+Who can help being inspired by Harriet Tubman? But what does it mean to be inspired? It has something to do with gratefulness. This slave woman dared to question authority and to act on her conviction. Inspired by her example, we shall show ourselves grateful for our freedom by acting in her spirit. Unless we, too, question authority, we become slaves. — Br. David

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland, sometime around 1820. The exact date is unknown, since the birth of slaves was not recorded. As she grew up, she experienced the typical cruelties of slave life, the beatings, insults, and daily indignities. Like other slaves she became skilled in the art of passive resistance - working slowly, breaking tools, adopting a false mask of simple-minded contentment - while struggling to maintain an inner conviction that she was indeed worth more than a thing. But Tubman was not content merely to survive with her inner dignity intact. She was convinced that God intended her to be free.

It is one of the miracles of Christian history that African slaves, having received a false gospel from their "Christian" slavemasters, nevertheless heard in the biblical story a message of life and liberation. The slavemasters' catechism stressed the virtue of obedience and counseled slaves to be content with their lot. But the slaves heard a different message. The God of the Bible was the God who led Moses and the Hebrew slaves out of bondage in Egypt, who inspired the prophets, and who was incarnate in Jesus Christ. This was not the god of the slavernasters, but the God of the oppressed.

It was with this God that Harriet Tubman enjoyed a special reltionship. From the time she was a child she was subject to deep trances in which she heard the voice of the Lord. In one of these visionary experiences in 1849 she saw "a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no how. I always fell before I got to the line." When she awoke she took this vision as a signal for her to begin her escape.

Though small in stature, Tubman was a strong woman. She had spurned the housework coveted by most slaves in favor of backbreaking field work. She had trained herself over the years to move quietly, to be at home in nature, and to find her way in the dark. All these skills now came into play as she made her break. Traveling by night, following the North Star, she passed through swamps and forests, sleeping by day in the shelter of caves or hidden in a leafy treetop.

When she finally crossed into the free state of Pennsylvania, she looked at her hands "to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven." But at once she was seized by a sense of wider mission. "I had crossed the line. I was FREE; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland.... But I was free and THEY should be free. I would make a home in the North and bring them there, God helping me."

And so, having made her perilous way to freedom, Tubman chose to return to the South to assist in the escape of others still in bondage. Over the next twelve years she returned a total of nineteen times to "Pharaoh's Land," in the process rescuing at least three hundred slaves, including her parents. These trips were fraught with danger at every step. It was one thing to travel alone, but quite another to move twenty or thirty people, including children, across hundreds of miles of open country. She was aided over time by a well-organized network of safehouses and supporters, the so-called Underground Railroad. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 it was no longer sufficient to bring slaves to the North. Her trips extended all the way to Canada.

Though armed bounty hunters roamed the countryside, Tubman never lost a single one of her charges. A fantastic price was put on her head and wanted posters were widely circulated. Among whites she was one of the most hated figures in the South. But among slaves she was known as "Moses."

During the Civil War Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a nurse, then as a scout and spy. She made numerous trips behind Confederate lines. More than once, her cunning and her unassuming appearance saved her from detection. The "Moses" of the wanted posters was imagined to be a person - probably even a man - of remarkable features, certainly not a scrawny, gap-toothed old woman.

After the war Tubman retired to a small house in Auburn, New York. She was worn out and penniless, but still she devoted herself to providing shelter and care to poor blacks. She supported herself by selling vegetables from her garden. In 1869 a white admirer published Scenes of the Life of Harriet Tubman as a means of earning her some money. But she was used to poverty, and so she quickly dispersed her income to those in greater need. When the book was published, Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and himself a former slave, wrote to her:

Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way.... 1 have had the applause of the crowd ... while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondsmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt "God Bless You" has been your only reward.

Tubman lived into her nineties and died peacefully on March 10, 1913.

See: Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1981).