Questions to ask Harriet Tubman

Her life in short

Tubman was born Araminta Ross, called Minty, around 1822 in Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, to Harriet “Rit” Green and Ben Ross, both enslaved. As a young teenager she was struck on the head by a heavy iron weight an overseer threw at another enslaved man. For the rest of her life she had spells of sudden sleep, headaches and vivid visions. Around 1844 she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and took the name Harriet.

In 1849 she escaped alone to Philadelphia. Over the next eleven years she went back about thirteen times and brought out about seventy people, mostly family and friends, and gave directions to others. In the Civil War she worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse, scout and spy, and helped lead the Combahee River Raid of 1 to 2 June 1863, which freed more than 700 people. She settled in Auburn, New York, married Nelson Davis in 1869, spoke for women's suffrage, opened a home for elderly Black people, and died there on 10 March 1913.

Before you write questions: how we know what she said

Because Tubman did not write, every quotation from her passed through another person. That matters for your project. Use this order of trust:

1. Official records: her Civil War service papers, her pension file and Union officers' letters supporting it. Facts, not her words.
2. Interviews printed in her lifetime: Franklin B. Sanborn's article in the Boston Commonwealth (1863) and Sarah Bradford's Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), written with her help to raise money for her.
3. Bradford's expanded Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886), which adds stories and rewrites her speech in a heavy invented dialect, a literary habit of the time. Quote the standard-English 1869 wording where you can, and never imitate the dialect in a performance.
4. Twentieth-century posters and websites. Most “Tubman quotes” here cannot be traced at all.

Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land (2004) is the most careful modern biography and the best place to check a number.

Questions about growing up enslaved

• 1. Three of your sisters were sold away. What did that do to your family?
• 2. You were hired out as a small child to other households. What work were you made to do?
• 3. How were you hurt in the head, and how did it change your life?
• 4. You worked in the timber fields with your father. What did he teach you about the woods and the stars?

What the record says: Larson's research in Dorchester County records confirms the sale of her sisters Linah, Soph and Mariah Ritty. Ben Ross was a skilled timber foreman, and historians think the outdoor work taught her the land she later travelled. Talk about the injury plainly. Modern doctors have suggested temporal lobe epilepsy, but any diagnosis now is a guess, so say so.

Questions about the escape and the trips back

• 5. In 1849 you first set out with two of your brothers, who turned back. Why did you go again alone?
• 6. What did you feel when you crossed into Pennsylvania?
• 7. Why go back to Maryland, where you could be caught and sold?
• 8. How did you rescue your niece Kessiah and her children from an auction in Cambridge in 1850?
• 9. How did you find your way and avoid slave catchers?
• 10. In 1857 you brought out your own elderly parents. How do you move two old people a hundred miles in secret?
• 11. Why did you take people all the way to Canada after 1850?

What the record says: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made free states unsafe, so she led many to St. Catharines, Ontario, where she lived for several years. She worked with the Philadelphia organiser William Still, whose records name some of her parties, and with Thomas Garrett in Wilmington, Delaware. She travelled mostly in winter, when nights were long, and used the North Star, rivers, safe houses and messages passed by word of mouth or song. The Underground Railroad was a network of people and routes, not tunnels or trains.

Questions about the war and the Combahee River Raid

• 12. John Brown called you “General Tubman”. What did you think of his plan for Harpers Ferry?
• 13. How did you gather information as a scout in South Carolina?
• 14. What happened on the night of 1 June 1863 on the Combahee River?
• 15. You later described the Union assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863. What did you see of the wounded?

What the record says: Brown met her in St. Catharines in 1858. Illness kept her away from the raid in October 1859. In 1863 Union gunboats under Colonel James Montgomery, carrying Black troops of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, went up the Combahee with Tubman and her scouts guiding them past Confederate mines. They destroyed plantations and brought away more than 700 people. A Wisconsin newspaper and Sanborn's Commonwealth reported her part within weeks.

Questions about later life and recognition

• 16. You were never paid properly for your war service. How did you fight for a pension?
• 17. Why did you open a home for elderly and poor Black people in Auburn?
• 18. Why did you speak at women's suffrage meetings in the 1890s?
• 19. Sarah Bradford wrote your story. Did she get it right?
• 20. What was your friendship with Frederick Douglass like?

What the record says: she received a widow's pension of 8 dollars a month after Nelson Davis died in 1888, and in 1899 Congress raised it to 20 dollars, partly in recognition of her own service as a nurse. Her home for the aged opened in 1908 on land she had bought next to her house. In 1868 Douglass wrote her a letter of praise, printed in Bradford's 1869 book, comparing her work done in the dark with his done in public.

Two questions about her beliefs

• 21. You said God guided you. What did faith mean in your work?
• 22. What do you want people to understand about slavery?

What the record says: Bradford and others recorded her religious language and visions. Report them as her experience, not as magic, and do not turn her into a mystic or a superhero. She was a careful planner who carried a pistol and used disguises.

Sample answers from the 1869 book

These come from Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), where Bradford set down what Tubman told her. Say so when you use them: they are her words as one writer recorded them.

For question 6, on crossing into freedom:

For question 7, she explained her loneliness with a story. She said she felt like a man sent to State Prison for twenty-five years who comes home to find the house pulled down and his family gone. A strong answer retells that story in your own words and then gives her conclusion from the same page: her family was still in Maryland, and if she was free, they should be free.

For question 5: Bradford reports her saying she had reasoned that there were two things she had a right to, liberty or death, and that if she could not have one she would have the other. Paraphrase it; the 1869 printing renders it in dialect.

Myths and questions she could not answer

• “You freed 300 people on 19 trips.” Bradford's early figures were too high. Larson's count is about 13 trips and about 70 people led out directly.
• “Did you use quilts with secret codes?” There is no evidence from the period for quilt codes; the idea dates from the 1990s.
• “I freed a thousand slaves and could have freed a thousand more if they knew they were slaves.” No source from her lifetime contains it.
• Anything about the plan to put her on the twenty-dollar bill, announced in 2016, or her national park in Maryland.
• Speaking from 1863, she cannot know of Lincoln's death or Reconstruction.

Our quote-checking guide shows how to trace a line back to its first printing.

A note for performers

In a wax museum or a first-person speech, speak in your own clear English. Do not copy the dialect Bradford invented in 1886 or the accents of old films. Tubman's dignity is in what she did, and the facts carry the speech. If you want to hear how a voice answer might sound before you write yours, you can try an AI recreation of Harriet Tubman on Yuga. It is built from the historical record and avoids caricature, but it is a recreation, not her, and can be wrong. Cite Bradford, Sanborn and Larson, not the app.

Where to read about Tubman in the sources

• Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869) and Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886), both free on Project Gutenberg.
• William Still, The Underground Rail Road (1872), with records of parties that reached Philadelphia.
• Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, run by the National Park Service, with her home and the Home for the Aged.
• Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land (2004), and Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004).