by Anne Schraff
Tubman was given $200 by the army to use for the construction of a washhouse. Once the building was completed, she trained some of the contraband women to do washing for the soldiers, who paid them. This gave many families a source of income. For the first time in their lives they were receiving wages. Only slaves like Harriet Tubman and others with skills such as carpentry or blacksmithing had been rented out by their masters and given the chance to earn wages. Tubman became skilled at logging, but most of the slave women knew only housework.
Tubman herself received no pay from the army. She got room and board and earned a little cash by making and selling root beer, gingerbread, and pies. She made them at night and paid someone to peddle them during the day while she worked at the hospital.
Eventually, Tubman was called to work at a military hospital in Fernandina, Florida, where both soldiers and contraband were, she said, “dying off like sheep,” from dysentery.5 Tubman made more herbal tea and attended to the basic care of the sick, keeping them clean and fed. Far more serious was the smallpox that soon came to ravage the population. Tubman worked relentlessly with the smallpox victims, never herself getting sick. She had no fear of illness or death. She often said, “The Lord will take care of me until my time comes.”6 She would then add that she was always ready to go.
Tubman’s days at the hospital were very busy. Her tasks included filling buckets with water and chunks of ice to bathe the heads of the sick and the wounds of the soldiers and civilians. She would bathe three or four people and then the water would become too warm or too bloody to be of any more use. She would then repeat the routine, getting another pail of clean water with ice.
As northern forces moved into the South, they were eager for information about the Confederate strategy and troop movements. Much of this was available from blacks who overheard important information or observed troop movements. But the slaves were often unwilling to talk to northerners. They did not trust them. They often feared the strange white men with their curious accents as much as they had feared their masters. Sometimes slaves fled into the woods at the very sight of the Union soldiers.
Harriet Tubman, however, was able to win the confidence of the slaves and extract information from them. So began her career as a Civil War scout and spy. She accompanied Union expeditions up and down the rivers and into the wilderness, talking to slaves along the way and getting crucial bits and pieces of information. She often went behind Confederate lines, posing as a peddler selling chickens and gingerbread. This gave her extra spending money as well as a logical reason for being there so the Confederate soldiers would not be suspicious.7
On one occasion, General Hunter asked Tubman to go on a gunboat up the Combahee River in South Carolina. The purpose of the expedition was to recover torpedoes the Confederate Army had placed there to blow up Yankee gunboats. Tubman had learned the location of the torpedoes from slaves who lived along the river and had observed men placing them. She also knew the location of important Confederate supply depots from her information-gathering forays.
Another purpose of the Combahee River expedition was to destroy southern bridges and railroads, cutting off the supply lines to the Confederate Army.
Harriet Tubman’s uniform for these missions was a coat and dress in federal blue, and a large bandanna worn over her short hair. She carried a satchel filled with first-aid equipment, her musket, and canteen. Colonel James Montgomery, an old friend of Tubman’s who shared her abolitionist views, led the Combahee River expedition. Later, Montgomery would write his commanding officer praising Tubman as “a most remarkable woman, and invaluable as a scout.”8 As part of the expedition, one hundred fifty black Union soldiers traveled in three steam-powered gunboats.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 to take effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation decreed freedom for the slaves in states fighting the United States armies. Beginning in 1863, President Lincoln sought to recruit black soldiers for the Civil War. Many, like the men in the gunboats heading up the Combahee River, flocked to the Union colors.
The expedition was successful in destroying millions of dollars’ worth of Confederate supplies, removing dangerous torpedoes, and freeing eight hundred slaves.
