Harriet Tubman Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Harriet Tubman - Research Paper Example The Underground Railroad operation marked a significant turn in the lives of the slaves who found a safe way to reach Canada when the would be able to escape the laws such as the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 which permitted the owners of the slaves to redeem the escaped slaves back to the south. The paper focuses upon the role of Harriet Tubman in this Underground Railroad Operation. Introduction Harriet Tubman was born somewhere around 1820 in the country of Dorchester located on the east shore of Maryland. She was a slave by birth on the plantations of Edward Brodas. From birth her name was Araminta, which in short became Minty. Her father’s name was Benjamin Ross and her mother was Harriet Green. Her parents were ‘enslaved Ashanti Africans’. The slave owners had sold many of their eleven children in Deep South. At the age of five, the neighbors rented her for doing household works in which she was never that good and hence was regularly beaten up by the owners. Since she was uneducated, she was engaged to work in fields as a helping hand that contributed to her strength and she preferred the work. In the initial years of her teen, she altered her name to Harriet following her mother. When she was fifteen years old, she was unintentionally hit on the head by a heavy weight by her master, and sustained a severe fracture in the skull. She remained ill for a long period and never fully recovered. In the early years of injury, she had periodic sleeping fits that affected her looks negatively as a slave. The injury resulted in narcolepsy that made her suddenly fall asleep any moment of time no matter wherever she happened to be. After the death of her old master, the son sold her to a lumber merchant. The new owner appreciated her work and allowed her to keep the money earned from extra work. At the age of twenty-four or twenty-five she married, a free black man named John Tubman but the marriage did not work well. Shortly after that sh e hired an attorney for investigating her official history which resulted in the finding that her mother had been free from slavery and she was also born free which made her instinct rise and run for freedom. In the year 1849, her husband was inclined to sell her to Deep South along with her two brothers. A white neighbor of her helped her with the contacts of some people she could seek help from in times of need. She ended up alone trying to persuade her brothers to escape and alone made her way to freedom and fled to Philadelphia in the year 1849 escaping through the Underground Railroad. Her freedom that day led to the freedom of thousands of other slaves through the same. She led this solely with all her strengths and courage risking her life for liberty so that every individual could experience freedom. When the civil war broke in the country she did not even wait for the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ but instantly participated in order to free the slaves. After the war ended, she returned to Auburn and continued to help the class by raising money for the welfare of the impoverished children, transforming her home into the home for the aged and the black people2,3,4. The Underground Railroad operation undertaken by Harriet Tubman resulted in freedom for 300 slaves. The journey towards escape of Harriet Tubman and the other slaves Harriet Tubman was first marked as a criminal when she fled from the Maryland farm in 1849. Instead of