“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.“
Introduction
The brutality of slavery is a stain on society that will continue to haunt future generations. Shackled and beaten for the colour of their skin, black men, women and even children were put to work on plantations for backbreaking labour. Cruelly treated, separated from family and treated as an inferior race, many stories have been written about their bravery and determination to break their chains and become free once more. To evade the searing heat and live once more as god-fearing humans. One of the inspirational enslaved people was Harriet Tubman, or Moses as she came to be known. A child who was born into slavery, beaten and whipped by her enslavers and who sustained a head injury when a metal weight hit her on the head, causing a life of dizziness and hypersomnia. An injury caused her to have religious visions, which her Methodist upbringing ascribed to be visions from God.
Saviour
Yet this brave soul escaped her captors in 1848 and fled to Philadelphia, returning to Maryland for multiple journies to free relatives and others. Working in the dead of night and carrying a revolver, she helped hundreds of men, women and children escape from America and Canada. A cook, nurse, and spy in the Union Army during the Civil War, she would go on to look after her parents in Auburn, New York, and she was a key figure in the Suffragette movement.
A conductor on the Underground Railroad for eight years, Tubman was once asked by a white woman whether she should vote and received a short and frank reply of “I suffered enough to believe it.” A lady later had a brutal operation of having her skull cut open to alleviate the pain she had suffered from her head injury. Her last years were spent in a rest home, which was opened to celebrate her work. She died penniless from pneumonia in 1913. On her deathbed, surrounded by friends and family, her last words were a quotation from the Gospel of John. “I go away to prepare a place for you.” Tubman was buried with semi-military honours at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. Much has been written about her, including a 2019 film entitled Harriet about her life.
