Braxton Taylor
The state of Maryland marked Veterans Day by commissioning one of its own, Harriet Tubman, as a brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard in recognition for her service to the Union during the Civil War as an operational leader and spy.
Nicknamed the “American Moses,” Tubman is best known for shepherding 70 family members and friends to freedom along the Underground Railroad. But she also risked her life and own safety as a nurse for Union soldiers in Port Royal, South Carolina, before becoming a reconnaissance scout and squad leader during operations on the Combahee River.
During river operations with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a unit of the U.S. Colored Troops, Tubman led a party of soldiers on a mission to destroy local plantations and liberate roughly 750 enslaved people, according to the National Park Service, or NPS.
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Tubman later was recognized as a veteran and given a pension, but only for her work as a nurse even as she listed her military service as “nurse and cook in hospitals and as commander of several men (eight or nine) as scouts during the late War of the Rebellion,” according to the NPS.
The Maryland General Assembly passed a bill earlier this year giving the governor authorization to posthumously promote, appoint or commission someone into the Maryland National Guard.
On Monday, Maryland National Guard Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Janeen Birckhead, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Tubman family members and others gathered near Tubman’s birthplace on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to commission the abolitionist leader as a brigadier general.
Birckhead said the rank was appropriate recognition for the former slave’s skillful and strategic leadership.
“Like [other Civil War brigadier generals], Harriet Tubman was a lightning rod, a role model. Her willingness to risk everything to help others to action — her moral conviction — inspired audacious actions,” Birckhead said.
Tubman was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822. She was separated early in her life from her parents, toiling in the marshes and on the farms of the rural Eastern Shore before marrying a free man, John Tubman, and changing her name to Harriet, perhaps in honor of her mother.
In 1849, facing separation from her family after her owner died, she escaped to Philadelphia, where she connected with other abolitionists and became part of the expanding antislavery movement. From 1850 to 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore 13 times to free family members and friends.
Having caught the attention of abolitionists, including Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew, Tubman was recruited to work in South Carolina, where her skills navigating marshland could be of use to the Union. She initially worked as a nurse, cook and recruiter of Black troops but later headed up reconnaissance parties, contributing to intelligence-gathering that helped Union forces prevail in the Battle of Jacksonville, Florida.
Tubman then planned an armed raid with Col. James Montgomery and, on June 1, 1863, led members of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) to burn plantations and free those enslaved along the Combahee River.
“We talk about this idea that ‘leave no one behind’ is not just a statement, it is a governing philosophy. But let’s be clear about who the original ‘leave no one behind’ was, because there is nobody who defined ‘leave no one behind’ in the way that Gen. Tubman left no one behind,” Moore said.
After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, with her second husband, Nelson Davis, a Civil War veteran, and daughter Gertie. She continued to work as a civil rights activist and suffragist, helping co-found the National Association of Colored Women.
In 1868, Frederick Douglass wrote a letter to Tubman to discuss their mutual work on behalf of Black Americans, with Douglass noting his public, well-supported fight. Meanwhile, he said, Tubman “labored in a private way.”
“The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism,” Douglass wrote.
Tubman died March 10, 1913, of pneumonia and is buried in Auburn. On Monday, Tubman’s great-grandniece three times over, Tina Wyatt, praised the woman whom her family has called “Aunt Harriet” for more than a century and said her leadership and tenacity should serve as an inspiration.
“She came into the Civil War, into the bowels of slavery after having freed herself, to be able to free others, to fight for the Union to attain and continue to attain democracy for all,” Wyatt said.
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