The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

Just how far down did Moses go? The spiritual does not say, but one of the prophet’s namesakes—the woman who sang “Go Down, Moses” along the rivers and roads of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as she helped some seventy people escape slavery via the Underground Railroad—went as far south as she could. Harriet Tubman returned not only to the border state from which she herself had escaped; defiantly courageous, she ventured deeper into the land of bondage to liberate hundreds of others during the Civil War.

Her greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success. For more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory.

On the night of June 1, 1863, five months after the Emancipation Proclamation and a few weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg, Tubman accompanied Colonel James Montgomery and the newly freed men of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers as they boarded three steamboats off the coast of Beaufort. Their paddle wheels turned quietly in the dark as the vessels advanced toward St. Helena Sound. From the pilot house of the lead steamer, Tubman watched a full moon rise, its light a welcome guide for the raiders as they avoided pluff mud and mines, following a serpentine, twenty-five-mile route up the river. By the next morning, Montgomery’s men had landed and driven off the few remaining Confederate pickets, most enemy soldiers having fled the so-called sickly season, when malaria and yellow fever ravaged the coast. Thanks to Tubman’s intelligence, the Union troops faced almost no resistance besides a few skirmishes; after destroying a pontoon bridge they marched on seven plantations, burning whatever they could not confiscate. Millions of dollars in property was left smoldering as soldiers made away with rice, cotton, corn, chickens, pigs, and horses, but the soldiers were soon overwhelmed by a different kind of “contraband.”

Tubman later remembered how enslaved people of all ages emerged like “startled deer” from the fields and the forests along the shoreline, running for the boats like “the children of Israel, coming out of Egypt.” It was as if a “mysterious telegraphic communication” had gone from one rice field to the next, with laborers sharing the news that “Lincoln’s gun-boats come to set them free,” she said. Hundreds of refugees began rushing the rowboats; once those were filled, the oarsmen, worried about capsizing and afraid of being stranded, began beating people back. Seeing the chaos, Montgomery called out to Tubman for help: “Moses, you’ll have to give ’em a song.”

Above the screaming, the splashing, and the gunfire, Tubman’s voice rang out. “Of all the whole creation in the east or in the west, / The glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best,” she sang. “Come along! Come along! Don’t be alarmed, / Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.” After every verse of the abolitionist anthem, the clamoring crowds let go of the boats, raised their hands, and shouted, “Glory!” The rowboats returned to the steamers, and the three steamships returned to Beaufort, with more than seven hundred newly freed people.

That dramatic scene, with all its danger, grace, and tragedy, is wonderfully staged in Edda L. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War” (Oxford). Where some have seen the raid primarily as Tubman’s story, isolating her from the broader network of Black liberation, Fields-Black powerfully situates the abolitionist among her contemporaries—controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics, and fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose not to flee but to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.

“Combee” is one of two notable books out this year to wrestle with less familiar aspects of Tubman’s legacy. The other is “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (Penguin Press), by Tiya Miles. Fields-Black conveys, in elaborate detail, what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery; Miles addresses the far more elusive question of why she did it.

Neither “Combee” nor “Night Flyer” is a cradle-to-grave biography, though both Fields-Black and Miles are drawn to the cradle that Tubman’s father made for her, from the trunk of a sweet-gum tree. Born Araminta Ross, to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, around 1822, Tubman was first known as Minty. There were tender moments—she recalled being rocked in that hand-carved cradle—but her early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled mostly with physical torture and emotional terror.

Tubman was the fifth of nine children. Three of her sisters were sold and sent to the Deep South. Her parents were owned by two different families who separated them not long after her birth. While still a young girl, Tubman was taken away from her mother and forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand. She was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. Short and frail, she was often debilitated by beatings and was once struck so hard with a two-pound iron weight that she suffered seizures for the rest of her life. What was never beaten out of her was an innate sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage, spiritually as well as literally. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.”

