The Story of the Trailblazer Who Led Many to Freedom

When No One’s Watching

Do the good things you do when no one is watching really matter? Do they impact the world?

Harriet Tubman never held political office, carried a formal military title, or wrote books. Much of her work was local, relational, risky, and secret. In the world economy of her day, she was overlooked, undervalued, and mistreated. And yet, from the tumultuous start of her life to the tiresome end, she reminds us that our world is changed through the faithful actions of ordinary, embodied people.

Harriet was likely the last person anyone expected to make a sizable impact on human history. This is because she was born enslaved, a woman, illiterate, and was disabled most of her life. Yet the fruit of her labor reached far beyond her lifetime.

The Making of a Leader

Harriet was one of eight children born to Ben and Rit Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1820. Her family loved one another deeply and shared a vibrant faith in God. Both realities shaped her courage and strength for the rest of her life.

At just five years old, Harriet was forced to do exhausting housework. She spent long days away from her family and was expected to do work far beyond a child’s abilities, and this lifestyle obviously took its toll. Harriet often became dangerously ill and faced the possibility of death more than once.

Around age fourteen, Harriet intervened to protect an enslaved boy. In the process, she was struck in the head with a two-pound iron weight, leaving her with debilitating headaches, periods of unconsciousness, and vivid visions for the rest of her life.

Despite her injury, Harriet grew into a strong woman. She was small in stature—standing at just five feet tall—but was bold in spirit, savvy, and clever. As she blossomed into adolescence, she was relieved to move from suffocating domestic work in plantation homes to the spacious farmlands outdoors. Being a slave was “the next thing to hell,¹” as she put it. But the woods became her refuge, the fields a kind of sanctuary. She learned to read the night sky, navigate marshland, and survive outdoors—skills that would later save lives on the Underground Railroad.

Escape to Freedom

As Harriet grew, whispers of freedom surrounded her. Her father was eventually freed, and in 1844, she married John Tubman, a free Black man. But when she heard rumors she might be sold away from her family, Harriet knew she must run.

One night she quietly slipped away and began the arduous and dangerous trek north. The journey required fortitude, secrecy, and absolute trust in God. But she was not alone. Anti-slavery allies and Underground Railroad conductors guided her along the way. Harriet traveled by night, hid in forests and marshes, following the North Star and the Holy Spirit as her guide. In the fall of 1849, the twenty-nine-year-old quietly stepped into the “city of brotherly love” (Philadelphia’s famous nickname).

“When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven,” she recalled. “I had crossed the line. I was free. But there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.”²

Despite her loneliness, she found paid work and a sense of independence she had never known. But her joy was incomplete. Freedom felt empty without the people she loved. She longed for her parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, and friends—many of whom were still enslaved in Maryland. So, she did the unthinkable. She went back for them.

From the tumultuous start of her life to the tiresome end, [Harriet Tubman] reminds us that our world is changed through the faithful actions of ordinary, embodied people.

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad

Within a year of her own escape, she returned to her family despite the danger of recapture and the Fugitive Slave Act, which made escaping even more dangerous.

Harriet’s initial rescues were about freeing and reuniting with her family. She helped her nieces, Kessiah and Aramint, and her brothers escape. Later she would guide her parents north, too. Over time she made roughly thirteen trips back into slaveholding territory and ushered approximately seventy people to freedom. She also gave guidance to many others who fled on their own.

Harriet was a noteworthy conductor of the Underground Railroad, not only because of her courage but also her method. She studied the landscape meticulously, traveling by night and stopping at trusted safe houses. She was clever, carrying messages through song, altering routes at the last moment when necessary, and disguising herself to avoid detection.

Her work was illegal under federal law. This meant she was constantly under threat from slave catchers and informants. Yet she persisted, convinced God was guiding her. She prayed often on her missions and spoke of sensing divine warnings that led her to change direction at critical moments. Her faith echoes the psalmist’s confidence: “The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps. 121:8).

The Civil War: The Fight for Freedom Continues

When the Civil War began in 1861, Tubman’s work to free others did not end, but it took on a new shape. She joined the Union effort in South Carolina. First, she worked as a nurse for formerly enslaved people and Union soldiers. She treated smallpox, dysentery, and other illnesses with herbal remedies she had learned in her youth. She also served as a cook and laundress, helping newly freed people transition to life outside bondage.

Her role expanded to scouting and intelligence. On June 2, 1863, Tubman played a central role in the Combahee River Raid. Working alongside Colonel James Montgomery, she helped guide Union gunboats upriver past Confederate mines. The raid resulted in the destruction of plantations and the liberation of more than seven hundred enslaved men, women, and children. Many historians note this as the only documented case of a US military operation planned and led by a woman during the Civil War.

For Harriet, emancipation ought not simply be an abstract policy for some but instead a lived reality for all.

Caring for the Least of These

After the war, Harriet settled in Auburn, New York, purchasing property from her friend and fellow abolitionist Senator William H. Seward. She continued to care for extended family members and for formerly enslaved people who sought care. Her home became a refuge where the marginalized found shelter, food, and friendship.

In 1896, she formally founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged with the help of her local church, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Elderly Black men and women—many of whom had lived much of their lives under slavery—came there for care. Tubman raised funds, cooked meals, tended the grounds, and lived alongside the residents. When she herself grew too old and ill to live independently, she became a resident of the very home she had founded.

Harriet spent her final years surrounded by community, speaking occasionally at women suffrage meetings and church gatherings and receiving visitors who wanted to thank her. In her final moments, she recalled John 14:2–3—Christ preparing a place for his people. She died in 1913.

Her life was a living example of Jesus’s call to care for “the least of these,” (Matt. 25:40) as shown in the people she fed, housed, and nursed to health.

Changing the World, Right Where You Are

Her friend and fellow abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, once observed that while his work was public and praised, hers was largely hidden, witnessed mainly by “the midnight sky and the silent stars”³. He understood that her influence came from proximity to “the least of these”—standing beside frightened travelers in the dark, sitting with the sick, and guiding families to new lives.

Harriet’s life shows us that history is changed not only by speeches and laws but also through persistent human action in ordinary life. Her faithfulness reminds us not to measure our lives only in the trinkets and titles but also in our quiet, steady acts of faithfulness and good we do for others. “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9).

Shar Walker is the author of The Story of Harriet Tubman: The Trailblazer Who Led Many to Freedom.

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