- "I never lost a passenger, never crashed my locomotive. Not many can say the same."
Harriet Tubman (March 1822 – March 10, 1913), born Araminta Ross, was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery in 1849, she used the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to rescue other enslaved people. During the American Civil War, she served as a scout and spy for the Union, being posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general. She is a leader in Civilization VII.
Intro[]
Born Araminta “Minty” Ross to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Harriet Tubman escaped slavery, then helped others do the same via the Underground Railroad, a network of safehouses that led to the free North. She led the Union Army in a raid on Combahee Ferry, rescuing over 700 people, and later became involved in the suffrage movement and other causes. Few have embodied the fight for freedom and equal rights as well as Harriet Tubman.
In-Game[]
Harriet Tubman has the Diplomatic and Militaristic attributes. Her default colors are light blue and dark blue.
Her leader ability is Combahee Raid. It grants +50% 
Influence towards initiating Espionage actions and 5 War Support on all wars declared against her, and lets her units ignore movement penalties from Vegetation.
Her agenda is Veracity. Her relationship increases by a Medium Amount once for each formal war the player declares, and decreases by a Medium Amount once for each surprise war the player declares.
Strategy[]
What you want to do with Harriet Tubman is strategically provoke other civilizations into attacking you through means such as espionage, aggressive settling, religious pressure, denunciations, stationing units at their borders, and refusing deals. Her leader ability halves the cost of espionage actions, so you can continually perform espionage while still having enough Influence to spend on alliances and Independent Powers. Her war weariness bonus in defensive wars plays into this strategy, as you will be provoking other civilizations without declaring war yourself. The higher the difficulty level, the more likely the AI leaders are to take the bait. Instead of suffering a penalty for war, you will maintain the same level of 
Happiness that you would when at peace. Your units will also move well in vegetation (which you are likely to spawn near thanks to Tubman's starting bias), so your enemies will get slowed while moving into your territory while your own army will be able to outmaneuver them.
Harriet Tubman is Militaristic and Diplomatic, so a Military Victory is usually the easiest to pursue when implementing the strategy above. You can also use your bonuses to complement another victory condition, but you'll have to be wary of other civilizations that are geared toward those victory conditions and counter them with espionage and war baiting if you don't want them to outpace you. Tubman is a very strong leader, but using her to her fullest requires a strategy that takes full advantage of her perks.
Lines[]
Harriet Tubman is voiced by Debra Wilson. She speaks American English with an African-American vernacular.
Voiced[]
| Line | Quote | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Quote | I never lost a passenger, never crashed my locomotive. Not many can say the same. | Harriet says "train" while in the subtitles it says "locomotive," in reference to the Underground Railroad. |
| Greeting | So here we meet, and I got to ask myself — are you going to be my friend or my foe? | |
| Attacked | Y'all don't know what it's like to be shackled. So go on and do what you're gonna do, 'cause I can't die but once. | |
| Declares War | If I can't change your heart, I suppose I'm going to have to take you out of the way. | This line comes from Tubman's own account of her prayer when her enslaver, Edward Brodess, appeared to be preparing to sell her: "Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way." |
| Accepts Player's Deal | Not too bad. Always could be better. | |
| Rejects Player's Deal | Yeah well, our paths got to split on this. | |
| Defeat | You think this ends things? You think that casting out one broken-down woman makes you a hero in the eyes of God and history? |
Leader Path[]
| Level | Unlocks |
|---|---|
| 2 |  Lantern |
| 3 | Diplomatic Attribute Node
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| 4 | Exploration Diplomatic Legacy Card
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Exploration Militaristic Legacy Card
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| 5 |  Satchel |
| 6 | Harriet Tubman Badge 1
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Harriet Tubman Banner
| |
| 7 | Militaristic Attribute Node
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| 8 | Modern Diplomatic Legacy Card
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Modern Militaristic Legacy Card
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| 9 |  Sidearm
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| 10 | Harriet Tubman Badge 2
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Conductor
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Civilopedia entry[]
Slavery's legacy in the American South is long and complicated. As early as the 1500s, the enslavement of native people and the transport of enslaved Africans became a cornerstone of European colonies in the Caribbean and the southern region of the Thirteen Colonies. Cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, and sugar were as lucrative as the gold and silver mines in Spanish territories and existed for the same profit-oriented reasons. Colonial plantations were not farms but factories – large estates owned by one family or person that relied on a large body of replaceable labor provided with the bare minimum to keep this labor going.
