T Is For...Harriet Tubman, Civil War Heroine: A To Z Challenge 2017

                                                          

   

Reward notice for Harriet(Minty) and her brothers. Public Domain

Today's post is brought to you by the letter T, for Harriet Tubman.

Woodcut of Harriet with her gun. Public Domain

You may well have heard of Harriet Tubman, the woman called Moses, the conductor on the Underground Railroad, who never lost a "passenger." Harriet Tubman, leader of Union troops during the war. Harriet Tubman the feminist who found a new cause after the war, fighting for women's right to vote. Harriet Tubman, the ... spy? 

Harriet in 1885. Public Domain

An amazingly successful one, actually. 

Born into slavery in the 1820s as Araminta Ross, Harriet suffered narcolepsy for the rest of her life after a lead weight thrown at another slave hit her in the face. She had a back full of scars from whippings. She married a free African American called John Tubman, but that didn't make her free, and any children she had would belong to her owners. She escaped in 1849, when she was about to be sold - John disagreed, so she simply left him - and then went back, first for her family, then for others - hundreds of others. She volunteered to work for the Union army as a scout and a spy. 

Her spying career began in 1862, with a visit to a Union camp in South Carolina where there were many liberated slaves for her to speak with. It wasn't easy. For one thing, she didn't speak their language - they spoke a sort of mixture of English and African languages. They laughed at her attempts at communication. Then they resented the rations she was getting when they weren't. She won their trust by giving up the rations and making a living selling pies and root beer to the troops, and running a laundry, something male spies probably didn't have to do.  But she had a mission.

Finally, she was ready to go, and she chose around a hundred scouts to get the lay of the land to avoid traps in Confederate territory, doing some scouting herself. She even had a budget for paying for useful information!  As a result, she was able to organise an 1863 raid by boat along the Combahee River, with black troops. They knew about mines laid in the river due to the information she had acquired. This raid, as well as fulfilling its military objectives, liberated seven hundred people, who rushed for the boats with great enthusiasm. A hundred of them later joined the Union army. 

As I've mentioned in another post, it wasn't hard for African American slaves to overhear secrets. They were almost invisible. Their owners had no more hesitation about speaking freely in front of them than they did about speaking in front of the sofa or the cows. That made them very useful sources of information for spies such as a disguised Harriet Tubman. For the same reason, Harriet and other African Americans made good spies. They were much less likely to be noticed than white spies. Which didn't mean it wasn't extremely dangerous, especially for Harriet Tubman, who was well known for what she was doing. She would have died horribly if she had been caught. 

But she wasn't caught. She survived the war, found a new cause and lived to a ripe old age. It would be nice to say she was appreciated by the government she had helped to win the war, but she wasn't. She had help from admirers, but only a small pension from her husband's war service and a very small one for her service as a nurse, not as a spy - and she had to fight for that. When she died of pneumonia in 1913, she was buried with semi-military honours at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York, where she had settled with her family.

There is now an asteroid named for her, and I hear she is going to replace President Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill in 2020. As she might have said, like Hedy Lamarr, "Hmph! About time!" 

If you'd like to read and view some more, here are a couple of my sources: 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160421-harriet-tubman-20-dollar-bill-union-spy-history/

and Biography.com which has a couple of videos as well as an article. 

http://www.biography.com/news/harriet-tubman-biography-facts

I started this from a chapter in my book Your Cat Could Be A Spy, but it was a very short one and the book was published in 2006, a long time ago, so I thought I'd look again and see if the information had changed since then.