Harriet Tubman was born in 1821 into a family of enslaved African Americans on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland, owned by Edward Brodas. Her birth name was Araminta and was known by minty, till she changed her name as an early teen to Harriet, after her mother. many of her 11 siblings were sold and taken to the deep south.
At age 5, Tubman was "rented" to neighbors to do housework. She was not great at household chores and was often beaten and abused by her slaveholders and "renters'' due to her skill. Like other African Americans, As a child she was never taught to read or write and never had a broad span of education in general. Eventually she was put to work as a field hand, which she preferred over the housework. At age 15, she suffered a head injury when she blocked the path of the overseer pursuing an uncooperative enslaved person. The overseer flung a weight at the other enslaved people, hitting Tubman, who probably sustained a severe concussion. She was ill for a long time and never fully recovered.
In 1844 or 1845, Tubman married John Tubman, a free Black man. Shortly after her marriage, she hired a lawyer to investigate her legal history and discovered that her mother had been freed on a technicality upon the death of a former enslaver The lawyer advised her that a court wouldn't likely hear the case, so she dropped it. But knowing that she should have been born free led her to contemplate freedom and resent her situation.
In 1849, Tubman heard that two of her brothers were about to be sold to the Deep South, and her husband threatened to sell her, too. She tried to persuade her brothers to escape with her but left alone, making her way to Philadelphia and freedom. The next year, Tubman decided to return to Maryland to free her sister and her sister's family. Over the next 12 years, she returned 18 or 19 times, bringing more than 300 people out of enslavement.
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