THE LAW CALLED THEM PROPERTY. SHE HELPED THEM WALK AWAY.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and returned repeatedly to help others secure freedom, later using intelligence networks in Union military operations and building care institutions after the war. Her life demonstrates how organized solidarity can challenge coercive labor—and how emancipation remains incomplete without safety, resources, recognition and political rights.

PEOPLE & POWER · 06 · REFORMERS, ABOLITIONISTS & CIVIL RIGHTS

Published by Langhorne P. Breedlove

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026 · 5:14 AM ET

Tags: Harriet Tubman · Underground Railroad · Abolition · Enslaved Labor · Combahee River · Civil War Pensions · Suffrage

A woman who has escaped bondage turns around and returns toward the place that claimed to own her. She carries no official commission, no army of lawyers and no permission slip from the authorities. She carries knowledge of the roads, people she can trust and an understanding that liberty means very little if the people she loves remain behind.

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, was enslaved from childhood, escaped in 1849, helped other people flee bondage and later served the Union as a nurse, scout, intelligence organizer and guide. Her work extended after the war into women's suffrage and material support for elderly and impoverished Black residents. She offers a history of organized liberation that is more concrete—and more demanding—than the legend of a solitary heroine. (Sources 01, 02)

ROOTS · THE PEOPLE WHO WERE TREATED AS PROPERTY

Tubman grew up on Maryland's Eastern Shore in a world in which enslavers claimed legal authority to compel work, restrict movement, sell family members and punish resistance. Her parents, Ben Ross and Harriet 'Rit' Green, endured the danger of family separation. Tubman's own childhood work included domestic duties, field labor and employment connected to the waterways. (Sources 01, 02)

Slavery was not merely low wages. An enslaved worker could not simply quit, negotiate hours or move to another employer. The legal machinery protected claims of ownership over human beings. A proletariat reading must preserve that particular horror rather than reduce racial slavery to an interchangeable example of an unpleasant job.

Tubman experienced serious injury in youth when an enslaver struck her with a heavy object meant for another person. Accounts describe lasting health effects. The point is not to diagnose her retrospectively, but to remember that the conditions she challenged combined coerced labor, physical danger, family separation and legal exclusion. (Source 02)

1849 · ESCAPE WAS THE BEGINNING, NOT THE END

Tubman escaped to Philadelphia in 1849. Freedom in a northern state did not eliminate the threat posed by slave catchers or the claims enslavers asserted. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 enlarged federal mechanisms for pursuing freedom seekers, increasing risks even in places where slavery was prohibited. Tubman nevertheless returned to Maryland to bring relatives and others north. (Sources 01, 03)

The National Park Service estimates she personally led about seventy people to freedom in roughly thirteen rescue trips and helped instruct another fifty to sixty people in escaping. These are historically supported estimates, not proof of the often-repeated legend that she personally rescued three hundred people on nineteen missions. Good history does not become less powerful when the numbers are accurate. (Source 03)

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD WAS A NETWORK, NOT A TRAIN

The Underground Railroad was a loose network of people, routes, places of refuge, resources and information. Free Black communities, antislavery organizers, religious groups and individual households played varied roles. Tubman made dangerous journeys and earned trust, but successful escape also depended on many other people's judgment, shelter, food, funding and willingness to take risks. (Sources 03, 04)

That is the organizational lesson. When institutions enforce bondage, people may create practical routes toward freedom by sharing labor and risk. But the network was not a formal government or an employee-owned business, and it did not possess the predictable protections of an accountable public institution. Its work was clandestine precisely because lawful authorities could punish those involved.

Calling it a 'parallel system of care' is a modern interpretation, not a claim that Tubman or her collaborators wrote today's political platform. They organized transportation, warning, shelter and personal support around the concrete objective of freeing people whom the law sought to return to slavery.

THE LAW WAS PART OF THE DANGER

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required federal officials and certain processes to facilitate returning people claimed as fugitives from slavery. It also punished forms of assistance and limited rights of people accused under the statute. Enslaved and formerly enslaved people therefore faced a government apparatus in which legality and personal liberty could come into direct conflict. (Source 05)

This is why the original essay's contrast between law and legitimacy works as historical interpretation. Tubman's rescues resisted the legal protection of slaveholding interests. But it would be mistaken to infer that all laws or all public institutions were uniformly aligned with bondage: abolitionists, northern communities, courts, lawmakers and eventually Union authorities held competing positions that changed through war and emancipation.