Tubman’s concept of freedom was not only hoped for, like faith; it was something she observed in the world around her. Like Frederick Douglass, born just a few towns away, Tubman saw the reality of liberation early, interacting with formerly enslaved people who had worked to buy their freedom or been manumitted by their owners. In Tubman’s lifetime, the Black population in Maryland was almost evenly divided between enslaved and free; the year before the Civil War started, the state had more free Black people than any other in the country. She married one of those free men, John Tubman, and after taking his name she took her mother’s, too.

But marriage did not make Harriet Tubman free. Owing to the perverse absurdities of antebellum slave laws, she remained enslaved, and any of her children would be as well—born the property of the man who owned her. In 1844, when her wedding is thought to have taken place, that man was Edward Brodess, whose mother had owned Tubman’s mother. Tubman’s father had been manumitted by his owner, but Brodess had inherited Tubman, hiring her and her siblings out to neighbors for seasonal work, whether trapping muskrats or clearing land. Then, struggling with debt, Brodess decided that selling his inheritance would earn him more money than hiring them out.

Fearful that she would be separated from her family, Tubman turned to God. “I groaned and prayed for old master,” she told an early biographer. “Oh Lord, convert master! Oh Lord, change that man’s heart!” Brodess, evidently having as hardened a heart as the one Moses confronted in Exodus, did not relent. Tubman, on hearing that she and her brothers were to be sold into the Deep South, altered her petition. “If you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart,” she remembered pleading, “kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.” Brodess died within the week.

Brodess’s wife, though, still planned to proceed with the sale, and on the night of September 17, 1849, Tubman, who had spent her entire life hearing God’s voice and having visions of God’s mercy, decided to act on her faith, and she fled into the darkness with two of her brothers. The brothers grew frightened and soon persuaded her to turn back, but she set off again later, on her own. “I’m bound for the promised land / On the other side of Jordan,” she sang while leaving, hoping that her friends and family would understand where she was headed.

That promised land was both geographical, the American North, and theological, God’s Kingdom on Earth. Many readers today will find such a concept confounding; some of Tubman’s contemporaries did, too. But resurrecting her spiritual life is the unusual project of Miles’s “Night Flyer.” Noting that Tubman “oriented to the world from a place of immersive religious belief,” Miles argues that we might never understand her if we don’t try to occupy that same “experiential space of integration between what she knew and what she felt, between rational thought, intuition, spiritual sensation, and landscape awareness.”

Abolition was a legal and social movement, but it was also a religious one, populated and promulgated by men and women of faith, who operated out of sincere and sweeping spiritual convictions. Tubman carried a pistol, but when questioned about her safe passage she once declared, “I just asked Jesus to take care of me.” And although she has rightfully been compared to intellectuals such as Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Miles suggests that Tubman should also be considered alongside Black evangelists of the era, including Jarena Lee, the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Zilpha Elaw, a mystic and a minister; Old Elizabeth, a spiritual memoirist; and Julia A. J. Foote, a leader in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement.

“Night Flyer” is a welcome corrective to the sorts of biographical portraits that reduce religious faith to psychoanalytic case studies or medical mysteries. It takes seriously the spiritual life of a people who, despite their enormous suffering, emerged with a robust and restorative religious tradition all their own. Rather than suggesting that Tubman’s prophetic visions and potent prayers were merely the product of temporal-lobe epilepsy or narcolepsy, Miles explores Tubman’s own explanation for their origin—the Lord God Almighty. Tubman and these other pioneering Black women “came to view themselves as ‘sanctified’ or ‘holy,’ after an emotionally wrought process of spiritual transformation,” Miles writes, and they shared a profound theology of universalism, inspired by St. Peter’s declaration in Acts that “God is no respecter of persons” and St. Paul’s assertion in Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see. Raised in the Baptist Church, Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, studied womanist theology in her early academic career and has lately focussed her scholarship on the environmental humanities, connecting ecology with spirituality in careful, creative studies of nineteenth-century America. One of those studies won the National Book Award, in 2021: “All That She Carried,” a beautiful, braided story of a single South Carolina family, told through a cotton sack passed from one generation to the next.

