Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero Essay Example

a man by the name of John Tubman. In these years she had taken on the name Harriet in honor of her mother, Mariah Ritty. After being sold again, she fears this to be a repeating pattern, so she ran away in 1849. Soon, she will become one of the most famous “conductors” of the underground railroad.

She had met many people that have helped her achieve her heroic doings. Most of these people were freed blacks and quakers who were willing to help, and an occasional white who felt sympathetic. These people helped her hide and had hidden other slaves; they provided materials to help them move along. Tubman was a very intelligent and a resourceful person. These traits allowed her to make her thirteen trips back to retrieve her family members and others. She preferred traveling in the winter because there was more time to travel during the darkened hours of night. She would dress in middle-class styled clothes and sometimes even dressed as a male figure, so no one knew who she was. Strategically, she would plan to leave on Saturdays because the newspaper would not print on Sundays and runaway slaves couldn’t be publicized until Monday’s paper. Therefore, Harriet Tubman was wise with choosing the people she decided to get involved with. The people that she decided to associate with helped her save approximately seventy to around eighty slaves and possibly more. People believe there was an additional fifty or sixty of whom she gave detail about saving. This also was a successful plan because of her street smart actions.

After many years of Tubman’s countless trips back and forth between the Northern

states/Canada and to Maryland, she had brought many slaves to freedom through The Underground Railroad. She proceeded to live in Ontario, Canada. Here, she meets John Brown, who got her involved in being more publicly active. She was part of the rescue of fugitive slaves, which was known as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Soon the Civil War started; Tubman had worked as a nurse, cook, spy, teacher, and a laundress for the Union force. Under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, she was the first woman to lead an armed raid. During this they freed around 700 slaves, defeat their enemies and proceed to burn their food, buildings and other essentials that they needed. After the Civil War ends in 1865, Tubman moves back home to Auburn. She is hired out as a nurse. She still encountered inequalities from people. One incident being she was when she was heading home she was thrown of a passenger train because of the racist conductor. In the 1880s she was still living on her 70 acre of land and farming it. In this time, she opens a business of making bricks with Nelson Davis, who was her second husband. Sadly, he died of tuberculosis in 1888. Tubman became even more involved in conventions and attended the suffrage movement of both whites and blacks in the 1890s. During this time she had bought out land and turned it into a home and a hospital for sickened and aged African Americans. In 1913, Harriet Tubman took her last final breaths and is buried next to her brother at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

Harriet Tubman had

affected many lives. After several long years she had saved countless people through slavery, the Civil War and the acts she had gotten involved in. She is the definition of an American hero through many peoples eyes. Harriet Tubman had put herself at risk a numerous amount of times to save others. Through heartache, abusive and other unacceptable behavior, she still had the heart and motivation to help others before herself.