Harriet Tubman

Born Araminta Ross around March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman grew up under the whip and took a metal weight to the skull as a child when an overseer meant to hit someone else - the injury left her with lifelong dizziness, pain, sudden sleep, and visions she believed were messages from God. In 1849 she slipped north to Philadelphia, then turned around and began the slow extraction: one group at a time, always by night, guiding kin and dozens of others through the Underground Railroad without losing a soul. After the Fugitive Slave Act tightened the noose in 1850, she pushed her routes into Canada; she met John Brown in 1858 and helped him recruit for Harpers Ferry. When war came she cooked and nursed for the Union, then took up arms as a scout and spy, leading the Combahee Ferry raid that liberated more than seven hundred people in a single blow. She bought land in Auburn, New York in 1859, retired there after the war to care for her parents, spent her last decades pushing for women's suffrage, and helped found the home for elderly African Americans where she died on March 10, 1913.