Detailing the horrors of this system is beyond the scope of this article. In short, slavery sought to strip the humanity from individuals and families and reduce people to their labor. Marriage, education, free time – those things that we take to be parts of a fulfilling life were denied to people who were, contrary to earlier systems of slavery, denied their basic humanity. American slavery was entwined with racism as well, with an ideology that Africans were fundamentally not human in the same way others were, citing both pseudo-biology and Biblical passages to justify what was at its core an economic system of domination.
But in Harriet Tubman’s time, things were changing. Europeans (Denmark, at first) had begun to ban the trade of enslaved people in 1803, while the United States banned the importation of new enslaved Africans into the country soon after – though this did not prohibit the continued enslavement of African Americans already present. Around this time, Haiti erupted in revolution, marking the first successful slave revolt in the world and charting a new path forward. England banned slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, despite its extensive holdings in the Caribbean and Africa. The USA remained a holdout for an institution that had long grown unpopular worldwide, and this position was to tear the country apart. It is worth noting that the time between worldwide disgust at the institution and the end of slavery in the USA was an entire generation – someone could be born when slavery was being widely banned in Europe and die a grandparent before its abolition in the USA.
Trade in enslaved people grew more tenuous in the United States after these bans – by that time, most African Americans were two or three generations removed from Africa. But two major factors came into play during Tubman’s time – the development of the cotton gin, which allowed plantations to produce far more cotton with unskilled labor in far less time, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which stipulated a requirement to “return” escapees to their “owners.”
All these factors combined created an environment in which trade in enslaved people was limited to the USA, the productive potential of enslaved labor vastly increased, and whites could simply “claim” that any Black person they captured was an escapee. Unfortunately, these claims happened all too often –residents of New York, for instance, were subject to seeing groups of Black people in chains being “repatriated” back to the South even though some of them had never seen the South. The anger of abolitionists began to increase, and the fires of the Civil War had begun.
The Underground Railroad (UGRR) was closely associated with Harriet Tubman and this time period. It was a series of safehouses and guides – “stations” and “conductors" – used to move escapees away from the South and towards freedom in Canada. These were networks of free Black people and white abolitionists (often Quakers) operating largely independently of each other, for everyone’s safety. While the South saw this as an invasion of their property rights, the North was (largely) sympathetic. War seemed inescapable.
Harriet Tubman was born “Minty” Ross on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Her early life was not happy. Tubman’s body bore the scars of a beating she underwent at the age of five, after an infant she was instructed to keep quiet cried. In another incident, she was permanently damaged when an overseer struck her in the head with a weight. Her parents, also enslaved, had to fight hard to keep the family together, hiding Tubman’s brothers when slave traders came through Dorchester.
In 1849, fearing she would be sold and put into a dangerous and unfamiliar environment, Tubman used the UGRR to escape. She ended up in Philadelphia. The next year, she heard that one of her nieces was also likely to be sold and decided to head back to Maryland to rescue her. It was the first of 13 missions to help others.
A prelude to the Civil War occurred in the West Virginia town of Harpers Ferry when John Brown seized an arsenal in an attempt to spark a wider abolitionist movement. Tubman helped plan this bold move, though she was not present. The United States sent marines to stop Brown, and he was killed. The raid was not popular at the time; only later would writers cast Brown as a hero.
Tubman continued her efforts as wider conflict broke out. She volunteered as a nurse for Union forces, and applied her experience as a UGRR guide to provide intelligence for the army. One of her most significant contributions was her role in the raid on Combahee Ferry in South Carolina, a dramatic attack on plantations that resulted in the rescue of over 700 people out of slavery and inspiring several similar missions.
After the war, Tubman continued the fight for civil rights in upstate New York, where she joined suffragettes seeking to expand the vote to women. She was never paid for her military service and died in near poverty.
Tubman herself led only a few score of enslaved people to freedom before the war, and the UGRR did not make a meaningful economic impact upon the South – yet their symbolic importance to the present-day United States is dramatic. Tubman remains a key figure in the histories of that period and the struggle for equal rights in the United States. She is a profound inspiration to those who seek to stand up for what is right, even if the job seems difficult, thankless, or downright dangerous.
Trivia[]
- Harriet Tubman's ability references the raid on Combahee Ferry, a military operation during the American Civil War in which she led a contingent of African American soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Infantry in liberating over 750 enslaved people.
Gallery[]
Videos[]
First Look- Harriet Tubman - Civilization VII
First Look: Harriet Tubman
Related achievements[]
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Ground Breaker/Freedom Fighter.
Win the modern age as Harriet Tubman.
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