Harriet Tubman Led Rescues, Spied for the Union and Raided the Combahee River

The federal government eventually gave Harriet Tubman a pension, and it took about thirty years and an act of Congress. The same woman had led an armed raid for the United States Army, been hunted by slaveholders and posses. Let that be your measure of how slowly the machinery of government moves, and how fast a person of faith can.

She was not an abstraction or a poster. She was a small woman with a bad head injury, a deep Christian conviction and a talent for planning that would have been the envy of any general, and a record of never mistaking confidence for carelessness, which is more than can be said for most of the officers she worked with. Her biography belongs to every American, and conservatives have particular reason to tell it, because it is a story about faith, family, courage and the rule of law properly understood.

Born into it

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, around 1822. The exact year is uncertain, since no one recorded the births of enslaved children with care. She was one of a large family, and she was hired out as a child to work for others. She was beaten. As a teenager she suffered a blow to the head from a heavy metal weight thrown by an overseer at another slave who was trying to escape. The injury stayed with her for life, leaving her with headaches and sudden spells of sleep, and, by her account, vivid dreams and visions that she understood as the voice of God.

Here is where her faith enters, and it is not an accessory to the story. It is the engine. She was a believer in the God of the Old Testament and the New, and she drew on the story of the Exodus and the Psalms as a living source of instruction. Those who knew her described her trust in divine guidance as the thing that steadied her on the road. A secular biography that treats her faith as a quirk misses what she herself would have said was the point. The tradition of Black churches as a source of courage and organization in American life is something we trace in pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement, and Tubman is among its earliest and greatest figures.

Escape, 1849

In 1849 Tubman's owner died, and she feared that she and her family would be sold South, a fate that was routine on the Eastern Shore. She decided to go. She left in the autumn of that year, and she made her way north by night, following the North Star and the help of a network of free Black families and sympathetic white neighbors, including Quakers. She reached Pennsylvania, a free state, by way of Philadelphia.

What she did with that freedom is the story. She did not stay safe. She went back.

The law she was breaking

To understand the stakes, hold the law in your mind. Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution contains what is usually called the Fugitive Slave Clause: "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." The words "slave" and "slavery" do not appear in the original Constitution, a fact that Madison cared about, as we show in Madison Kept the Idea of Property in Men Out of the Constitution's Words, but the clause protected the institution all the same.

Then came the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, signed in September of that year. It was a harsh statute. It made federal commissioners responsible for hearing claims and, in a rule that infuriated Northerners, paid a commissioner more if he sided with the slaveholder than if he freed the accused. It required citizens to assist in recovering fugitives. It denied the accused the right to testify in his own defense. It put free Black residents of the North at real risk of being seized, and some were.

The Act changed Tubman's work. After 1850 the border with Pennsylvania was no longer safe for runaways, so she took her passengers farther, to British North America, where the law of the United States did not reach. A community of fugitives took shape in St. Catharines, in what is now Ontario, and Tubman lived there for a period in the 1850s. The route north became longer and riskier, and her skill had to grow with it.

The rescues

The National Park Service counts about thirteen trips back into Maryland to bring out family and friends, and says she also guided about seventy others who reached freedom on their own; other accounts give about seventy people over thirteen trips. Either way the figures are rounded, and historians treat them as estimates. She herself is sometimes quoted as claiming more journeys, but the careful count is thirteen. A conservative writer should prefer the smaller number, because the story needs no embellishment.

In December 1850 she helped her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's family escape a sale. Other return trips followed across the years. She traveled mostly at night and, by common account, set out on Saturdays. She carried a pistol, and she is reported to have used it as a threat against any passenger who lost nerve and wanted to turn back. A man who returns has the power to betray the group, and she did not allow it. Whether or not every detail of the reports is exact, the underlying discipline is clear: she planned, she managed risk, and she said she never lost a passenger.

Consider how much came together in this operation. She needed information about who could be trusted, hiding places, a schedule, forged or borrowed papers, food and money. She used the free Black communities of the Eastern Shore, and she worked with the network that William Still kept records for in Philadelphia, a story told in The Underground Railroad and the Quakers Who Broke an Unjust Law in the Open. It was a large operation held together by a person who trusted the God who had sent her, and who was hunted for it.

A scout and a spy for the Union

When the Civil War came, Tubman went south. She went to Union-held South Carolina and served the Union Army in several capacities: as a cook, a nurse, a scout and a spy. She worked with Colonel James Montgomery, who led the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, a Black regiment.

I want you to see this as part of a larger fact: this was a woman working inside the military chain of command, with little or no formal rank, in service of the American cause. She did not have the vote and could not have it. She served the nation that had not yet granted her the status of citizen, because she believed that the nation's own principles were the thing to hold to.

