The Moses of Maryland

On a moonless night in the autumn of 1850, Harriet Tubman crept back across the Maryland border into Dorchester County — the very land she had escaped just a year before. The Fugitive Slave Act had passed weeks earlier, making every free state dangerous for runaways. But Tubman returned anyway. She guided her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's two children out of Cambridge, Maryland, through a network of safe houses stretching north through Delaware, where Quaker stationmaster Thomas Garrett sheltered them in Wilmington, and onward to freedom in Philadelphia.

It was the first of roughly thirteen rescue missions Tubman would make over the next decade, leading approximately seventy people out of bondage. She traveled by night, navigating by the North Star, carrying a revolver she never had to fire in violence. Those she rescued called her Moses.

The name was no accident. In Exodus 3:7-8, the Lord told Moses, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people... I have heard their cry... and I have come down to deliver them." God heard the groaning of the enslaved — and then sent a deliverer back into the place of suffering.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Tubman trembled on those dark roads. But she kept walking south when every instinct told her to stay safe in the north. True courage returns to the place of danger because God has said, "I have heard their cry." When the Almighty sends you back, He goes with you.