I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.

Attributed to Tubman in Dorothy Winbush Riley, My Soul Looks Back 'Less I Forget p. 148 (1993). Riley gives a date of "c. 1865" but offers no citation. No source from earlier than 1993 is known. Quoted in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999) by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, p. 299. Tubman specialists like Jean H. Humez and Kate Clifford Larson deem this one completely spurious. See "Bogus Tubman," by Steve Perisho.