Clinton, who has taught history at Harvard and has written 15 books, presents a full portrait of a complicated woman with deep religious convictions, incredible courage, and a passion for freedom. Tubman suffered from seizures and narcolepsy because of a head injury sustained when she tried to help an escaping slave. Her condition might have contributed to the constant visions she reported of fleeing harrowing circumstances and of danger signs that she often heeded to her benefit. Clinton recalls Tubman's vital role in the Underground Railroad; her relationship with other prominent antislavery activists of the time, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Sojourner Truth; her espionage and other services provided to the Union during the Civil War; and her later involvement in women's rights issues. Also covered are Tubman's early marriage, her many rescues of enslaved family members, the mysterious abduction of a fair-skinned girl who may have been her own daughter, and her later marriage to a man nearly 20 years her junior. .

Well-written bio of the former slave who became an engineer on the Underground Railroad, a loyal supporter of John Brown, a Civil War nurse and spy, and a fiery advocate for women's suffrage. Less hobbled by academic conventions than Kate Clifford Larson's recent Bound for the Promised Land (p. 1262), this new account of "the Black Moses" trots along at a brisk pace. Clinton ( Civil War Stories , 1998, etc.) begins in 1908, when the elderly Tubman appears at the opening in Auburn, New York, of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent, her last great public endeavor. (She died five years later—the year Rosa Parks was born.) The author then takes us back to the Eastern Shore of antebellum Maryland, where Araminta Ross, as Tubman was then called, was born sometime between 1815 and 1825. Like all biographers of slaves, Clinton could consult only a slim file on her subject's early years; documentation is particularly scant in Tubman's case because a courthouse fire in the 1850s destroyed important papers. The author assiduously paints the region's cultural background and helps us imagine Tubman maturing within it, but is nonetheless forced to make frequent use of phrases like "little is known" and such words as "perhaps." Clinton persists, giving more or less authentic accounts of Harriet's childhood, her marriage to John Tubman (who did not flee the South with her), her escape to Canada, her numerous and increasingly dangerous returns to help free relatives and others, her rise to prominence in the Underground Railroad, her service to the Union in the Civil War (it took years to extract a $20 monthly pension from the government for her efforts), her many speaking appearances (she was by all accounts a stunning performer), her struggles to support herself and those who relied on her. A generous biographer, Clinton sometimes accepts too uncritically the many legends that proliferate in the fertile Tubman soil. Still: a clear, concise portrait of "Moses" in her milieux. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)