That book, Miles wrote, “leans toward evocation rather than argumentation and is rather more meditation than monograph.” The same approach serves her well in “Night Flyer,” which portrays Tubman as the living embodiment of an extraordinary faith that helped her escape the estuarine ecology of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and master the salt marshes of the South Carolina Lowcountry. “Among the best preserved of Tubman’s speech acts are her prayers,” Miles notes. She has collected many of them in “Night Flyer,” along with modern poems and contemporary liturgies that give the book a spiritual texture not often encountered in narrative nonfiction. The result, like “All That She Carried,” is not an academic study of nineteenth-century Black history but a moving account of Tubman’s intellectual life—“her belief in God, heaven, and unseen powers” and “her belief in the integrity and import of relationships among all natural beings.”

Aflock of Christian witnesses surrounds Tubman in “Night Flyer,” while a different cast of characters joins her in “Combee.” Some readers may balk at the equal attention that Fields-Black gives to Tubman’s many compatriots in the Combahee River Raid and the many South Carolinians liberated by their efforts, but the book’s more than seven hundred pages rescue neglected lives and, in the process, reconstitute an entire society.

For Fields-Black, those people are not just historical figures but family. Like Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home” or Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures,” “Combee” derives some of its power from the author’s personal connection to the national history she recovers. In McWhorter’s magisterial account of the Birmingham campaign of the civil-rights movement, she teased out her own family’s complicity with the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, Shetterly, whose father worked with the “human computers” at nasa’s Langley Research Center, was surrounded by the pioneering Black engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who later filled her book. Fields-Black, for her part, grew up visiting relatives around the Lowcountry, touring the region with her Gullah Geechee-speaking grandparents. She is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Hector Fields, one of hundreds of men who liberated themselves from the Confederacy and then fought to liberate others in the Combahee River Raid.

Aided by the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum, in Charleston, Fields-Black found military records and plantation archives that helped her plot Hector’s journey from enslavement in Beaufort to enlistment in the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. He was denied a federal pension, but his brother Jonas had a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-page Army pension file that allowed Fields-Black to recover the story of the ancestors whose headstones she still visits at her family cemetery in Green Pond. Hector’s story is as important to Fields-Black as Tubman’s not only because of their family ties but because she understands that without men like him the Combahee River Raid would never have succeeded. As singular as Tubman was, her efforts depended on other freedom fighters.

Already famous for her furtive work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman arrived in Beaufort in the spring of 1862, a few weeks after the Union general David Hunter declared martial law and ordered the emancipation of the local enslaved population. Tubman had the endorsement of Hunter’s friend John Andrew, who was the governor of Massachusetts—and a member of both the Boston Vigilance Committee, which provided assistance to fugitive slaves, and the Free Soil Party, which fought slavery in the Western territories. President Lincoln reversed Hunter’s emancipation order and rebuked him publicly, but Hunter began recruiting Black soldiers anyway.

Like Tubman, these soldiers were anomalous even among abolitionists, risking their freedom and safety by remaining in Confederate states. Thousands of them enlisted all around the country, forming regiments like the 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers, the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, and the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. They soon swelled the ranks of the Bureau of Colored Troops, joined by dozens of Northern regiments. By the end of the war, more than two hundred thousand Black men had volunteered for the Army or the Navy; nearly twenty per cent of them died fighting for the Union.

“Combee” studies the pension files of these veterans to reconstruct their lives before and after the Civil War, paying close attention to the Gullah Geechee people of the Carolina Lowcountry. We meet Old Heads, Prime Hands, and Pikins—what the Gullah Geechee called elders, enslaved laborers, and children—whose work, harvesting billions of dollars of Sea Island cotton and Carolina Gold rice, made the Combahee River one of the most profitable agricultural regions in the country. Some had already escaped to Port Royal in the first year of the war, after the Union Army captured the city and surrounding islands, joining the ten thousand refugees left behind after Confederate forces fled.