THE CIVIL WAR CHANGED THE SCALE OF THE WORK

During the Civil War Tubman went to South Carolina and worked in support of the Union. She nursed soldiers and freedpeople, cooked, scouted and organized intelligence gathering with local Black collaborators. Her ability to understand communities and travel through dangerous terrain made her work useful to military operations. (Sources 06, 07)

The intelligence network did not consist solely of one legendary spy moving through the woods. Black pilots, scouts, escapees and local residents supplied knowledge of roads, waterways, Confederate positions and plantation conditions. Tubman's work demonstrates the military value of people whose knowledge had often been ignored or exploited by those in authority.

1863 · THE COMBAHEE RIVER RAID

In June 1863 Tubman helped plan and guide a Union operation on the Combahee River in South Carolina. Union troops and naval vessels targeted Confederate resources while enabling hundreds of enslaved people to reach freedom. The National Park Service credits the intelligence collected by Tubman's network of pilots and scouts as important to preparation and execution. (Source 08)

Accounts often describe approximately 750 people liberated, but the precise historical figures differ by source and reporting method. The importance is not a single perfectly rounded number. The raid combined military force, intelligence, knowledge of local waterways and decisions by enslaved people who seized the opportunity to leave plantations.

Tubman's participation was extraordinary, but she did not act alone or command a modern army as a commissioned general at the time. Colonel James Montgomery and Union forces carried out the armed operation alongside the networks that supplied intelligence. The liberated people themselves took enormous risks boarding vessels and leaving places where their labor had been coerced. (Source 08)

THE STATE ACCEPTED HER SERVICE. PAYMENT WAS ANOTHER MATTER.

The National Archives preserves Tubman's later affidavit and congressional records seeking recognition for Civil War service. She described nursing, cooking and directing a small group of scouts. She had received only limited direct payment for her wartime work and pursued compensation for decades. (Sources 06, 09)

After the war she received a widow's pension based on the service of her husband, Union veteran Nelson Davis. Congress in 1899 authorized an increase to twenty dollars per month related to her own nursing work, without fully recognizing all the intelligence and scout service she described. The distinction exposes how indispensable labor can be accepted during an emergency and then discounted when official compensation must be determined. (Sources 09, 10)

Tubman's case was not a modern wage lawsuit, and the pension rules of her era had their own statutory categories. Yet the familiar economic problem is visible: the value of work and the institution's willingness to account for that work are not the same thing.

AUBURN · FREEDOM REQUIRES A PLACE TO LIVE

Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, supporting relatives, neighbors, former soldiers and other people facing poverty. Her home became a center of care. She later contributed land and efforts toward the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, which served elderly Black residents who had limited access to adequate support. (Sources 02, 11)

That chapter complicates the popular habit of ending her story at the Underground Railroad. Escaping bondage solves one immediate form of domination; it does not automatically provide housing, income, medical care or security in old age. Tubman's later work joined liberty to the material institutions necessary to live with dignity.

SUFFRAGE AND THE POLITICAL RIGHTS STILL DENIED

Tubman also supported women's voting rights and participated in suffrage activities, using her history as an abolitionist to argue that women had demonstrated their ability to serve society and should exercise political power. Her presence linked emancipation, racial justice and women's citizenship, though organizations within those movements were often divided by race and strategy. (Sources 02, 12)

Tubman died in 1913, before the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification in 1920. Her participation was part of a wider movement, not proof that she alone secured any later constitutional amendment. The point is that she did not treat the attainment of freedom from slavery as the last political demand she would make.

HEROIC MYTHS CAN HIDE COLLECTIVE LABOR

Commemorations sometimes portray Tubman as an almost supernatural lone rescuer. Such stories can inspire admiration while obscuring the other people who sheltered escapees, financed journeys, supplied intelligence, served in Union units and organized movements for equal rights. They can also erase the courage and agency of people who escaped bondage themselves.

A worker-centered history should credit her exceptional judgment, stamina and organizing skill without making freedom depend on the existence of one unusually gifted hero. The Underground Railroad's strength was that people made themselves useful to one another, sometimes without public recognition or the protection of powerful institutions.

