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Who was Harriet Tubman, the woman replacing Andrew Jackson on $20 bill?

Tubman was responsible for new lives of between 70 and 300 escaped slaves

harriet-tubman-ap A wax likeness of Harriet Ross Tubman is unveiled at the Presidents Gallery by Madame Tussauds in Washington | AP

It was a move in place when Obama left the White House, to replace the formerly impeached, avowed racist, pro-slavery president Andrew Jackson with the image of abolitionist Harriet Tubman. One of the early acts of the Trump Administration in office was to scuttle the project “until at least 2026,” and keep Jackson on the money. Now Biden has changed that and ordered the process back on track and speeded up.


But who was Tubman? Why should she be the one chosen to inspire Black Americans with self-respect, dignity, and a sense of history as well as to inspire the rest of the world with goodwill and understanding of her cause and work? What is her historical place?

Born Araminta Ross on a plantation deep in the bowels of the slave state of Maryland in the American South in 1922, she was the fifth of nine children, whipped and slaved in the wheat fields and in the timber fields of western Maryland forests. But she was also a rebel free spirit who would grow into a true anti-slavery radical, running the underground railroad to help escaping slaves into the northern free states or British Canada, even becoming a scout and a spy during the civil war years.

Driven by what she later would say were beautiful dreams in which she crossed the fields of flowers from slavery to freedom and in which beautifully dressed white ladies stretched their hands to welcome her, Ross married a free man by the name of John Tubman, and in that process changed her name to Harriet in honor of her mother. In September 1849 at the age of 27, she ended her slavery by running away alone in the middle of the night to prevent being sold to plantations further south. Her husband stayed behind.

Hiding in the woods and running through swamps, braving the cold autumn winds, scraping her feet sharp rocks, and cutting her legs to bleed in the weeds, she reached a Quaker home with the help of a white woman. There she passed herself off as a maid, but it was the kindness of that Quaker couple that, realising she was an escaping slave, hid her in their wagon and took her to a safe house, from where she would follow several other journeys to other safehouses, hidden by Quakers, protected by their help. The Quakers had a long history dating back to 1688, of anti-slavery conscience and activism, standing up for equal treatment for Blacks and Whites. That was her exposure to the underground railroad.

Eventually, she reached Philadelphia where she found work, saved her money to return to Maryland to do for others what the Quakers had done for her. To Tubman, this work became a holy crusade at great risk to herself as an escaped slave and hunted as an agitator, her face posted in Runaway Slave ads that offered some rewards for her capture and re-enslavement, some of them saying “Dead of alive.”

The Underground Railroad was a loose floating, ever-shifting network of sometimes connected sometimes isolated groups of people, Black and White, Quakers, Puritans, and committed abolitionists risking prosecution, violence, and death operating clandestine safe houses in slave states, free Black men producing fake papers and free passes to ease the pass along a system developed perhaps as soon as northern states began to abolish slavery in the early 1800s.

It existed to help escaping slaves; there was no specific road or way it worked, it encompassed roads, seaways, boats, horses, and trains along the most dangerous way of the journey to freedom.

Harriet Tubman became legendary for her heroics and bravery in her quest as the tireless operator and coordinator of the underground railroad. She was a Moses to streams of escaping slaves, leading them to freedom in northern states and Canada. It was not the work of a day, but of a lifetime to end racial subjugation and turn into a nation’s moral outrage that changed the course of America, endowing it with a morality that broke the chains of slavery through bloody civil war and enshrined its achievements in racial freedom in its laws.

Tubman was responsible for the freedom and flight to safety and a new life of between 70 and 300 escaped slaves. In deed and in moral force, in flesh and blood, in danger and leading to freedom, she was, in her own right, a personal Great Emancipator to many.

When the man who would later be given the title of the Great Emancipator called to arms in the Civil War, Tubman changed the dimension of her work to fight slavery as a volunteer with the Union Army, where she served as a cook, laundry washer, and a nurse where she put her herbal medicine knowledge to treat soldiers and escaping slaves at Fort Monroe. She later became the leader of a scouting and spy network for the Union Army in occupied South Carolina. History reports say “she provided crucial intelligence to Union commanders about Confederate Army supply routes and troops and helped liberate enslaved people to form Black Union regiments.”

Scholars have debated the impact of the five-foot diminutive woman and her wartime contributions but have settled in describing her work as “significant in guaranteeing Union victory.” She was indeed a giant in her accomplishments, an American hero. She was buried with military honours.


As a slave child, she was made to work on the fields at the age of five and punished when she did not please her masters. Even at the early age of 12, she defended slaves about to receive punishment, getting socked in the head by a stone headed for a young Black man in the process, and receiving injuries that would last a lifetime.

Having run her own network of the Underground Railroad, she worked with Frederick Douglas in abolitionist causes and with Susan B. Anthony in the struggle of suffragettes, a woman of substance, dedicated to equality and fairness and willing to fight for it.

For the last 15 years of her life, she purchased and ran the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People, where she would become a resident, still suffering the effects of that rock on her head. She remained there until her death in 1911.

President Biden has now ordered the speeding up of the process of placing Tubman on the $20 bill, by a twist of fate, the exact monthly amount of the military pension she received thanks to an 1899 act of Congress.

“I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it,” she once said. But the real value of her image in the face of the nation’s money and of millions of people around the world on a daily basis is in inspiring generations to learn about her contributions to the dignity and self-respect she granted to many, to think, if even for a moment, about what she did to advance racial equality and liberty and to ensure they have the experience of knowing that their future was not neglected in the past, thanks to the work and bravery of women like her.

And now, to know that a nation will not be ignorant of her contribution to its greatness.

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