CHALLENGE IS AN ASSET
She started life as a slave and lived most of her life alone. When she was thirteen, she received a blow to her head that troubled her all her life. She was in a store, and a white slave overseer demanded her assistance so he could beat an escaping slave. When she refused and blocked the overseer’s way, the man threw a two-pound weight that hit Tubman in the head which nearly killed her. Her recovery took months.

At age twenty-four, she married John Tubman, a free black man. But when she talked to him about escaping to freedom in the North of America, he wouldn’t hear of it. He said if she tried to leave, he’d turn her in. When she resolved to take her chances and go north in 1849, she did so alone, without a word to him. Her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, said Tubman told her “I had reasoned this out in my mind with one of two things I had a right to, liberty of death. If I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man would take me alive. I should fight for my liberty as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord won’t let them take me.” Tubman made her way to Philadelphia and Pennsylvania via an Underground Railroad, a secret network of free Blacks, White abolitionists and Quakers who helped escaping slaves on the run. Though free herself, she vowed to return to Maryland and bring her family out.

SHE WAS THE MOSES OF HER TIME (GENERATION)
In 1850, she made her first trip as an Underground Railroad “conductor,” someone who retrieved and guided out slave with the assistance of sympathizers along the way. Each summer and winter, she took domestic jobs in malls and hotels; scrubbing floors, making up rooms and cooking, scraping funds she needed for her trip to the south. She worked hard and seemed physically tough. But just about every spring and fall, she would disappear and risk her life by going south of America and returning with more people. She was fearless and her leadership was unshakable. It was extremely a dangerous work, and when people in her charge wavered, she was strong as steel to encourage them never to give up. Tubman knew escaped slaves who returned would be beaten and tortured until they gave information about those who helped them. So she never allowed any person she was guarding to give up. She would tell a fainthearted slave as she put a waded pistol to his head; “Dead folk tell no tales, you go on or die.”

While she was only in her thirties, Harriet Tubman came to be called Moses because of her ability to go in to land of captivity and bring so many of her people out of slavery’s bondage. Between 1850 and 1860, she guided out more than three hundred people, including many of her family members. She made nineteen trips in all and was very proud of the fact that she NEVER LOST a single person under her care. She said “I never sank my train off the track and I never lost passenger. Southern whites put a $12,000 price on her head - a great fortune. Southern blacks simply called her Moses. By the start of the American civil war, she had brought more people out of slavery that any other American in History – black or white, male or female.

HER BRAVENESS BROUGHT HER TO THE LIMELIGHT
Tubman’s reputation and influence commanded respect, and not just among slaves who dreamed of gaining their freedom. Influential Northerners of both races ought her out; she spoke at rallies and in home throughout Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Boston, Massachusetts, St. Catherine, Canada and Auburn and New York, where she eventually settled.

People of prominence sought her out, such as Senator William Seward, who later became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state and outspoken abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglas. Tubman’s advice and leadership were also requested by John Brown, the famed revolutionary abolitionist. Brown always referred to the former slave as “General Tubman” and he was quoted as saying “she was a better officer that most whom he had seen, and could command an army as successfully as she had led her small parties of fugitives.”

It is the gift in a man that will make room for him and bring him before prominent men. Discover your talent(s) and refine them into gifts and they will bring you before great men of our days. See you at the top.
JESUS IS LORD.