Life & Mortality Quote by Harriet Tubman

Tubman’s line isn’t a flourish of revolutionary rhetoric; it’s a private calculation spoken aloud, the kind that turns moral certainty into operational strategy. “I had reasoned this out in my mind” matters as much as “liberty or death.” She frames her stance as logic, not legend, rejecting the era’s insistence that enslaved people were governed by impulse or dependency. Freedom here isn’t a hopeful abstraction. It’s an entitlement: “a right to,” not a favor to be granted.

The famous binary “liberty or death” (echoing Patrick Henry) gets sharpened in Tubman’s mouth. For her, it’s not a speech in a hall but a rule in the field. On the Underground Railroad, hesitation could kill everyone. By stripping the options down to two, she removes the middle ground where fear breeds compromise. The subtext is also deeply protective: a person who has already made peace with dying can’t be easily coerced, bribed, or terrorized into turning back. That inner commitment becomes a kind of armor.

Context gives the sentence its heat. Tubman operated under laws and patrols designed to make escape not just difficult but psychologically unthinkable. “If I could not have one, I would have the other” is a refusal of that system’s core weapon: the promise that survival requires submission. She’s claiming ownership over the only thing slavery tries to take completely - choice. Freedom, in this framing, isn’t granted by a state; it’s seized by a mind that has decided it will not be owned.