invisible to my enemies and show me the way to Freetown."

'Freetown' was a place created in the hearts and minds of black slaves. No one had ever seen it, and no one knew the way. Freetown was as far from southern slavery as Heaven is from earth. She started on her journey trusting God to lead the way. 250 miles later, she found it in Wilmington, DE. Along the way through the kindness of strangers, who themselves had been moved by God, she built what is now know as the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was a system of paths, trails, caves, farmhouses, and people who worked together to move slaves invisibly from slavery to 'Freetown'.

Led by the Lord God, she extended the Underground Railroad as far south as the republic of Texas, some 1300 miles into southern slave territory. She traveled on foot, and 5 or 10 at a time she lead some 3000 slaves to 'Freetown'. And she did this with a $50,000 bounty on her head, at a time in this country when white men worked for a salary of a nickle a week. In today's terms, that bounty would be some 2 million dollars.

Every plantation owner, field boss, sharecropper, police officer, sheriff, a group called the Pinkertons (whom we now call the FBI), and most house negroes were always looking to catch the woman called "Moses" by her beloved benefactors.

None of them ever laid eyes on her, or the captives she set free. She made at least 138 trips into slave territory on foot, and still to this day no one knows where the Underground Railroad began or ended.

She became a soldier for the Union Army during the civil war, and lead a squad of troops into South Carolina to blow up the Confederate armies' ammunition depot. This went a long way toward ending the war, because they could not fight without ammo.

Of all the groups looking to collect the bounty on her head, the Pinkerton group came the closest. They caught up to her in Delaware and followed her on a perilous journey through New York on a box train, all the way to the Canadian border, where they were then detained by the same force of mounties who detain us today when traveling to Canada. This allowed her to escape her enemies once again.

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Category: People

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