They called him “Moses” for leading the slaves of the South to freedom in the North. But Harriet Tubman fought the institution of slavery far 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 became known as the Combahee Ferry Raid.
On January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Tubman was 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 traveled to Hilton Head, South Carolina , which had fallen to the Union Army early on. in the war.
Tubman becomes military leader
During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman served as a spy and militia leader with Union forces.
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For months, Tubman worked as a laundress, opening a laundry and serving as a nurse, until she was ordered to form a spy ring. Tubman had proven invaluable in gathering clandestine information, forming allies, and avoiding capture, as she ran the Underground Railroad. In his new role, Tubman assumed leadership of a secret military mission in the South Carolina low country.
“First and foremost, his priorities would be to defeat and destroy the system of slavery and, in doing so, permanently defeat the Confederacy,” said Brandi Brimmer, professor of history at Spelman College and historian of the ‘slavery.
Tubman joined forces 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 wipe out some of the wealthiest rice plantations in the region.
Montgomery had about 300 men, including 50 from a Rhode Island regiment, and Tubman assembled eight scouts, who helped her map the area and send a message to the slaves when the raid would take place.
“She was fearless and she was brave,” said Kate Clifford Larson, historian and author of On the Road to the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. “She had a sensitivity. She could get black people to trust her, and the Union officers knew the locals didn’t trust them.
Launching night raids from the river
On the night of June 1, 1863, Tubman and Montgomery, on a Federal ship the John Adams, led two other gunboats, the Sentinel and Harriet A. Weeds, out of St. Helena Strait to the Combahee River. On the way, the Sentinel ran aground, forcing troops from that ship to be transferred to the other two ships.
As explained in Catherine Clinton’s book, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Tubman, who was illiterate, could not write down the information she gathered. Instead, she memorized everything, guiding ships to strategic points near the shore where runaway slaves waited and where Confederate property could be destroyed, while steering steamboats away from known torpedoes.
“They needed to take gunboats up the river,” Clinton said. “They could have been blown up if they hadn’t had his intelligence.”
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Around 2:30 a.m. on June 2, the John Adams and the Harriet A. Weeds split up along the river to carry out different raids. Tubman led 150 men on the John Adams towards the fugitives. Tubman, later commenting on the raid, said that once the signal was given, she saw slaves running around, with women carrying babies, crying children, pigs, chickens and pots of rice. The rebels tried to drive off the slaves, shooting them with their guns. A girl was reportedly killed.
As the escapees ran for the shore, black troops in longboats ferried them to the ships, but chaos ensued. Tubman, who did not speak the region’s Gullah dialect, reportedly climbed onto the deck and sang a popular song from the abolitionist movement which calmed the group down.
More than 700 escaped slavery and rode the gunboats. Troops also landed near Field’s Point, burning plantations, fields, mills, warehouses, and mansions, causing a humiliating defeat for the Confederacy, including the loss of a pontoon bridge torn to pieces by gunboats.
Tubman was recognized as a hero (but not paid)
The July 4, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly depicting slaves escaping to a Union ship on the Combahee River, as buildings burn in the distance.
Library of Congress
The ships docked in Beaufort, South Carolina, where a reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal heard what had happened on the Combahee River. He wrote an unsigned story about the “She-Moses” but never mentioned Tubman’s name. He wrote that “Montgomery’s valiant band of 300 soldiers under the leadership of a black woman, rushed into the country of the enemy, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of storehouse dollars, cotton and stately homes, and sowing terror among the heart of the rebellion carried off 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.
But Tubman’s anonymity ended in July 1863 when Franklin Sanborn, editor of Boston’s Commonwealth newspaper, picked up the story and named Harriet Tubman, a friend of hers, as the heroine.
Despite the success of the mission, including the recruitment of at least 100 freedmen into the Union Army, Tubman was not rewarded for her efforts during the Combahee Ferry Raid. She had repeatedly asked the government to be paid for her duties as a soldier. “She was turned down because she was a woman,” Larson explains.
“As we get to the Emancipation Proclamation, we have Lincoln establishing concrete spaces for black men and their recognition in military service,” Brimmer said. “But there really isn’t a vision of the work of women who serve in the military and who bear arms, especially black women.”
Tubman would eventually get a pension, but only as the widow of a Black Union soldier she married after the war, not for her brave service as a soldier.
READ MORE: Harriet Tubman: 8 facts about the bold abolitionist
