The Harriet Tubman bronze figure was the model for the 13 foot high monument erected in Harlem at West 122nd St. and St. Nicholas Avenue in 2007. The installation was dedicated on November 13, 2008. Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, in Dorchester County Maryland 1822-1913) was a key figure in the movement of escaping slaves from South to North and Canada, and herself escaped from Maryland in 1849. She made an estimated 13 trips back South to help approximately 70 other people to escape. During the Civil War she became a scout, spy and nurse. She worked with the South Carolina Volunteers commanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Colonel James Montgomery, and helped approximately 730 slaves on a rice plantation escape during a Union raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina. She later founded a home for African American aged people in Auburn New York, which is now a site commemorating her legacy, run for the AME Zion Church to which she belonged. This cast is number 3 of an edition of 9.

Jacob Morris, an independent scholar and educational consultant whose fields of interest include research into the Underground Railroad and work on a book currently titled Cold Fire: Exploring the Lives of Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln, was active in efforts to persuade New York City to rename a section of Chambers Street in honor of Frederick Douglass and his passage to freedom. Born a slave on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass succeeded in escaping from slavery in September 1838 after previous attempts had failed. Although his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, reveals how Douglass felt upon arriving and living in New York, it is intentionally silent about the details of his journey along the Underground Railroad and his place of landing. It has been determined, however, that after traveling by train and boat he arrived at the Chambers Street Dock, an area now comprised of landfill and the site of Stuyvesant High School. Working with residents of Battery Park City and Community Board #1, supporters of the street re-naming succeeded in their efforts when Mayor Bloomberg signed enabling legislation changing the names of forty-five streets and other public places on May 9, 2005. Frederick Douglass Landing street signs were posted on September 22, 2005.

The subject of this painting is probably a freeman, since most slaves were forbidden to read. The title informs us that the man's thoughts have wandered to Liberia, where the American Colonization Society was organizing a resettlement of freed slaves. The reference to "Hayti" is a reminder of the fight for freedom in that French colony, as well as the social and political turmoil that followed. Slaves in Haiti won their freedom in 1804, after a 13 year war against their French owners.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Rogers built his early fame on his Civil War subjects, and after the conflict ended, he produced a few final groups memorializing some of its most important figures. The Council of War (1952.334, 1925.42, 1936.657) depicts its highest military officials: General Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and President Abraham Lincoln. In The Fugitive's Story Rogers paid tribute to leaders of the abolitionist movement: the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, the editor William Lloyd Garrison, and the preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Rogers' biographer, David Wallace, called it a "civilian counterpart" to The Council of War. The artist's last Civil War subject, The Fugitive's Story offered a perfect bookend to his acclaimed series, returning as it did to his beginnings. Rogers' first Civil War-related subject was The Slave Auction of 1859 (1928.28), which condemned the evils of slavery in the days leading up to the war, and his last Civil War group memorialized the triumph of the abolitionist cause. The three men are gathered around a desk listening to the tale of a slave who has escaped to the North with her baby. A small bundle containing her worldly possessions lies at her feet, and she clasps her child to her shoulder. Her head is inclined toward Garrison, seated at his desk, and all three men gaze at her with expressions of deep interest and concern, likewise drawing the viewer's eye to her earnest face. Whittier (at left) and Garrison (at right) hold papers that suggest their role as writers in the fight against slavery; Rogers further emphasizes the point with the inkpot and papers on Garrison's desk. The artist often incorporated portraits into his narrative groups, but this is the only instance in which he inscribed the names of the sitters on the base to make his subject perfectly clear. The story reportedly had a powerful effect on the former slave Sojourner Truth: the abolitionist newspaper the Independent reported that when she saw the work, she burst into tears, remembering her own escape with her small child. Rogers' own convictions about abolition are evidenced in the time and care that he took preparing the group, and in his later memories of it. The artist wrote to Beecher and secured his enthusiastic approval for the idea. He interviewed each of his three sitters and took detailed measurements, secured photographs, and even took life masks of Beecher and Garrison. Both men wrote to Rogers with suggestions for the composition and for his portrayals of them. There were reports from all three that they were satisfied with the likenesses; Garrison called the sculpture "a marked success, both in regard to the likenesses and as a work of art." William Cullen Bryant wrote to Rogers in relation to The Fugitive's Story, "You have succeeded in a higher degree than almost any artist in making sculpture a narrative art." Public reaction was equally enthusiastic, and critics were quick to connect this valedictory work with Rogers' humble The Slave Auction of little more than a decade earlier, when he could not induce stores to carry the sculpture for fear of offending their Southern customers. The subject apparently had strong poetic resonances for his viewers. Rogers was compared to Whittier, the poet he portrayed, with one commentator declaring, "What Whittier is in verse Rogers is in sculpture." The Boston Advertiser called the group "a perfect poem of our history." Yet another writer connected it with efforts to establish a colony for former slaves in Liberia, in western Africa, writing a poem from the point of view of the fugitive as a wife looking forward to a reunion with her husband, who was preparing a home for them there. Rogers considered The Fugitive's Story an important landmark in his oeuvre. Nearly twenty years later, in an 1887 interview for the New York Herald, Rogers related tales of his time with Beecher and Garrison preparing for this work, and in an 1890 a

The Manumission Society presented this pair of pitchers to Joseph Curtis in 1817 in recognition of his successful efforts to have the New York State Legislature pass the Manumission Act, freeing slaves in New York beginning July 4, 1827. The pitchers depict Liberty removing the chains of bondage from slaves, with a freed slave reading a book behind. Curtis himself is depicted behind Liberty, using a hand mirror to reflect the rays of the sun onto the freed men.