Quote by Harriet Tubman: “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I never ran my train off the track.”

Tubman delivered this as a declaration of her own competence and record — she guided hundreds of people to freedom without a single loss or capture. It is a statement of fierce, earned pride from someone who had every reason to doubt herself but chose instead to trust her skill.

Tubman spoke these words at a suffrage convention in 1896, more than thirty years after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction had collapsed, and Black Americans across the South were being stripped of political rights through Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and systematic violence. Tubman was in her seventies and still publicly active.

American abolitionist and political activist who escaped slavery and then led approximately thirteen missions to rescue around seventy enslaved people using the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War she served as a spy, scout, and nurse for the Union Army.