The Combahee River Raid, June 2, 1863

Her most famous military service came on June 1 and 2, 1863. Union gunboats carrying Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, under Montgomery, steamed up the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman had helped gather intelligence, and she was aboard.

The raid was a success. The troops landed, and the boats took on board the enslaved people who came running to the shore. More than seven hundred men, women and children were freed, according to the National Park Service. Tubman was present, and she is often described as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States, a description that stretches her formal role but reflects how central she was.

Here the writer's job is to separate what is known from what is claimed. What is known: the raid took place on June 1 and 2, 1863, the gunboats carried the soldiers, Tubman worked with Montgomery, and the freed numbered over seven hundred. What is less clear is the precise extent of her command. A thorough account says she was an adviser and guide of enormous importance, and leaves the question of command to those who find it interesting. The heroism does not depend on it.

The pension fight

When the war ended, Tubman was not rewarded. She spent years seeking compensation from the government for her wartime service, with little success. She had supported herself and her family by farming and by selling produce and baked goods, and she took in people with nowhere to go.

She married Nelson Davis, a veteran, in 1869. After his death she applied for a widow's pension, and after a long process she received one at eight dollars a month. In 1899 Congress passed a law raising her pension to twenty dollars a month. The sum was small and the delay was long. A person who risked her life for the Union cause, whose raids helped free hundreds, waited decades for the country to put a few dollars a month in her hand. That is a failure of the system, and it deserves to be said without hedging. It also teaches something: a government is never more careful with money than when it owes it to the people who earned it.

Auburn, and the last years

Tubman made her home in Auburn, New York, on property she bought from William Seward in 1859, a man who had been a senator and later served as Lincoln's Secretary of State. She cared for her family and for the poor there, and in her later years the property became a home for the aged. She was active in the church and in efforts to support suffrage, speaking and organizing where she could. She died on March 10, 1913, in Auburn, at about ninety. She was buried with military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery.

The man who sold the land was a politician. The woman who lived on it did the work. If you want to measure the gap between what government promises and what private charity does, a woman of very limited means running a home for the aged with her own property is the picture.

The objection and the answer

The strongest objection to a portrait like this one is a historian's. It says: the Tubman of popular memory is partly legend. The figures vary. The stories of her pistol, her sleep spells and her superhuman powers of evasion come from biographies written by admirers, notably the book Sarah Bradford published in the late 1860s, whose proceeds helped her pay her debts. A good historian should be cautious.

That is exactly right, and the response is to be cautious. The numbers in this post are the careful ones: thirteen trips, about seventy people, more than seven hundred freed at the Combahee. Even so reduced, the record is extraordinary. The cautious account loses nothing because the facts do the work. A skeptic should be pleased to find that the less-embellished version is still one of the greatest stories in American history.

A second objection, from the other direction, says that Tubman's story is used to make conservatives uncomfortable. The answer is to look at her actual commitments. She was a person of intense Christian faith. She valued family so much that her most dangerous work was to bring relatives out. She trusted private charity, the church and neighbors. She served the military and the Union. And she looked to the founding promises of the nation, not away from them. Frederick Douglass, whose own case for the Constitution is the subject of What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution, took the same view. If these are not conservative virtues, the word has lost its meaning.

What to learn

Three things.

First, faith is a source of courage in public life. Tubman did not separate her convictions from her work, and the republic is better for it. It is a model for how a person of faith engages with injustice: seriously, with sacrifice, and without waiting for permission.

Second, the law is not always just, and the response matters. She broke the Fugitive Slave Act because she judged it contrary to a higher law, and she took the risk openly in the sense that she accepted its costs. A later chapter of the story, the Thirteenth Amendment and its enforcement clause, is told in The 13th Amendment's Second Section Gave Congress a New Kind of Power.

Third, the government that came late was still worth serving. She served the Union and kept her faith in the country's principles even when the country was slow to honor her. That patience is not weakness. It is what it looks like to love one's country for what it promises while working to make it keep its word.

The case in brief

1. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849 and, at great risk, returned about thirteen times to lead roughly seventy people to freedom.
2. Her work was shaped by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and by a deep Christian faith that she described as her guide.
3. In the Civil War she served the Union as nurse, scout and spy, and she helped plan and joined the Combahee River Raid of June 2, 1863, which freed more than seven hundred people.
4. She waited decades for a federal pension and spent her later years caring for others in Auburn, New York, where she died on March 10, 1913.
5. The careful facts are enough: her story is one of faith, family and service to the nation's founding promises.

What you can do: look up the records of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland, visit if you can, and read the National Park Service's account of the Combahee River Raid.