Harriet Tubman Didn’t Ask for Allies — She Carried a Gun and a Plan

She stood five feet tall. She could not read. She suffered from narcoleptic episodes caused by a two-pound iron weight that an overseer had hurled at another enslaved person and struck her in the head when she was twelve years old — a traumatic brain injury that would cause her to lose consciousness without warning for the rest of her life. She had no money, no legal standing, no political connections, no army, no institutional support, and no reason whatsoever to believe that she would survive what she was about to do. She was, by every metric the world uses to measure power, completely powerless. And she became the most dangerous human being in the United States of America — not because she had power, but because she had something that no amount of power can defeat: an absolute, unwavering, bone-deep refusal to accept the conditions of her captivity.

Her name was Araminta Ross. History knows her as Harriet Tubman. And I want to tell her story not as a children’s book fable, not as a sanitized icon on a postage stamp, not as a safe and comfortable symbol of a struggle that has been conveniently consigned to the past — but as what she actually was: a military strategist, an intelligence operative, a combat leader, and a woman who carried a loaded revolver and was fully prepared to use it on anyone, including her own passengers, who threatened the mission. She was not polite. She was not patient. She did not wait for allies, for legislation, for public opinion to shift, for white people to have a change of heart, or for anyone’s permission to be free. She moved. And in the moving, she shattered every expectation that the slaveholding South had for a Black woman, and every excuse that a free generation would later invent for its own inaction.

The Facts of the Matter

Tubman was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, circa 1822 — the exact year is uncertain because enslaved people were not deemed worthy of precise record-keeping. She was one of nine children born to Harriet “Rit” Green and Ben Ross, both enslaved. She was hired out to other households from the age of five, was beaten regularly, and suffered malnutrition severe enough to stunt her growth permanently. The head injury she sustained at twelve left her with a fractured skull, chronic pain, and what modern neurologists believe was temporal lobe epilepsy. She experienced vivid visions that she interpreted as communications from God. Whether divine or neurological, these visions gave her a certainty that no obstacle could diminish: she was going to be free, and she was going to bring her people with her.

In September 1849, Tubman escaped. She traveled approximately ninety miles on foot, moving at night, navigating by the North Star, from Dorchester County, Maryland to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She crossed the state line alone. No one helped her at the start. She had a network of contacts along the way — the nascent Underground Railroad — but the initial decision, the first footstep into the dark, the moment of choosing freedom over the familiar horror of captivity: that was hers alone.

What she did next is what separates Tubman from every other figure in the iconography of American freedom. She was free. She had crossed the line. She was in Philadelphia, where she could work, earn money, build a life, and never again be subject to the whip or the auction block. And she went back. Not once. Thirteen times. Over approximately eleven years, between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland thirteen times and led approximately seventy enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad. She never lost a single passenger.

“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.” — Harriet Tubman

The Military Operation

The Underground Railroad, as Tubman ran it, was not a loose network of goodwill. It was a military operation executed with a discipline that any commanding officer would recognize. Kate Clifford Larson, whose 2004 biography Bound for the Promised Land is the most thoroughly researched account of Tubman’s life, documents the tactical sophistication of her missions with revelatory precision.

Intelligence. Tubman gathered information before every mission. She used coded letters sent through intermediaries to communicate with contacts on the Eastern Shore. She identified safe houses, mapped patrol patterns, noted which waterways were passable at which times of year, and maintained a network of informants — free Blacks, sympathetic whites, and fellow Underground Railroad conductors — who provided real-time intelligence on the movements of slavecatchers. This was not improvisation. This was reconnaissance.

Timing. Tubman launched her rescue missions on Saturday nights. This was not random. Newspapers that would carry advertisements for runaway slaves did not publish on Sundays. By the time a slaveholder discovered his property was missing and could get a notice printed, Tubman and her passengers had a thirty-six-hour head start. She calculated this advantage deliberately.

Disguise. Tubman used multiple disguises during her operations. She dressed as an old woman, as a man, as a field hand. She once walked directly past a former master while carrying live chickens and wearing a sunbonnet pulled low over her face. He did not recognize her. She had become invisible — not through magic but through the tactical exploitation of the slaveholding class’s inability to see Black people as individuals.

