Harriet Tubman

Which Harriet Tubman quotes are real?

Fewer than you would think. You have probably seen the line about freeing a thousand people, and a thousand more if only they had known they were slaves. It appears in no documented record of her words. Most of the tidy lines printed under her photograph are the same. Two are documented. From an 1896 speech at a suffrage convention: 'I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say, I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.' And from the first biography of her, published in 1869: 'There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other.' Everything we have from her was written down by someone else.

How many people did Harriet Tubman free?

About seventy, on roughly thirteen trips back into slave territory after her own escape in late 1849. Those are the working figures, and honest scholarship gives them as ranges. Depending on the source, the trips run from eleven to nineteen and the number of people from about sixty to eighty. The famous claim that she never lost a passenger is her own, made in a speech in 1896, and no one has independently verified it. Then there is the other number, the one that gets left out. In June 1863 she scouted for the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single operation.

What did Harriet Tubman mean by being free inside first?

She did not begin her freedom with the walk north. She began it with a decision made while she was still enslaved in Maryland, that she had a right to liberty or death and would take one of them. Nothing outside her had changed. She had no papers, no money, no protection. What changed was that she stopped accepting anyone else's account of what she was worth. That is what she means by free inside. It is not a comfort, and it is not a substitute for the walk. It is the thing that makes the walk thinkable, because a person who has already refused the terms in her own mind has something to move toward.

• Inner conviction that freedom is a birthright comes before physical liberation and makes it possible.
• Double-consciousness means resisting oppressive external definitions while holding onto your own sense of humanity.
• Collective practices, from spiritual affirmation to coded songs to storytelling, nurture inner freedom under oppression.

Listen to the story “Inner Freedom First”

What did Harriet Tubman teach?

Harriet Tubman left no book, so what she taught has to be read out of what she did. Three things stand out. Inner freedom comes first. She had decided she had a right to liberty or death long before her feet crossed any line, and that decision made the walk possible. Courage comes before certainty. She prepared carefully and then moved with what she had, because waiting for a safe moment meant leaving people behind. And freedom is something you take together. Her missions went after whole families, and in old age she built a home for the aged instead of resting on her name. The labels for these ideas are ours. She did not name them.

Why did Harriet Tubman have visions?

When she was about thirteen, an overseer threw a two-pound iron weight that struck her in the head and broke her skull. The wound never fully healed. For the rest of her life she had seizures that arrived without warning, along with vivid dreams and visions. She read them as guidance from God, and she trusted them with her own life and with the lives of the people she was leading. A doctor today would talk about a head injury. She talked about God. Both readings sit in the record, and we do not settle it for you.