It was the Port Royal Experiment, an early attempt at Reconstruction, that drew Tubman to the Deep South, where she worked as a nurse and a cook, then established a kitchen and laundry where refugees could earn a living baking gingerbread and pies, making root beer, and washing clothes. At the same time, she interviewed all the “contrabands” she could, gathering information about the land they’d left behind, recruiting people who could navigate local byways and waterways, and encouraging able-bodied men to enlist. She became one of the Union’s most valuable spies, equipped with “secret service money” for paying informants and official travel papers that read “Pass the Bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go, and give her free passage at all times on Government transports.”

General Hunter had issued Tubman that pass, and he was eventually joined in the Department of the South by other white officers with abolitionist sympathies, eager to expand the use of Black troops. “Combee” celebrates two of these officers in particular, allies of Tubman who offered her opportunities to serve. Both were ministers who left their pulpits to fight for abolition, leading two of the first Black regiments at a time when the Army would not commission Black officers. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hailed from Massachusetts; after studying theology at Harvard Divinity School, he was called to a Unitarian church in Newburyport, then found a more radically abolitionist congregation in Worcester. Although remembered by some today as an early reader and mentor of Emily Dickinson, he was one of the Secret Six, who sent arms to Kansas and funded John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.

Higginson regarded Tubman as the seventh member of Brown’s Secret Six. He’d met her in Boston, before the war, and in a letter to his mother he described her as “the greatest heroine of the age.” “Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction,” he wrote, “and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary.” Higginson commanded the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, and he often led actions with James Montgomery, who commanded the 2nd South Carolina. Montgomery had been raised a Congregationalist, in Ohio, but after moving to the slave state of Kentucky he found himself drawn to a more evangelical faith, the filings of his soul aligned magnetically by the spiritual fervor and social revolution of the Second Great Awakening. He became a Campbellite preacher and moved his family west, to Kansas, where he developed a reputation as one of the most zealous Jayhawkers, attacking pro-slavery households and retaliating against border ruffians. Although Tubman had known Higginson for longer, some sources say she told Hunter that she would accompany troops on the Combahee River Raid only if the fervid Montgomery was in charge.

What Tubman accomplished a hundred and sixty-one years ago deserves to be celebrated in the annals of military history, and Fields-Black argues that it should be celebrated as a revolutionary act in the history of Black liberation, too—as notable as the Stono Rebellion, in South Carolina, or Nat Turner’s revolt, in Virginia. Her characterization of the Combahee River Raid as “the largest and most successful slave revolt in U.S. history” is debatable, given the decisive assistance of the Union Army; other revolutionaries could presumably have succeeded at a similar scale if backed by its might. But it is true, as Fields-Black suggests, that those involved were crucial links in a long chain of brave individuals connecting this country to its most honorable ideals of freedom and equality. And she does not shy away from how often and how cruelly the United States has failed to uphold those ideals, including after the Civil War, when Tubman and countless other Black veterans were denied their pensions outright or had to spend decades fighting for the compensation that they deserved.

Tubman died famous but in near-penury. She received some money as the widow of a war veteran, her second husband—and, belatedly, through congressional appropriation, only a portion of the money she was owed for her service as a scout, a nurse, and a spy. Yet she never lost her faith, in her country or in her Creator. The beauty of “Combee” and “Night Flyer” is that, taken together, they remind us of the redemptive possibilities of patriotism and religious belief, ideologies that today are too often associated with the reactionary rather than the radical. On her deathbed, Tubman invoked the Gospel of John, paraphrasing the promise that Jesus made to his disciples of their place in Heaven, and also echoing her own promise to bring about that Heaven on earth: “I go away to prepare a place for you, and where I am you also may be.”

— Written by Casey Cep. View this review as it originally appeared in The New Yorker.