The gun. Tubman carried a revolver on every mission. Its purpose was not primarily defense against slavecatchers, though she was prepared for that. Its primary purpose was operational security. When a passenger became frightened and wanted to turn back — which would have exposed the entire network of safe houses and endangered every future mission — Tubman pointed the gun at them and said, according to multiple documented accounts: “You’ll be free or die a slave.” She was not cruel. She was a commander who understood that one person’s fear could get dozens of people killed, and she made the command decision that the mission was more important than any individual’s comfort.

The Combahee River Raid

If Tubman’s Underground Railroad missions were special operations, the Combahee River Raid was a full-scale military assault — and it made Harriet Tubman the first woman in American history to plan and lead an armed military operation.

In 1862, Tubman was recruited by the Union Army as a scout and spy in South Carolina’s Department of the South, under the command of Colonel James Montgomery. She spent months gathering intelligence from enslaved people in the coastal lowcountry, mapping Confederate troop positions, identifying underwater mines (called torpedoes), and building a network of informants along the Combahee River. On June 2, 1863, she led Colonel Montgomery and 150 Black Union soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers up the Combahee River in three gunboats.

The operation was devastating in its success. The raiders destroyed Confederate infrastructure — rice plantations, bridges, supply depots — and liberated more than 700 enslaved people in a single night. Tubman had organized the evacuation in advance: she had stationed rowboats along the riverbanks and assigned guides to lead the newly freed people to the gunboats. The operation was executed with such precision that it suffered minimal casualties while inflicting maximum damage on the Confederate war economy.

The Union Army paid Tubman $200 for her services during the entire war. White soldiers of comparable rank received many times that amount. She spent decades petitioning the federal government for a military pension and was eventually granted $20 per month — as the widow of a veteran, not in recognition of her own service. She was never formally recognized as a military commander during her lifetime. The country she had served — the Union she had fought for, bled for, risked her life for thirteen times before the war even began — repaid her with bureaucratic contempt. She did not stop working.

The Builder

After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, on property that Secretary of State William Seward had sold to her before the conflict. And here is the part of her story that the children’s books almost never include, because it is not dramatic enough for a movie but is far more instructive than any rescue mission: she built.

Tubman purchased additional land around her property and, over decades of fundraising, advocacy, and personal labor, established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged — a residential facility for elderly and indigent Black Americans who had no other refuge. She deeded the property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church so that it would outlast her. She continued speaking publicly on behalf of women’s suffrage, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists while simultaneously challenging the movement’s frequent indifference to Black women. She was, until the end, both a fighter and a builder, and she understood what too many activists forget: that liberation without institution-building is a fire without a hearth. It burns bright and warms nothing.

Tubman died on March 10, 1913. She was approximately ninety-one years old. She died in the home she had built, in the community she had created, surrounded by the people she had served. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The governor of New York declared her death a loss to the state. The woman who had been born property, who had been valued at $300 on a slaveholder’s ledger, who had never attended a day of school, who had suffered a brain injury that would have destroyed a lesser person — that woman left behind a legacy that the combined fortunes of every slaveholder in Maryland could not match. She left behind freedom, institutionalized and operational and self-sustaining, and she had built it with her own hands.

The Modern Contrast

I want to be very careful here, because the comparison I am about to make will sound harsh, and it is meant to. It is not meant to diminish the real challenges of the present. It is meant to clarify, with surgical honesty, the distance between what Tubman did with what she had and what this generation is failing to do with infinitely more.

Tubman navigated the Underground Railroad with the North Star. You have GPS. Tubman communicated through coded letters carried by illiterate intermediaries across enemy territory. You have a smartphone with encrypted messaging. Tubman risked capture, torture, and death every time she crossed the Mason-Dixon line. You risk a bad comment section. Tubman organized seventy people for freedom with no budget, no institutional support, no legal protection, and no margin for error. You have constitutional rights, federal civil rights law, the entire apparatus of a free society, and the combined knowledge of human history available at your fingertips.

