General Harriet Tubman.
On Monday, Tubman was posthumously awarded the rank of a one-star brigadier general in the state of Maryland’s National Guard during a ceremony held at the Underground Railroad State Park that bears her name. Tubman was the first woman to oversee an American military action, helping guide black soldiers on a gunboat raid in South Carolina during the Civil War.
Born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, Tubman would escape to freedom in Philadelphia in 1849. She would become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, served as a nurse, spy, and scout for the Union Army during the Civil War, and purchased a farm in Auburn from the Seward family in 1859. That is where she would become active in the women’s suffrage movement and create the Home for the Aged on her Auburn property.
Following her death in 1913, she was laid to rest in Fort Hill Cemetery.
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