Historian Lerone Bennett said that Tubman was “the most remarkable of all Union spies,” and the first woman to “lead U.S. Army troops in battle.”9 Bennett may have been referring to the Combahee River expedition as a battle. Though Colonel James Montgomery was the commander, he allowed Tubman to shout out instructions about the Confederate sentry post half a mile up or where to ambush the Confederate rebels who tried to resist.10
Colonel Montgomery had organized runaway slaves into army units that would strike inside rebel-held country. From Port Royal, South Carolina, the army sailed up the Combahee River, burning plantations and liberating slaves. Tubman sang a hymn with a chorus beginning “Come along,” to reassure and encourage slaves to join them. Although they were under Confederate fire, Montgomery and Tubman and their troops returned without a scratch.
Wendell Phillips, a famous abolitionist, added his praise on Tubman’s wartime work. Familiar with her activities in the Civil War, he said that there were few who did more for the cause than “our fearless and most sagacious friend, Harriet Tubman.”11
Tubman met many black soldiers during the war. One was a tall, handsome recruit named Nelson Davis of Company G of the English U.S. Colored Infantry Volunteers. Tubman told Davis all about herself and her little house in Auburn, New York. Years later, the two would meet again.
The black people who came to Union lines disliked being called “contraband” and were intensely proud to be accepted into the Union Army.12 One wounded black soldier was walking toward a base hospital loaded down with a shoulder bag, musket, and cartridge box. When someone offered to relieve him of his burden, he refused and insisted on carrying his equipment all the way to the hospital so they would recognize him as a soldier.13
Harriet Tubman organized a scouting service for the Union Army under the direct supervision of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. She picked seven former slaves who knew the inland areas and could locate food-storage sites and Confederate ammunition dumps. Tubman also chose two black river pilots who knew every foot of the terrain. They surveyed the countryside in preparation for raids by black regiments who went up the St. Mary’s River, which divided Florida from Georgia. The raids brought back supplies including iron, lumber, bricks, rice, and herds of sheep.
In 1863, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers stormed Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor. These were the first black troops organized into a combat unit in the Union Army. Harriet Tubman witnessed this battle and later helped carry the wounded and the dead off the battlefield.
A thousand black troops advanced on a narrow causeway. Fort Wagner was a key position in the Confederate defense of Charleston, South Carolina. The first assault was made on July 11, 1863, and the heaviest fighting took place on July 18. All the soldiers of the Fifty-fourth—1,354 men—participated. In spite of their brave efforts, the initial attack failed and there were 247 casualties. The bombardment of Fort Wagner continued until it fell to Union forces in August 1863.14 The bravery of these soldiers convinced northerners that they should accept black soldiers.15
Harriet Tubman described the battle in graphic detail. The guns, she said, were like lightning, and the big guns like thunder. Tubman compared going onto the battlefield when the guns were silent to getting in the crops. “It was dead men that we reaped,” she said.16 “And then we heard the rain falling and that was the drops of blood,” Tubman recalled.17
Sergeant William Carney, flag bearer for the Fifty-fourth Volunteers, took bullets to his head, chest, arm, and leg. He said proudly, as he lay wounded, “The old flag never touched the ground, boys.”18 Carney’s poignant boast about upholding the honor of the flag became a rallying cry for other soldiers. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor, along with twenty-two other bla
ck soldiers, but it took him thirty-seven years to receive it. Prejudice against black soldiers persisted for many years and they were long denied the honors due them.
Tubman’s Civil War activities—working as a spy, scout, soldier, and nurse—never drained her sturdy constitution. In her mid-forties during the war, she was about twice the age of most of the young men she tended after the battle. She walked among people with highly contagious diseases and was close to the battlefield, but she seemed to lead “a charmed life.”19
Early in 1864, another black crusader for freedom, the legendary Sojourner Truth, met Tubman in Boston. Truth was on her way to Washington to see President Lincoln, and Tubman was taking time out to visit her parents in New York. Truth’s biographer, Nell Painter, believed the two women had much in common. Both shared a devotion to their people, said Painter, and “adventurous pasts, intimate connection with God, singing and ways of knowing independent of literacy.”20 However, Tubman and Truth disagreed on the character of President Lincoln. Truth saw Lincoln as a friend of black people, but Tubman resented the fact that emancipation had been delayed, and she believed that white soldiers received more money than blacks during the Civil War.21
Chapter 9
A NEW BEGINNING
In the spring of 1865, Harriet Tubman began working as a nurse at a veterans hospital in Fort Monroe, Virginia. She was employed by the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization that made private homes and hospitals available for wounded soldiers. The Army Medical Bureau lacked the funds to care for these veterans.
