# Conductor *A Biography of Harriet Tubman* — Legendary Biographies No. 085 - **Subject:** Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman) - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 188 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 188 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-088-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-162-8) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/085-conductor.html ## About this book She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 on the Dorchester County, Maryland plantation of Anthony Thompson, the third or fourth child of an enslaved couple named Harriet Green and Ben Ross. She suffered a near-fatal head injury at twelve when an overseer threw a two-pound weight at another field hand that struck her instead. She escaped north to Philadelphia in September 1849 alone, returned south thirteen times between 1850 and 1860 to lead approximately seventy enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad — she preferred a Saturday-night winter departure with a pistol — served as a U.S. Army scout and spy in the Combahee River Raid of June 1863, was the first woman to lead an armed military expedition in the Civil War, and lived to ninety-one in her Auburn, New York home. She died on March 10, 1913, at ninety-one. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the documentary care a subject of this stature requires. The book traces the Dorchester County childhood, the head injury and the lifelong narcolepsy and visionary trances, the 1844 marriage to John Tubman, the 1849 escape, the Underground Railroad rescues, the Combahee River Raid, the long postwar fight for veterans' pensions, the 1869 marriage to Nelson Davis, the Auburn home and the AME Zion Church Home for the Aged, and the long final years that brought her to the centenary of her Maryland escape. What emerges is a portrait of the Maryland-born Underground Railroad conductor and U.S. Army scout whose forty years of postwar organising the country has only in the twenty-first century begun to write into the official record. ## Contents 1. The Eastern Shore 2. The Iron Weight 3. Araminta Becomes Harriet 4. The Escape 5. The First Return 6. The Conductor 7. The Pistol 8. The Passengers 9. John Brown 10. The Civil War Begins 11. The Spy 12. The Combahee River Raid 13. After Combahee 14. Auburn 15. The Pension 16. The Suffragist 17. March 10, 1913 18. The $20 Bill ## Questions **Who is Conductor about?** Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Conductor — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 6,750 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 188 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.