Harriet Tubman's Delaware, The Road North Ran Through Here

Harriet Tubman was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, in approximately eighteen twenty-two. She spent the first twenty-seven years of her life enslaved on the Eastern Shore. When she fled in the fall of eighteen forty-nine, she walked north through the flat farmland of the Delmarva Peninsula, following routes passed from person to person along the network that freedom seekers called, in retrospect, the Underground Railroad.

Delaware was not just a corridor Tubman passed through once. She returned to it again and again. Between eighteen forty-nine and eighteen sixty, Tubman made an estimated thirteen missions back into slave territory to guide others north. Many of those routes crossed Delaware, threading through Kent and Sussex counties, the state's flat, pine-and-farmland lower tier. The landscape was dangerous. Slave patrols operated openly. Rewards for Tubman's capture eventually reached forty thousand dollars, an astronomical sum equivalent to well over a million dollars today. She was never caught.

The network she used had human nodes scattered across Delaware: free Black families, Quaker farmers, Methodist ministers, and a handful of white abolitionists who understood what they were risking. In Camden, a small town in Kent County, a Black Methodist church called Ezion Mount Carmel served as one gathering point. Thomas Garrett, a Quaker iron merchant in Wilmington, is documented to have assisted more than two thousand freedom seekers over three decades, including Tubman on multiple missions. Garrett was convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act in eighteen forty-eight and fined so heavily that he was financially ruined. He reportedly told the court: I say to thee and to all in this courtroom, if anyone knows a fugitive who wants a shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett and he will befriend him.

Tubman's Delaware legacy is now marked by the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a driving route through the Eastern Shore and lower Delaware that traces the geography of her missions. The land is much the same: flat, open, threaded with drainage ditches, offering little cover. How she moved through it repeatedly, at night, in all weather, guiding terrified strangers, remains one of the most extraordinary stories of courage in American history.