Harriet tubman facts biography of mahatma gandhi

But Tubman's joy at escaping slavery was muted, because her family had remained behind in servitude. "I was free, and they should be free," she later recalled thinking. She was determined to help them escape, too [source: Bradford].

After settling in Philadelphia, she worked as a hotel cook and saved her earnings to subsidize her secret career as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a clandestine abolitionist network that had existed since the 1820s.

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It was a highly dangerous mission, since "slave stealers," as the Southern states called them, faced the risk of being publicly branded and jailed — and in Tubman's case, enslaved once more. And in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made such efforts a federal crime [source: Allen].

That didn't stop Tubman. That same year, she slipped back into Maryland and helped her niece and her two children escape.

Over the next decade, she repea