Tubman soon found that the hospital lacked necessary medical supplies. The only sedative available was whisky. When a man’s leg had to be amputated, it was Tubman’s job to hold him down while the surgeon worked. A lead bullet was placed in the man’s mouth for him to bite down on. It was often bitten in half during the agonizing ordeal. In July 1865, Tubman left the hospital and went to Washington to protest conditions at Fort Monroe and other veterans hospitals which were woefully short of funds.
Her job at Fort Monroe was Tubman’s last official work for the government or private agencies serving the Civil War veterans. Through it all, as nurse, spy, and scout, she had received no pay for her services. She had cooked and nursed and guided the gunboats down the Combahee River, but the government never paid her. Tubman figured it all out and came to the conclusion that she was due about $1,800 from the United States government for her services.1
When Tubman prepared to leave Washington to return home, she was given a government half-fare pass to ride the train. But when she took her seat in the passenger car, the conductor came through and challenged her right to sit there. He could not accept that a plain-looking, poorly dressed black woman had actually received a government pass to ride at half fare. He ordered Tubman to go and sit in the baggage car. Tubman refused to move and the conductor enlisted the help of three other men to grab her and drag her to the baggage car, where she rode the rest of the way to Auburn. During the struggle the men wrenched Tubman’s arm and shoulder so violently that she suffered pain for a long time afterward.
Tubman, about forty-four years old, was returning to Auburn. She had no clear means of support, and no activity would consume her life as the Underground Railroad had.
Tubman arrived home with no money, but she still had her parents to support. She was determined to make their lives as comfortable as possible. She planted a vegetable garden and apple trees in the yard, hoping to sell the produce and earn income that way. A few donations from white friends saw Tubman and her parents through her first few months home. For herself, Tubman wanted no luxuries. She dressed in the simplest clothes and ate plain food, expressing a desire for a piece of fruit now and then.2
With the Civil War over, and slavery conquered, Tubman embraced another cause: woman suffrage—the right to vote. She believed that the issue of blacks’ rights to equality was linked to woman suffrage.3 Tubman said, “I have suffered enough” to believe in women’s right to vote.4 Many of Tubman’s ardent abolitionist supporters were also suffragists, so this cause was always close to her heart.
In October 1867, along a road in Dorchester County, Maryland, John Tubman, Harriet Tubman’s former husband, had a fight with a white man named Robert Vincent. There is no record of what the fight was about, but Vincent told Tubman that if he ever saw him again, he would kill him. Apparently, Tubman made no effort to stay away from Vincent despite the threat, and they met again. Vincent drew his gun and deliberately shot John Tubman. Vincent was indicted and tried for murder, but he was acquitted. The only witness to the incident was Tubman’s thirteen-year-old son, and the testimony of black people held little weight in Maryland at that time. Harriet Tubman heard of her husband’s death. She had long since lost any affection for him, but she had been his wife and now she was a widow.
In the winter of 1867–1868, a severe blizzard buried many of the houses in Auburn, including Tubman’s. Tubman and her parents, being poor, had few extra provisions, and the pantry was quickly emptied while they were snowed in. Tubman had never asked for help for herself, but this time she had to. Eventually, she struggled from the snowbound house and made her way to town. She asked a friend for a quarter with which to buy food. With that, Tubman was able to buy a little food for herself and her parents. A few days later, Tubman returned the quarter, paying her friend back in full. Tubman had been able to earn a little money by helping neighbors dig out from the snow.
