Harriet Tubman's Thirteen Missions

The marsh is flat here and wide. The Choptank River runs through it to the bay, and in the eighteen forties the tidal creeks that split the meadow grass were not on any map that mattered to the people who wanted to stop her. Harriet Tubman grew up knowing this land from the inside. She knew which farms sat along the patrol routes and which Quaker households would leave a door unlocked. She knew the stars when clouds came in and the smell of the tide when the creek bent north. That knowledge was the difference.

She escaped from Dorchester County in the fall of eighteen forty-nine. She was alone when she crossed into Pennsylvania. She had been hired out as a field hand; her enslaver was about to sell her south. She walked for nights.

She went back.

The National Park Service, drawing on the most careful historical scholarship available, records thirteen return missions to the Eastern Shore. Some historians, depending on how a mission is defined, have counted anywhere from twelve to fourteen. What no serious source disputes is this: in those missions, conducted between eighteen forty-nine and eighteen sixty, Tubman guided approximately seventy people out of bondage. She was never caught. Not once. She operated under a price on her head; she carried a pistol; she told those she led that turning back was not an option, because a freedom seeker who turned back could be forced to tell what they knew.

The slaveholders who controlled the Eastern Shore had built their economy on the flat, navigable terrain of the tidal marsh. The same geography they relied on for moving tobacco and grain, Tubman navigated in darkness using the polestars and the north-running creeks. The landscape that trapped the people she loved was the road she ran to get them out.

She never lost a passenger. That is the phrase she used. The park named after her sits in the marsh she knew better than her captors ever did. She came from here, and she kept coming back.