Harriet Tubman Biography

Essay by keiferHigh School, 10th grade May 2006

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The savior of so many black slaves during the 1700's, the "black Moses" of all slaves. The person I am referring to is the late Harriet Tubman. She single handedly led 300 slaves from station to station and finally to freedom, 300 black slaves. She was born in 1820 on a plantation in the state of Maryland. She despised slavery from the start and was put to work on the plantation as a field hand at the age of 7. Her and her fellow slaves would chop wood, cut hay, and plow the land from morning until night. At the age of sixteen she helped another black slave escape from her plantation. This infuriated her masters and was struck over the head with an iron weight, rendering her unconscious for a couple days. When she regained consciousness she was plagued with splitting headaches and a type of narcolepsy for the rest of her life.

Harriet would fall asleep uncontrollably at any time weather she was doing something or not, she would even fall unconscious in mid sentence, and would then wake up and keep doing what she was doing as if nothing had happened. In some states slavery was outlawed, this gave a safe haven for slaves to escape to.

Harriet herself fled to Pennsylvania with help from the Underground Railroad. She faced many problems on her way to freedom especially encounters with bounty hunters because of the $12 000 reward for her capture, dead or a live. One of these encounters happened on a train when she sat across from two bounty hunters. The two bounty hunters had a suspicion that she was the slave that they were looking for, but she fooled them by pulling a book out of her bag and starting to act like she...