Though she was living in deep poverty herself, with no money set aside and no income, Tubman dreamed of being able to help others, especially the poor, homeless, and sick among the black population. Many were former slaves who had toiled most of their lives expecting support in their old age. As bad as slavery was, it had provided for elderly slaves with no other means of support. Of course, it had also deprived them of the education and opportunity to build their own security. This generation of emancipated slaves was now caught in the middle—uneducated, illiterate, floundering, and destitute. These were the people Tubman wanted to help.
Tubman never refused to help anyone who came to her door, and come they did. Her generosity was well known and her little house was usually filled with half a dozen or more strangers needing assistance. Occasionally, Tubman’s old friends would send her money. But Tubman had a carefree attitude about money, according to fellow Auburnites familiar with her charitable ways. She would receive a windfall and then give it all away, trusting in the Lord to replace it when needed.5
To support herself and her parents, Tubman nursed sick neighbors, did a little bit of housecleaning, and cared for neighborhood children when she was needed. As her garden grew, she sold vegetables door-to-door in season and also sold chickens and eggs.
By then, Tubman’s parents were about eighty, and they could not be of much help. Once, when a friend came to visit, Tubman was taking care of her parents, a brother, a grandniece, several elderly black people, and several children. At times the house would bulge with as many as twenty people, all looking to Tubman for support.
A temporary rescue came to Tubman from a white Auburn schoolteacher, the daughter of a professor at Auburn Theological Seminary. In 1868, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who was sympathetic to Tubman’s works, devised a plan to channel some money to her. During the years that Tubman was away helping the Union win the Civil War, Bradford had tended to Tubman’s parents, making sure they were provided for and writing letters for them. (Most of their letters were to their daughter Harriet, asking her when she was coming home.) Now, with Tubman home and in desperate need of funds, Bradford decided that a book about this remarkable woman might be a way of raising money for her.
Bradford sat down in Tubman’s little house and listened to stories of her childhood, the experiences she had in the Underground Railroad, and her exploits during the Civil War. Bradford wrote the stories down, but, although she trusted Tubman’s honesty, some of the stories were almost too amazing to be true. So with a scholar’s rigorous integri
ty, the teacher checked and double-checked every story Tubman told her, interviewing other people who had played a part in the events. “I have received corroboration of every incident related to me by my heroic friend,” Bradford wrote.6 She even omitted some incidents—wonderful, exciting stories that she believed to be true—that could not be verified. Bradford wrote her first book in 1868, titled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Later she wrote a more complete book, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. Bradford wrote quickly because Tubman needed financial help right away The first edition of the little book was printed in 1869 with funds from Tubman’s friends Garrett Smith and Wendell Phillips and from some businessmen in Auburn. Sales of the book brought about $1,200 and Bradford gave all the money to Tubman. She was able to pay off her mortgage, help some struggling black schools, and feed more hungry wayfarers at her door. For a while the burden of extreme poverty was lifted from her shoulders.
In 1869, a young man appeared at Tubman’s door, someone she remembered from the Civil War. The handsome young soldier she had met in South Carolina, Nelson Davis, had never forgotten Harriet Tubman. He had kept her Auburn address and now had come for a visit. They immediately struck up a warm friendship talking about old times. Tubman, then forty-nine, and Davis, twenty-eight, grew fond of each other and they courted. On March 18, 1869, Tubman and Davis were married.
It seemed that Tubman had now gained a strong, healthy helpmate who would ease her struggles. Unfortunately, that was not to be. Soon after their marriage, Davis fell ill with tuberculosis, a serious disease that affects the lungs. His illness lingered throughout the rest of his life. He was not able to work at all during their nineteen-year marriage, and Tubman was his caretaker until the day he finally died of tuberculosis. She bore this difficult obligation with the same quiet, uncomplaining courage she had exhibited in everything else she did. When Nelson Davis died in 1888, Tubman was a widow again.
