Harriet Tubman's Role In The Underground Railroad

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The Underground Railroad was an extraordinary protest against slavery. Slaves were fighting for survival and many died in the process. These people gambled their lives to escape the barbaric realities of slavery into freedom. Of course they were not able to escape without the help of others. Slaves did not know the paths to freedom and turned to the guidance of conductors to usher them into freedom. With the aid of heroic people like Harriet Tubman, Thomas Garrett, and Levi Coffin the Underground Railroad was able to have a high success rate in the freeing of enslaved African-Americans. To begin with, Harriet Tubman played a very large role in the Underground Railroad. Before Harriet’s time as a conductor, she was born a slave. Her birth …show more content…

This gave Harriet the last name that she is known for. Harriet was afraid that she was going to be sold, so she decided to run away from the plantation. After she made it to safety, Tubman decided to start coming back into the south to rescue others and bring them into safety. During Tubman’s time as a conductor, she made more than nineteen trips into the deep South and rescued more than three-hundred slaves. Harriet risked her life time and time again to help people out of the same situation she was once living in. If Tubman would have ever been caught, she would have been executed for her actions. At one point, the bounty for catching Tubman, alive of dead, was forty-thousand dollars. Despite this, Tubman and her fugitives were never caught. Harriet would not let anyone try to turn back after they started, either. Whenever anyone tried to turn back, she would pull out a gun and say that they could either follow her or die a slave. Tubman was not going to endanger herself or the others following. If one of the runaways would have returned back to their plantation, then they would have put Harriet and many others in great danger of being caught. Letting a slave return could have shut Tubman’s entire operation down. Tubman’s first trip back into the South was to guide her sister and her sister’s children into freedom. Harriet also helped free many of her relatives including her brother, mother, and father, who were

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