Harriet Tubman

I saw on Twitter today that this is Harriet Tubman's 200th birthday and I thought, that's worth a post!

But good for me, despite the late hour and events of the day, I thought it would be a good idea to make sure that statement was correct. And it turns out that Tubman's birthday is not a known fact, though January 29, 1820 is one of the dates that you will find if you look around on the interweb.

The Wikipedia says she was born c. March 1822, but other sources say she was born some time between 1820 and 1822 and that she gave her birth year as 1815, 1820, 1822, and 1825 at different points.

But whether she would have been 200 years old today or not quite that, Harriet Tubman is a person I'd rather be thinking about than many alive today.


Harriet Tubman in the 1860s

This quote from the Wikipedia is just one story from her life that is less-known than the usual one about freeing people through the Underground Railroad:

Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, [in South Carolina] Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that it was being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.

More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid.

I didn't learn the name Combahee from knowing about Harriet Tubman; I learned about it from the Combahee River Collective and the work of Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde. (They chose the name well.) I wish some of the Civil War history I was taught had included that piece.