People of G&WS can you say why Araminta Ross ‘Harriet Tubman’ was called The Female Moses of Her People?

Question

Born1820, Dorchester County, Maryland, US

Supporter of voting rights for women (suffrage movement)

Member of the New England Women's Suffrage Association

whatother details can you add?

Answer 1

Harriet Tubman was a slave who escaped from Maryland  in 1849.  She made her way to Philadelphia where she cleaned houses until she had enough saved to finance a return trip.

A year after her escape, a slave at her old plantation heard a noise at his cabin and saw a figure dressed like a man.  "It's me, Harriet" the figure said. "It's time to go North."  All in all, she made as many as nineteent trips over the border.  In one, using a hired wagon, she retrieved her elderly parents.  In another, she led eleven slaves to freedom.  She continued going back to Maryland and sheperded more friends and relatives to the North - only her own husband, who had remarried, refused the offer of escape.  She was expert at disguises, appearing as an old woman or a vagabond, or a mentally disturbed man.  She carried paregoric to quiet crying babies, and if anyone showed signs of panicking, she ominously fingered the revolver she always carried.  Maryland slaveholders offered a bounty of $40,000 for her capture.

Tubman was extraordinarily cool in a crisis.  On one occasion, when she saw a former owner coming towards her, she turned loose several chickens at a market and pretended to be chasing after them as she scurried by unnoticed.  Another time, when she realized she had been tracked to a railroad station, she calmly boarded a southbound train, guessing correctly that no one would suspect a black woman travelling deeper into slave territory.  She usually began her expeditions on Saturday night, giving her an extra day before the aggrieved owner could advertise his loss in the Monday papers. "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" she said.

When the Civil War began, Tubman left her home in Auburn, New York, and served as a spy and scout for the Union Army, bringing back reports from black informants on the other side of the Confederate lines. "Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying commissary, stores, cotton and lordly dwellings" stated a report at the time.  After the war she married a Union veteran and lived on her farm in Auburn, where she took in orphans and old people who had no other homes.  Harriet was "a woman of no pretensions, indeed a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found among the most unfortunate-looking farm hands of the South" wrote William Still", an African American leader in Philadelphia. "Yet in point of courage, shrewdness and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow-man, she was without equal."

Answer 2

Off the top of my head, she was instrumental in establishing the Underground Railroad which led escaped slaves to freedom in the north.

Answer 3

She was an obese cow and he rather large posterior and 7 chins nearly made the railroad collapse.

And she suffered from constipation.

Answer 4

Boy would she be proud today to see that women have finally attained government protected social rights equal that of a man.   .. She'd also be 'proud as a peach' to see all that misogynist p**n young women race to join and those golddiggers and secretaries and abysmal ratings for the WNBA and women studying to become glorified housewives with useless bachelor degrees and promotional models never a step behind to take their clothes of (for what ?) for ANYTHING!:D! and the reality tv hos begging for any ounce of fame they can muster, and last but not least the Feminists who spend their energy complaining about the above situations yet actually do nothing about it but make those other women feel even inferior to themselves.

     The  'Female Moses' is what they call her; you know, sometimes you just gotta look back and say "thanks".