The American Civil War created all manner of heroines. One such person was Harriet Tubman, a courageous African-American lady who led a spy ring and fought slavery during the US Civil War. Melissa Havran explains her courageous life.
Harriet Tubman in the 1860s.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is feeling that fear, insecurity, and doubt, but deciding that something else is more important. It's a quality that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. Harriet Tubman, I believe, epitomized what it meant to be courageous. She believed in what she was doing, and continued to do it, regardless of the dangers involved. As I began to research her role as a spy, I couldn't help but to question my own courage. If faced with the same dilemma, would I have been able to make the same choices Harriet made, even if those choices were a threat to my own wellbeing? Her story continues to amaze me.
They called her “Moses” for leading enslaved people in the South to freedom up North. But Harriet Tubman fought slavery well beyond her role as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. As a soldier and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States in what is known as the Combahee Ferry Raid.
By January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Tubman had been in South Carolina as a volunteer for the Union Army. With her family behind in Auburn, New York, and having established herself as a prominent abolitionist in Boston circles, Tubman, at the request of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, had gone to Hilton Head, South Carolina, which had fallen to the Union Army early in the war.
Spy ring
For months, Harriet Tubman worked as a laundress, opening a washhouse, and serving as a nurse, until she was given orders to form a spy ring. Her orders came as a result of her role gathering clandestine information, forming allies and avoiding capture, as she led the Underground Railroad. In her new role, Tubman assumed leadership of a secret military mission in South Carolina’s low country.
Tubman partnered with Colonel James Montgomery, an abolitionist who commanded the Second South Carolina Volunteers, a black regiment. Together, the two planned a raid along the Combahee River, to rescue slaves, recruit freed men into the Union Army, and obliterate some of the wealthiest rice plantations in the region.
Montgomery already had 300 men and, combined with the 8 scouts Tubman had recruited, the two were able to map the area and send word to slaves when a raid would take place.
One characteristic that made Tubman a successful spy ringleader, was that she could get black people to trust her when the Union officers knew that they were not trusted by the local people. Perhaps the most interesting piece of this story is that Tubman was indeed, illiterate, yet she had great success as a spy leader. Since she couldn't read or write, she also couldn't write down any intelligence she gathered. Instead, she committed everything to memory, guiding the ships towards strategic points near the shore where fleeing slaves were waiting and Confederate property could be destroyed.
While it seemed Tubman, for the most part, was able to compartmentalize her role as spy, some of her missions seemed to have more of an effect on her than others.
On one particular raid, where Tubman and Montgomery were working together to bring gunboats up river, Tubman vividly recalled the horrific scene that day with running slaves, women, babies and crying children being chased down by rebels and killed.
Legacy
After researching Tubman’s life as a Union spy, what stands out most is that she was recognized a hero, but never paid - largely because she was a black woman. Often, Tubman’s brave work was documented by local newspapers. She was never referred to by name, but instead as "She Moses", because just like Moses, she led an enslaved people to freedom. Perhaps writing that a black woman was leading Montgomery’s band of 300 men was unfortunately a little too much for the 1860s.
But Tubman’s anonymity came to an end in July 1863 when Franklin Sanborn, the editor of Boston’s Commonwealthnewspaper, picked up the story and named Harriet Tubman, a friend of his, as the heroine.
In the end, Tubman petitioned the government several times to be paid for her duties as a soldier and was denied because she was a woman.
Tubman would eventually get a pension, but only as the widow of a black Union soldier she married after the war, not for her courageous service as a soldier. To think of the lives saved because of the courage of another is truly what makes Tubman’s story stand out as one of the greatest in American history. If we all possessed this incredible characteristic of courage, I often wonder how our world would be different.
What do you think of Harriet Tubman? Let us know below.
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