When Was Harriet Tubman Born? The Evidence for 1822

Harriet Tubman, about 1885. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore as Araminta Ross. Enslaved people were property: they worked without pay, had no rights, faced beatings at an enslaver's whim, and lived in fear of the auction block and of seeing their children sold away. Their births were rarely recorded — so when was Tubman born?

What the records show

• No direct record. Her birth was not written in her enslaver's Bible or mentioned in his letters, and there was no birth certificate.
• A midwife's fee, 1822. Historian Kate Clifford Larson, in Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero: Bound for the Promised Land, found an entry dated March 15, 1822, in the accounts of Edward Brodess, Tubman's enslaver: $2 paid for a midwife for Rit, Tubman's mother. The child is not named, but it was most likely Araminta.
• A runaway notice, 1849. That year Tubman tried to escape with two of her brothers. Her enslaver's newspaper advertisement for their capture — a "Three Hundred Dollar Reward" in the Cambridge Democrat — described her as about 27. That again points to 1822.

Further research may one day pin down the exact day.

The bicentennial

Using the year the evidence supports, the Park Service marked Tubman's 200th birthday in 2022, with lectures and events on her path from enslavement to freedom, her life's work, and her impact in her own time and ours.

Sources

Based on Kimberly Szewczyk, "Determining Harriet Tubman's Birth Year," Harriet Tubman National Historical Park and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites Kate Clifford Larson's 2005 biography, which quotes Edward Brodess's account with his guardian for 1821 and 1822 (Maryland State Archives) and the Cambridge Democrat of October 3, 1849.