In 1840, Harriet’s father was set free and Harriet learned that Rit’s owner’s last will had set Rit and her children, including Harriet, free.

Her infirmity made her unattractive to potential slave buyers and renters. She also started having vivid dreams and hallucinations which she often claimed were religious visions (she was a staunch Christian). Harriet’s good deed left her with headaches and narcolepsy the rest of her life, causing her to fall into a deep sleep at random. I had no bed, no place to lie down on at all, and they laid me on the seat of the loom, and I stayed there all day and the next.” She later said about the incident, “The weight broke my skull … They carried me to the house all bleeding and fainting. Harriet stepped between the enslaved person and the overseer-the weight struck her head. (Feb.Harriet’s desire for justice became apparent at age 12 when she spotted an overseer about to throw a heavy weight at a fugitive. In her hands, a familiar legend acquires human dimension with no diminution of its majesty and power. those who ventured into the South to extract slaves' ('all of them white men' before Tubman), in detailing the extent to which she 'never wavered in her support' of John Brown, in chronicling her role in the Combahee River raid, Clinton turns sobriquets into meaningful descriptors of a unique person.

In distinguishing between 'runaways' and 'fugitives,' between 'conductors' and 'abductors. Of far greater consequence is Clinton's revelation of Tubman's public (though usually clandestine) work. Clinton is meticulous (without being annoying) in distinguishing the speculative from the known in Tubman's private life. Although she often posed as an old woman, Tubman was in her 20s when she began her rescues, and in her mid-30s as the Civil War broke out. Succinctly, she sets the stage upon which Tubman moves, offering just enough biographical detail to give less well-known figures vitality (Mary Shadd Cary gets more space than Frederick Douglass Union general David Hunter more than William Lloyd Garrison) and just enough historical detail to render Tubman's milieu meaningful (unfamiliar Canadian history gets more space than the familiar Fugitive Slave Acts). To the task of illuminating the 'difficult to document' life of the woman known as 'Moses,' Clinton brings her deep immersion in Southern history, women's history and African-American history.

Clinton has an extraordinary knack of compressing complex history into an informing brief paragraph or a single sentence, making this 'first full-scale biography' of Tubman (1825–1913) a revelation.

Harriet tubman by catherine clinton