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Harriet Tubman Essay

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Harriet Tubman

Even before Harriet Tubman was born she had a powerful enemy. Her enemy wasn’t a person or even a country; it was the system known as slavery. It is known that at least two grandparents were captured by slave traders and brought to North America from the Slave Coast of Africa during the 18th century. Because slaves were not allowed to read and write, Tubman grew up illiterate. She left no letters or diaries that would later allow historians to piece together all the parts of her life story. But we do know that she was one of history’s great heroines. With courage and determination, she escaped from slavery herself and then led more than 300 slaves to safety and freedom. When the Civil War began, she tirelessly scouted for …show more content…

Some slave owners separated a mother from her children very soon after she stopped nursing. Sometimes the mother was sold or hired out to live and work on another farm. The law did not recognize the marriages and families of slaves. It was up to the owners if they were considered married or not. As a result, many slave children never knew their parents or their own brothers and sisters. Only during the later years of slavery did most owners try to keep families together.

When Araminta was a child, Maryland planters were no longer growing much tobacco. They grew wheat and corn and hoped for better times. The Brodas plantation wasn’t as rich as it had once been. The slaves knew this because many of them were disappearing from the plantations. Some were sold. Others were hired out to people who couldn’t afford to buy their own slaves.

Araminta later worked as an apprentice to Mrs. Cook who taught her how to weave. The lint from the weaver’s yarn made Araminta cough and sneeze. She wasn’t at all interested in becoming a weaver and having to sit all day in a workhouse, so she paid little attention to her work. Mrs. Cook later gave up on her, so Mr. Cook decided to try her at another job. So the Brodas decided to give Araminta a job of a babysitter, she was now a scrawny seven-year old who didn’t seem bright enough to follow the simplest instructions. Her master probably thought he was lucky to get anything at all for her.

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