Questions to Ask Harriet Tubman
An imagined interview, written for students, book groups and living history projects. These 20 questions move from her own escape and the rescue trips through her Civil War service to her later years in Auburn, and each notes what a researched answer would need to cover.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What were you called as a child, and when did you become Harriet Tubman?
Why ask it
She was born Araminta Ross and called Minty, taking the name Harriet from her mother and Tubman from her first husband. Starting here forces an interviewer to separate the person from the monument, which is the hardest part of writing about her.
Tell me about your mother and father, and where each of them stood in law.
Why ask it
Her parents' differing situations, and the broken promise around her mother's manumission, shaped how she understood legal freedom as unreliable. Any serious answer has to explain how family members could be held under different terms on the same property.
What happened when you were struck in the head as a girl, and what did you live with afterward?
Why ask it
An overseer threw a weight that hit her head, and she had seizures, headaches and sleeping episodes for the rest of her life. She also understood the visions that followed as messages from God, so this single event connects her disability and her faith and cannot be left out of either story.
What finally decided you to leave in 1849, rather than the year before or after?
Why ask it
The trigger was the death of her enslaver and the prospect of being sold south, breaking the family apart. This question separates a decision made under a specific threat from the vaguer idea that she simply wanted freedom.
You reached Philadelphia alone. Why did you not stay there?
Why ask it
Her own freedom was not the point once her family remained behind, and she went back repeatedly rather than settling. An answer that treats her escape as the achievement has missed what she thought she was doing.
Who else was involved in the routes you used, and what did they actually do?
Why ask it
The network included free Black communities, Quakers, sailors and safe house keepers, and she relied on people rather than working alone. This is the corrective to the popular image of a single guide with a lantern.
How did you decide when to travel and which direction to go?
Why ask it
She favoured winter and Saturday nights, since notices could not be printed until Monday, and she moved at night using waterways and the stars. Concrete method here is far more revealing than general praise for her courage.
What did you tell people before a trip, and what did you require of them?
Why ask it
She set terms in advance because one person turning back could expose everyone on the route. Her reputation for saying that a passenger who started could not quit is where her leadership becomes specific rather than inspirational.
Which of your family did you get out, and who could you not reach?
Why ask it
She brought out her parents, several siblings and others, but arrived too late for her sister Rachel. Naming the failures is what keeps the account honest rather than triumphal.
How did the Fugitive Slave Act change what you were doing?
Why ask it
After 1850 the northern states were no longer safe, and she began taking people as far as Canada, some to St. Catharines in Ontario. This is the fact that shows how federal law reached into free territory.
What did you carry with you, and what did you do about a crying baby or a sick traveller?
Why ask it
She is reported to have carried a pistol and paregoric to quiet infants, which is uncomfortable detail and central to understanding the risk. Questions about logistics get closer to the reality than questions about feelings.
How did you support yourself between trips?
Why ask it
She worked in hotels and homes in Philadelphia and Cape May and used what she earned to fund the next journey. This is the part most retellings leave out, and it explains why the trips happened when they did.
What did you do for the Union Army, and how were you treated for it?
Why ask it
She worked as a nurse, cook, scout and spy in South Carolina, and helped guide the Combahee River Raid that freed hundreds of people. She was paid poorly and spent decades seeking compensation, which is the point of asking the second half.
Tell me about the Combahee River Raid from where you were standing.
Why ask it
She gathered intelligence from enslaved people on the ground and helped direct gunboats past Confederate mines in June 1863. A researched answer has to explain how local knowledge, not military rank, made the operation work.
What did you find when the war ended and you went home to Auburn?
Why ask it
She returned to poverty and years of applications for a pension, while caring for her parents and taking in others. This is where the story becomes about a country's neglect rather than about her endurance.
You were assaulted on a train after the war. What happened?
Why ask it
She was injured by a conductor and other passengers when she refused to move from her seat, an incident recorded years before more famous ones. It shows that legal emancipation did not deliver ordinary safety.
What did the home you established in Auburn do, and who paid for it?
Why ask it
She opened a home for elderly and indigent Black people on land near her own, and money was a constant problem. Asking who paid reveals how much of her later work was funded by her own labour and donations rather than institutions.
Why did you join the campaign for women's suffrage?
Why ask it
She appeared at suffrage meetings and worked alongside Black women organising for the vote in her later years. Including this stops her story ending in 1865, which is where most accounts stop.
What did your faith tell you to do that other people around you would not do?
Why ask it
She described being directed by God, and that conviction accounts for her taking risks that better-resourced abolitionists declined. The question invites the specific role of belief in her decisions rather than a general statement that she was religious.
What would you want corrected about how you are described now?
Why ask it
Save this for last, because answering it requires knowing which claims about her are documented and which are later embellishment, including inflated numbers of people rescued. It is the question that most usefully separates research from repetition.
Using These Questions for Research or Performance
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
If You Are Preparing Answers
Work From Her Own Words Where They Exist
Tubman could not read or write, so nearly everything attributed to her passed through an interviewer or biographer first. Note who recorded a quotation and when, because the same line often appears in several conflicting forms.
Check the Numbers Before You Repeat Them
Widely quoted figures for the number of trips and people rescued vary a great deal and some are demonstrably inflated. Historians generally give more modest counts than popular retellings, so cite where your figure comes from.
Keep the Timeline Straight
Her escape, the rescue years, the war, and roughly five decades in Auburn afterward are four distinct periods with different constraints. Most errors in student work come from mixing details from one period into another.
Answer in Her Circumstances, Not Ours
If you are performing these answers, keep to what she could plausibly have known in the year you are portraying. Having her comment on later events is the most common way a living history piece stops being useful.
Shaping the Interview
- Open with childhood and family, which grounds everything that follows in a specific place and household
- Ask about method before motive, since logistics produce concrete answers and motive produces slogans
- Follow every general answer with what happened next, or who else was there
- Include the failures: the sister she could not reach, the pension she was denied
- Carry the story past 1865 into the Auburn years and the suffrage work
- Close with the question about how she is described now, which requires the most preparation
Common Mistakes
- Treating the Underground Railroad as a fixed set of tunnels or buildings rather than a shifting human network
- Writing her as fearless, which erases the risk she was actually calculating
- Leaving out her disability, or separating it from her faith
- Repeating quotations without checking who first recorded them
- Ending the story at emancipation and skipping the poverty and the pension fight
- Using softened language for slavery that makes the conditions she escaped sound survivable by choice