THE CONTEMPORARY COMPARISON NEEDS ITS OWN LAW

The supplied draft draws a comparison to modern U.S. immigration enforcement. It can raise worthwhile questions about due process, detention, access to counsel and coercive labor conditions, but the legal framework for nineteenth-century racial slavery is not identical to present immigration law. Equating the two without specific evidence would erase important legal and historical distinctions.

The stronger method is to ask how any present institution accounts for individual rights, whether people can challenge mistakes, how workers can report exploitation and whether public officials face independent oversight. Those questions can be pursued under the applicable laws without assigning Tubman opinions on agencies or policies that did not exist in her lifetime.

WHAT THE PROLETARIAT LENS REVEALS

Tubman demonstrated that organizing can change material conditions, not merely the language people use to describe them. Her rescues physically removed people from enforced labor. Her wartime intelligence contributed to a military operation that liberated hundreds. Her later care and suffrage work addressed other barriers that survived emancipation.

But the lesson should not be stretched into an unrestricted claim that any action labeled resistance is justified. Tubman's historical context involved slavery, an institution that denied basic human freedom. Contemporary tactics require independent evaluation of legality, proportionality, rights and consequences. The moral clarity of abolition does not automatically decide every modern political dispute.

THE ONE-YEAR AND TEN-YEAR PUBLIC LEDGER

This biography is not an appropriations proposal, so an invented contemporary fiscal cost of Tubman's historical actions would be meaningless. Programs concerning archives, public history, housing or equal access would require a specific legal basis, identified beneficiaries and proper baseline estimates.

Illustrative accounting only: a public-history and community-support pilot offering ten local projects $500,000 each, plus $1 million for research and administration, would require $6 million in its first year. If ongoing grants and evaluation cost $3 million annually for nine more years, the undiscounted ten-year total would be $33 million. These are hypothetical figures, not a federal estimate, existing appropriation or valuation of Tubman's legacy.

WHY HARRIET TUBMAN MATTERS IN 2026

Tubman's life illustrates how political freedom becomes practical through knowledge, transportation, mutual trust, resources and coordinated action. The people who organized escape routes and provided care changed what was possible for individuals otherwise facing powerful legal and economic barriers.

She also exposed a contradiction in public recognition. The Union could rely on her abilities when they served a military purpose, but the government was far slower to compensate the breadth of her labor. Freedom, service and care were connected, yet the institutions administering them often failed to acknowledge those connections.

She did not wait for the machinery of slavery to authorize the people it held to leave. She helped build the route. And when the war ended, she kept asking whether those who were free had a safe place to live.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

01 · National Archives — Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913); biography, childhood, escape and Union service.

https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/harriet-tubman

02 · National Museum of African American History and Culture — Harriet Tubman: Life, Liberty and Legacy.

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/harriet-tubman

03 · National Park Service — Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad; estimated rescues and trips.

https://home.nps.gov/articles/harriet-tubman-and-the-underground-railroad.htm

04 · National Park Service — Harriet Tubman's Boston; abolitionist networks and fundraising.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harriet-tubman-s-boston.htm

05 · National Archives — Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, historical context.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/fugitive-slave-act

06 · National Archives — Doing 'Good Brave Work': Harriet Tubman and the Civil War.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2000/fall/harriet-tubman-beaufort-testimony

07 · CIA — Intelligence in the Civil War; Tubman's wartime intelligence role.

https://www.cia.gov/static/Intelligence-in-the-Civil-War.pdf

08 · National Park Service — Combahee River Ferry and Harriet Tubman Bridge; raid and intelligence network.

https://www.nps.gov/places/combahee-river-ferry-harriet-tubman-bridge.htm

09 · National Archives — Claim of Harriet Tubman; affidavit and congressional compensation.

https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/claim-of-harriet-tubman

10 · National Archives — Congress and Harriet Tubman's Claim for a Pension; 1899 act.

https://www.archives.gov/legislative/resources/education/tubman

11 · National Museum of African American History and Culture — Tubman's Auburn home and care work.

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/harriet-tubman

12 · National Park Service — Harriet Tubman and the Women's Suffrage Movement.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harriet-tubman-s-boston.htm

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