Tilly Escape significant person Harriet Tubman
The Tilly Escape occurred in October 1856 when an enslaved woman, Tilly, was led  by Harriet Tubman from slavery in Baltimore to safety in Philadelphia. Historians who have studied Tubman consider it "one of her most complicated and clever escape attempts." It was a risky trip because Tubman and Tilly would not have been able to travel directly from Baltimore to Philadelphia without proof that they were free women. In addition, local slave traders would have recognized strangers. Tubman sought to evade capture by going south, before heading north, and using different modes of transportation over water and land.Escape
Tilly's fiancé was a former slave who fled to Canada to avoid being sold in 1848 or 1849 and he had waited for Tilly to join him. He asked Harriet Tubman to guide Tilly from Baltimore and gave Tubman money for expenses. Tubman arranged for a letter of passage from a steamboat captain in Philadelphia that identified her as a free woman from the city of brotherly love. She traveled on his steamship through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal to Baltimore. With this letter, she was able to obtain a pass for Tilly from the captain of the steamboat for their travel from Baltimore.Tubman located Tilly in Baltimore and they traveled to Seaford, Delaware by a steamboat named Steamboat Kent. They traveled south through Chesapeake Bay for forty miles and then north-east via the Nanticoke River and landed in Seaford. They spent the night at the only hotel in town, now the site of Gateway Park. A slave trader found them there, but Tubman showed him their passes and he let them go. 
She later recalled that she had prayed at the time, "Oh, Lord! You've been with me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!"