HARRIET TUBMAN

Born Araminta Ross around 1822 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, she was hired out as a child, beaten, and struck in the head by a thrown iron weight meant for someone else. The injury caused seizures, headaches, and vivid visions for the rest of her life.

She escaped alone in 1849, walking north by night to Philadelphia. "I had crossed the line," she said. "But there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land."

Over roughly a decade she returned to Maryland about thirteen times and personally led some seventy people out, including her parents and brothers, guiding many onward to Canada once the Fugitive Slave Act made the northern states unsafe. She travelled in winter, on Saturday nights before runaway notices could be printed, and carried a pistol.

She never lost a passenger and never allowed one to turn back.

During the Civil War she worked for the Union as a nurse, scout, and spy. In June 1863 she guided the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which destroyed plantation supply lines and freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single night — the first American military operation planned and led with a woman at the front.

She spent her later decades in Auburn, New York, campaigning for women's suffrage and running a home for elderly Black people, while the government took over thirty years to pay her properly for her war service. She died in 1913.