And what is the dominant mode of Black political action in 2026? It is the tweet. It is the Instagram story. It is the hashtag that trends for forty-eight hours and changes nothing. It is the petition that accumulates signatures and produces zero legislation. It is the performance of outrage without the architecture of change. It is, in a word, theater — and Tubman, who understood that freedom is not performed but seized, would regard it with the same contempt she reserved for passengers who wanted to turn back.

I am not saying the obstacles are gone. Systemic racism exists. Police violence exists. Economic inequality exists. Mass incarceration exists. These are real, documented, serious problems that demand serious responses. What I am saying is that the response is unworthy of the tradition. Tubman did not wait for white people to dismantle slavery. She did not petition slaveholders to release their property. She did not hold vigils or issue statements or build coalitions with people who had a fundamental interest in maintaining her captivity. She assessed the terrain, built a plan, gathered her people, and moved.

“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” — attributed to Harriet Tubman

What Tubman Would Do with 2026

This is not a rhetorical exercise. This is a strategic question, and it deserves a strategic answer. If Harriet Tubman were alive in 2026, with the same mind, the same will, the same uncompromising refusal to accept captivity in any form — what would she do?

She would build. Not protest. Build. She would look at the dropout crisis and establish schools, the way she established the Home for the Aged. She would look at food deserts and organize cooperative groceries, the way she organized safe houses. She would look at the absence of Black-owned financial institutions and start one, because Tubman understood that freedom without economic infrastructure is a promise without a foundation.

She would organize. Not online. In person. She would identify the most capable people in every community, the way she identified station masters along the Underground Railroad, and she would build a network — a real network, with logistics, with accountability, with operational security, with clear objectives and measurable outcomes. She would have no patience for organizations that measure success by awareness raised rather than lives changed.

She would arm. Not metaphorically. Tubman was a Second Amendment practitioner a century before the term existed. She carried a weapon because she understood that freedom, at its irreducible core, is the capacity to defend yourself and the people in your care. She would look at the current state of Black communities — where violence is endemic and the police are often hostile — and she would advocate for the lawful, disciplined, trained capacity of Black citizens to protect themselves and their families.

She would educate. Tubman could not read, and she spent her entire post-war life ensuring that the next generation could. She understood that literacy was liberation in portable form. She would look at the 82% of Black fourth-grade boys who cannot read at grade level and she would regard it as a crisis equal to slavery itself — because a man who cannot read in a literate society is enslaved to every person who can.

And she would refuse to wait. That, more than anything, is the Tubman template. She did not wait for the political climate to improve. She did not wait for allies to appear. She did not wait for the Fugitive Slave Act to be repealed or the Emancipation Proclamation to be issued or the Thirteenth Amendment to be ratified. She acted within the conditions that existed, with the resources she had, toward the objective she had defined, and she let the conditions adapt to her rather than adapting to the conditions.

The Template

I am not asking for the impossible. I am asking for something far more difficult: the possible, executed with the discipline and the urgency that it requires. Tubman did the impossible because she refused to accept the boundary between possible and impossible as a valid constraint on her behavior. She refused to accept it because the stakes were too high — because the people she loved were in chains, and the only question that mattered was whether she would act or accept.

The chains have changed form. They are no longer iron. They are economic, educational, cultural, psychological. They are the chains of the dropout factory, the food desert, the prison pipeline, the health disparity, the absent father, the silenced mind. They are real chains, and they bind real people, and they produce real suffering. And the question that Tubman’s life poses to this generation is the same question it posed to every generation: will you act or accept?

She did not wait for conditions to be favorable. The conditions were never favorable. She operated in a country that had legalized her captivity, criminalized her freedom, and placed a bounty on her life. Those were her conditions. She moved anyway. She moved in the dark, with a plan and a weapon and an unshakable refusal to accept captivity as the final word. She moved because the alternative — to sit, to wait, to hope, to petition, to trust in the eventual goodwill of people who profited from her suffering — was not merely insufficient. It was obscene.

That is the template. Not the sanitized icon. Not the postage stamp. Not the children’s book hero who is safe because she is historical. The real Tubman — armed, strategic, relentless, impatient, dangerous, and free. Free not because someone gave her freedom but because she took it, and then went back, thirteen times, to make sure nobody she loved had to wait for it either.

She carried a gun and a plan. What are you carrying?