'This Negro can tell Mister Lincoln how to save the money and the young men,' she told friend Lydia Maria Child. If President Abraham Lincoln would only free enslaved people across the South, they would rise up and destroy the Confederacy from within, thus negating the need for thousands of senseless deaths. READ MORE: How Harriet Tubman and William Still Helped the Underground Railroad Tubman took care of 'contrabands' in the South during the Civil WarĪccording to Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 initially seemed to Tubman an unnecessary step. Over the next half-century, she would work as a Union Army General, a liberator, a nurse, a cook, a scout, a spy-ring chief, a celebrated orator, a caretaker and a community organizer. It was this adaptability that would lead Tubman to excel in her post-Underground Railroad endeavors. She was able to get in and out of places that someone else would have been stopped and accosted.” But she must have had one of these faces that's very changeable. “She's a tiny little thing, like a strong wind might blow her away…And she looks kind of like nobody.

“She's 5 feet tall,” Elizabeth Cobbs, author of The Tubman Command told NPR. She escaped her own slavery in 1849 but returned to the South and over the next decade rescued dozens of fellow enslaved people. Tubman has long been famous throughout the world for her work as a brilliant, daring guide for the Underground Railroad. All I ask is united effort, for united we stand divided we fall.”

“The work is now well started, and I know God will raise up others to take care of the future. “I did not take up this work for my own benefit, but those of my race who need help,” she said humbly that day. Officially called the Harriet Tubman Home, it was just one more selfless act in a lifetime of service. “With the Stars and Stripes wound about her shoulders, a band playing national airs and a concourse of members of her race gathered about her to pay tribute to her lifelong struggle on behalf of the colored people of America, aged Harriet Tubman Davis, the Moses of her race, yesterday experienced one of the happiest moments of her life, a period to which she has looked forward for a score of years,” wrote The Auburn Citizen.įor 15 years, an increasingly frail Tubman had dreamt of a rest home for elderly and infirm Black folks in New York and had worked tirelessly to achieve its opening.

At the center of the festivities was a seemingly delicate, elderly woman. On June 23, 1908, there was a grand celebration in Auburn, in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Harriet tubman by catherine clinton