1. Week 6 AMERICAN HISTORY CLASS

2. Harriet Tubman

3. As a slave, Araminta Ross was scarred for life when she refused to help in the punishment of another young slave. A young man had gone to the store without permission, and when he returned, the overseer wanted to whip him. He asked Ross to help but she refused. When the young man started to run away, the overseer picked up a heavy iron weight and threw it at him. He missed the young man and hit Ross instead. The weight nearly crushed her skull and left a deep scar. She was unconscious for days, and suffered from seizures for the rest of her life.

4. In 1844, Ross married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. She also changed her first name, taking her mother's name, Harriet.

5. In 1849, worried that she and the other slaves on the plantation were going to be sold, Tubman decided to run away. Her husband refused to go with her, so she set out with her two brothers, and followed the North Star in the sky to guide her north to freedom.

6. Her brothers became frightened and turned back, but she continued on and reached Philadelphia. There she found work as a household servant and saved her money so she could return to help others escape.

7. She had an “Underground railroad” that helped people escape. The Underground Railroad wasn’t an actual railroad… escaping slaves and the people who helped them were technically breaking the law, they had to stay out of sight. They went “underground” in terms of concealing their actions.

8. It was a path that slaves traveled at night with the help of conductors, or people who guided them from safehouse to safehouse until they had reached the North… It was a secret network of safe houses where runaway slaves could stay on their journey north to freedom.

10. Sometimes they even hid in unusual places.

14. The station masters were the people who lived at the safe house… these houses could be identified by the candles or lanterns that sat in the window.

16. Many clever and creative ideas helped slaves during their escape. When abolitionist John Fairfield needed to sneak 28 slaves over the roads near Cincinnati, he hired a hearse and disguised the group as a funeral procession.

17. Henry “Box” Brown, a slave, had himself shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden box!

18. Harriet made about 13 trips to the South and helped hundreds of slaves reach the safety of the North.

21. During the Civil War she was a spy with for the federal forces in South Carolina as well as a nurse.

22. During this same time, Sojourner Truth, was a slave in New York. Her mother taught her about God and instilled a faith and trust which would grow as the years passed. She taught her children to pray and to be good and honest.

23. She spoke about rights for slaves and rights for women. She pleaded with people to treat everyone as humans---not some as slaves and some as royalty.

24. Sojourner Truth was perhaps the most famous African-American woman in 19th century America. For over forty years she traveled the country as a forceful and passionate advocate for those who suffered much and had nothing, using her quick wit and fearless tongue to fight for human rights.

25. She declared that her soul was "beclouded and crushed" while in slavery. "But how good and wise is God, for if slaves knowed what their true condition was, it would be more than the mind could bear. While the race is sold of all their rights -- what is there on God's footstool to bring them up?" "But I believe in the next world. When we get up yonder, we shall have all them rights 'stored to us again." (Anti-Slavery Bugle, Oct. 1856)

26. "Does not God love colored children as well as white children? And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?" (Sabbath School Convention, Battle Creek, June 1863)

27. Also during this time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

28. . It showed what life was like for a slave. It reached millions of people as they read her book and became an influencing factor for the anti-slavery part of the Civil War.