Museum of Minds  /  In Conversation With
Accession No.  HT–1822–2026
Polaris The Path North — Maryland to Pennsylvania, 1849 "Follow the Drinking Gourd" N HT–1822–2026 Museum of Minds
Museum of Minds  ·  Primary Collection

Harriet
Tubman

c. 1822 — 1913

Moses of her people — conductor, soldier, and the most dangerous woman in America

Portrait of Harriet Tubman, c. 1868–1869
Field Notes — Curator

Born Araminta Ross on a Maryland plantation, she suffered a traumatic head injury at thirteen — a wound that brought on visions she understood as divine guidance. She escaped north in 1849, then returned south nineteen times, conducting more than seventy enslaved people to freedom. During the Civil War she served the Union Army as a spy, scout, and nurse, leading the Combahee River Raid that liberated over seven hundred people. She spent the last decades of her life fighting for women's suffrage and caring for the elderly poor — and spent thirty years petitioning Congress for a veteran's pension that arrived only months before her death.

✦   Enter the Conversation   ✦

Speak With Harriet Tubman

This exhibit invites you into direct conversation with one of the most consequential figures in American history. The intelligence behind this dialogue draws from Tubman's own documented words — interviews, letters, and the oral testimonies recorded by those who knew her — reconstructed with care and scholarly restraint.

Ask her about the mechanics of the Underground Railroad, about the theology of freedom that sustained her, about the revolver she carried and was prepared to use. Ask her about the pension Congress withheld for thirty years. Ask her what it means to be called a hero by a nation that treated her as property.

"I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

— Harriet Tubman, as quoted by Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, 2004

Tubman spoke in a voice shaped by the Eastern Shore of Maryland — direct, spare, unflinching. She was a woman of deep faith and practical genius. She did not theorize liberation; she enacted it, repeatedly, at mortal risk. Come prepared with serious questions.

Underground Railroad Civil War Abolition Military Intelligence Women's Suffrage Theology of Freedom Reconstruction
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. When I found that I had crossed that line, I looked at my 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.
— Harriet Tubman, as recorded by Franklin Sanborn, The Commonwealth, July 17, 1863