As an adolescent working on a Maryland plantation, young Araminta stepped between an overseer and an enslaved man trying to flee. The overseer hurled a two-pound metal weight intended for the fugitive. It struck Araminta in the head instead. She nearly died. For the rest of her life she suffered from seizures, severe headaches, and episodes of sudden unconsciousness -- what doctors today might diagnose as temporal lobe epilepsy. But the injury also brought something else: intense, vivid experiences she interpreted as visions from God. These visions became her compass. She believed God spoke directly to her, warning of danger, revealing safe paths, confirming her purpose. Whether divine gift or neurological phenomenon, the visions gave Tubman an unshakable certainty that sustained her through dangers that would have paralyzed others. She had been broken and remade into something fearless.

In 1849, Tubman escaped from Maryland's Eastern Shore to Philadelphia. She could have stayed free. Instead, she went back. Starting in December 1850, after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act making even free states unsafe for people who had escaped slavery, Tubman began guiding family members and others northward through the Underground Railroad's network of safe houses. Her methods were meticulous: she traveled in winter when longer nights provided cover, departed on Saturday evenings because newspapers that might print runaway notices did not publish on Sundays, and sometimes moved her passengers south briefly to confuse pursuers. She carried the revolver not for slavecatchers alone but also for any passenger who lost nerve and wanted to turn back -- a returnee could betray everyone on the route. Slaveholders posted rewards for her capture, but she was never caught. Over approximately thirteen missions, she led roughly seventy people to freedom, including her elderly parents, whom she transported by improvised horse cart when they could no longer walk. "I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years," she later said, "and I can say what most conductors can't say -- I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

When the Civil War began, Tubman's skills found a new application. She worked first as a cook and nurse for the Union Army in South Carolina, then as a spy and scout, using her years of covert travel to map Confederate territory around Port Royal. In early 1863, she led a band of scouts through enemy terrain under orders from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, gathering intelligence that aided in the temporary Union capture of Jacksonville, Florida. But her defining military moment came on June 2, 1863, when she guided three Union steamboats carrying Black soldiers under Colonel James Montgomery up the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman's intelligence network had identified the locations of Confederate mines in the river and had spread word among enslaved people on nearby plantations that liberation was coming. As the steamboats' whistles sounded, hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children rushed toward the shore. Tubman helped pull them aboard, singing lyrics from a song called "Uncle Sam's Farm" to encourage them. More than 700 people were freed in a single night. She is widely credited as the first woman to lead a major U.S. military operation.

Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, in 1859, purchasing a property from William Seward -- then a senator and soon to become Lincoln's Secretary of State. Auburn sat in the heart of abolitionist country, near Seneca Falls where the women's rights movement had launched a decade earlier. After the war, Tubman devoted herself to two causes: women's suffrage and care for the elderly. She worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland, speaking in New York, Boston, and Washington in favor of women's voting rights. In 1896, she was the keynote speaker at the first conference of the National Federation of Afro-American Women. But her generosity left her perpetually poor -- she once had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to attend receptions held in her honor in Boston. In 1903, she donated her Auburn property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She entered that home herself in 1911 and died there on March 10, 1913, of pneumonia, surrounded by friends and family.

Tubman's Auburn home is now part of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, established to preserve the places where she lived and worked during her final fifty-four years. Her gravesite at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn draws visitors year-round. In 1978, she became the first African-American woman honored on a U.S. postage stamp. Plans announced in 2016 to place her portrait on the front of the twenty-dollar bill -- displacing slaveholder Andrew Jackson -- have been stalled; the Trump administration has shelved the redesign, leaving its future uncertain. In 2024, the United States Mint issued three Harriet Tubman commemorative coins depicting her at different stages of life. And on November 11, 2024, Tubman was posthumously commissioned as a one-star general in the Maryland National Guard, a recognition of the military service she performed more than 160 years earlier at Combahee Ferry. The woman who navigated by starlight, who carried a revolver and a conviction that God spoke directly to her, continues to gain the honors that eluded her in her own impoverished lifetime.