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Just because recent events put me in mind of it: Harriet Tubman and her army of bad bitches explained on "Drunk History."

And if you want a book-length version of this, Combee by Edda L. Fields-Black just won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in the first book-length recounting of this raid.

#harriet tubman #american civil war #american history #combee #combahee river raid #harriet tubman and her army of bad bitches #Youtube

Combee

In this presentation, Professor Edda Fields-Black discusses Harriet Tubman and her leadership of the Combahee River Raid. The video’s description reads, “Carnegie Mellon University professor Edda Fields-Black talked about Harriet Tubman’s role in the 1863 Combahee River raid, a secret military mission against Confederates in South Carolina which rescued over 700 former slaves.The Enoch Pratt…

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#american-civil-war #Combahee River Raid #Harriet Tubman #USCT

New Post has been published on Whither Eudaimonia?

New Post has been published on http://whithereudaimonia.com/2016/05/06/harriet-tubman-soldier-spy/

Harriet Tubman, Soldier-Spy

Let’s “face” it, putting Harriet Tubman’s picture on the 20 bill has an unintended consequence. She glows in moral righteousness, and is in this sense a proper replacement for the marginally principled Andrew Jackson – but there is an appearance problem. Jackson’s display, wreathed with silver curls, is decidedly striking, while Tubman’s mug, dour and without vitality, is exactly the opposite. The lady was not Lena Horne. She had a continence that growled. At least it growls in her surviving photographs. And in this the former slave remains a captive of her time and circumstance. Andrew Jackson was a man of privilege, and a long-time subject of flattering paintings, while Harriet Tubman, born in wretched anonymity, was not a topic of photographs until the spoilation of time had set in. No one knows what she looked like as a girl, or young woman, only as a mature then elderly lady wearing a modest bandana. And yet she had been a girl, she had been a young woman, and she had been more than the images record. She’s well recalled as a middle aged abolitionist, and a later-time humanitarian, but she was also, at one point, a bustling babe who joined the United States Army to fight the segregationist Confederacy. General Jackson wasn’t the only dashing military paladin of 19th century America; former slave Tubman also turned an infantry trick or two. The lady didn’t have the usual makings of a soldier. She was frail and off-and-on sickly. Yet she had the philosophical muscle of one who’d survived bondage, and the inner drive to help others do the same. She’d been whipped and beaten as a child (1820s), and suffered a head injury that caused pain and dizziness throughout her life. In 1849, she escaped from a Maryland plantation, was caught, then escaped again. She followed the North Star on the second try, and learned there of the Underground Railroad system that was helping slaves move into freedom. As Tubman reached the safety of Pennsylvania, she said: “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything…and I felt like I was in heaven.” Within a year she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She risked her life going back and forth to Maryland, to guide others out of slavery. In more than a decade of it, she conducted perhaps 13 harrowing missions to rescue at least seventy slave families, earning the title of “Black Moses.” Barely five feet tall, she had only a pistol for protection, but she knew how to use it. She would blast away at the slave-hunting tracking dogs, and she would warn her crews that, once on the road, for the safety of the group, she’d not let anyone change their minds. She thus became one of the most famous Negroes in the nation, friends with Frederick Douglass and John Brown, sought out by writers and lawmakers. As such, when the Civil War broke out, she drifted toward was she believed was the greatest cause for good in the history of black Americans. She and other abolitionists went south to the Union-held coast of South Carolina, where Tubman became an army cook, nurse, general do-good, and effective spy. Yankees on the seaboard wanted to weaken the Southern spirit by weakening its infrastructure. The idea was to burn crops, destroy plantations, beat up villages, and grab the slaves that were vital to Confederate production. Abraham Lincoln did not care for the idea of slave deliverance, he was not yet ready to declare emancipation; but Tubman, in her own mind, outranked that idea. “Mister Lincoln,” she said, “he’s a great man, and I am a poor negro…but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to win the war. He can do it by setting the negro free.” Tubman and others were thus tasked to organize a sort of slave-spy network on the Carolina delta, plus down along George and into Florida. By the time Lincoln did declare emancipation (1863), she was a scout working under the direction of the president’s secretary of war. She and her band mapped military areas of advantage, where Union forces might be aided by local slaves and sympathetic whites. In time, Tubman, now 50 years old, joined a Northern brigade that included a unit of black troops known as the 2nd Regimental South Carolina Infantry Her unit was commanded by Col. James Montgomery, a sometimes nasty Jayhawker guerilla (Jayhawkers were abolitionists who fought bloody battles for a “free-state” of Kansas). In the spring of 1863 he was ordered to clear the Combahee River of Dixie torpedo mines and use it to invade South Carolina’s lowcountry. Tubman and friends had reconnoitered the area, and guided 300 men around river and shoreline dangers. They sailed into Confederate fire at times, but only one of three boats was lost, and that one harmlessly by way of water grounding. As fortune had it, the river was not defended as heavily as it might have been. The lowcountry of the time was rife with sickness during seasonal weather, which is to say everything from malaria to smallpox, and Southern captains had pulled most of their troops away from it. This meant that while the raid was not a waltz in the sun, it was neither a heated skirmish. When Confederates did arrive at the river in response, they were few in number and overwhelmed by the North’s gunboats. All in all, Tubman and Montgomery were left to get what they were after. Montgomery was after destruction. His troops set fire to plantations, blew up a rice mill, and destroyed any building of use to Southern designs. As for Tubman, she had sent word for slaves to gather, and that they would be taken to freedom. Of course, many of the slaves were doubtful. Their sort did not have a history of richly changing their lives. But when the ships and troops were sighted, hundreds ran to the riverbanks. Some were stopped by overseers, others were shot by watching Rebel troops, but it’s said Tubman got at least 750 of them on board. She was of course delighted: “I never see such a sight. We laugh, and’ laugh, an’ laugh. Here you see a woman with a pail on her head, rice a smoking in it just as she’d taken it from the fire…One woman brought two pigs, a white one and a black one; we took them all on board and named the white pig Beauregard, and the black pig Jeff Davis. Sometimes the women would come with twins hangin’ round their necks; it was like I never see so many twins in my life…There were bags on their shoulders…and young ones tagging behind, all loaded, pigs squeaking, chickens screaming.” The official account of the Combahee Raid has been lost to history. But none of the invaders were killed. One newspaper of the time, speaking of a “bold and effective blow,” did not name Tubman, calling her only “a black woman,” yet said she was the inspiration and leader of the effort. It went on to say, “For sound sense and real native eloquence she would do honor to any man.” Indeed, the honor was historic; there were a good many female fighters in the Civil War, on both sides, but only one led a mission as significant as the Combahee Raid. Following the war, ex-soldier Tubman rejoined the business of civil activism. Blacks were emancipated but still under the public thumb. Once, on a train to New York, she was set upon by a white conductor, who broke her arm while passengers watched with satisfaction. She received a small pension for her unpaid service in the army, but gave it up so not to be accepting “special favors.” She worked in the suffragist movement, lived in modest means, and baked pies to sell for a living. She died of pneumonia in 1913 (age 91), telling friends that she was going “to prepare a place for you.” There is today a Harriet Tubman bridge on the Combahee River. ———————- (Ed. Note: This is a good and even critical time to remember an American champion like Harriet Tubman. It reminds us that as national decency is being trashed by Adolf Trump, and many of his supporters, he and they remain where they belong, in historic contempt.)

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