Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849, traveling alone at night, using the North Star and a network of sympathetic contacts to reach freedom in Pennsylvania. Free at last, with every reason to simply stay safe, she made a decision that put her own hard-won freedom at risk again and again: she would go back.
Over the following decade, she returned to the South an estimated nineteen times, personally guiding around seventy enslaved people, including members of her own family, north to freedom along the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, at a time when being caught meant severe punishment or death for her personally.
She became so effective, and so elusive, that slaveholders eventually placed a substantial bounty on her capture, yet she reportedly never lost a single person she was guiding, adapting her routes constantly and using disguises, coded songs, and an unmatched knowledge of the terrain to avoid capture.
During the Civil War, she went on to serve as a scout and spy for Union forces, and became the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid, the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than seven hundred enslaved people in a single night.