Life is a ship of Leadership

An excerpt from from The Right to Lead, by John C. Maxwell

She wasn’t a very impressive looking woman. She couldn’t read or write. The clothes she wore were coarse and worn, though neat. When she smiled, people could see that her top two front teeth were missing. Her employment was intermittent. Most of the time she took domestic jobs in small hotels: scrubbing floors, making up rooms, and cooking. But just about every spring and fall, she would disappear from her place of employment, come back broke, and work again to scrape together what little money she could. Who would respect a woman like this? The answer is the hundreds of slaves who followed her to freedom out of the South—they recognized and respected her leadership. So did just about every abolitionist in New England. The year was 1857. The woman’s name was Harriet Tubman.

A Leader By Any Other Name

While she was only in her thirties, Harriet Tubman came to be called “Moses” because of her ability to go into the land of captivity and bring so many of her people out of slavery’s bondage. Tubman started life as a slave herself. At age twenty-four, she married John Tubman, a free black man. But when she talked to him about escaping to freedom in the North, he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that if she tried to leave, he’d turn her in. So when she resolved to take her chances and go north in 1849, she did so alone, without a word to him.

Tubman made her way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, via the Underground Railroad, a secret network of free black, white abolitionists, and Quakers who helped escaping slaves on the run. Though free herself, she vowed to return to Maryland and bring her family out. In 1850, she made her first return trip as an Underground Railroad “conductor”—someone who retrieved and guided out slaves with the assistance of sympathizers along the way.

A Leader of Steel

Each summer and winter, Tubman worked for the funds she needed to make return trips to the South. And every spring and fall, she risked her life by going south and returning with more people. She was fearless. And her leadership was unshakable. It was extremely dangerous work, and when people in her charge wavered, she was strong as steel, knowing that escaped slaves who failed would be beaten and tortured until they gave information about those who had helped them. So she never allowed any people she was guiding to give up. Between 1850 and 1860

Harriet Tubman guided out more than three hundred people, including many of her own family members. She made nineteen trips in all and was very proud of the fact that she never once lost a single person under her care. By the start of the Civil War, she had brought more people out of slavery than any other American in history—black or white, male or female.

A Test of Leadership

Harriet Tubman would appear to be an unlikely candidate for leadership, because the deck was certainly stacked against her. She was uneducated. She lived in a culture that didn’t respect African Americans. And she labored in a country where women didn’t even have the right to vote yet. Despite her circumstances, she became an incredible leader.