The Tubman Command Read online

  In Praise of the New York Times bestselling

  The Hamilton Affair, by Elizabeth Cobbs:

  “An entertaining, well-told tale.”

  —Cokie Roberts, author of Ladies of Liberty

  “Cobbs’s depiction of Hamilton will shed light on one of the most misunderstood figures in American history and the woman who shared his life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A juicy answer to Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. . . .”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “Cobbs’s meticulous account holds its own—even without catchy tunes.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Elizabeth Cobbs has now written the Hamilton novel that immediately leaps to the top of the list.”

  —Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers

  “The Hamilton Affair is a captivating historical novel from cover to cover . . . all but impossible to put down.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Think of it as a terrific—and must-read—companion to all things Hamilton.”

  —Jim Lehrer

  “A richly detailed and entertaining novel.”

  —Kurt Anderson, author of True Believers

  “Cobbs paints a portrait of a love so deep it was able to survive betrayal and a devastatingly public scandal.”

  —Booklist (Starred review)

  Books by Elizabeth COBBS

  Fiction:

  The Hamilton Affair: A Novel

  Broken Promises: A Novel of the Civil War

  Nonfiction:

  The Hello Girls: American’s First Women Soldiers

  American Umpire

  All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s

  The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil

  Major Problems in American History

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Cobbs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Endpaper map from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Courtesy of Stanford University Special Collections.

  Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes

  Cover image ©Shutterstock

  Print ISBN: 978-1-948924-34-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948924-35-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Myra Frances Burton,

  Student, Teacher, and Friend

  Then we saw the lightening, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.

  Harriet Tubman on the War Between the States

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  ~May 1863~

  Another woman today, just from “de main,” said to me that she had hard work to escape, sleeping in “de ma’sh” and hiding all day. She brought away her two little children, and said her master had just “licked” her eldest son almost to death because he was suspected of wanting to join the Yankees. “They does it to spite us, ma’am, ’cause you come here. They spites us now, ’cause de Yankees come.”

  Laura Towne, Teacher, St. Helena Island

  HARRIET’S EYES FLEW OPEN AT THE cock’s crow. Her mouth was dry, and her heart pounded. In the early morning light, she still sensed her husband’s solid hip against hers, as if all she had to do to take him in her arms again was roll over. Instead, she pulled the sheet across her face; John Tubman was gone for good.

  Their marriage had been a sturdy one. John’s timber business thrived in the five years they lived next to the plantation where Harriet grew up, rented to one sour-tempered mistress after another until she was strong enough for fieldwork outside slapping range. Her master, Edward Brodess, hadn’t objected to the union. As she recalled, he even smiled when she asked permission. If a free man wanted to waste his seed on a slave wife, Brodess was happy to reap the fruit. Free people of color like John Tubman often loved the wrong person. It was an easy mistake in a Maryland county where half the black population was enslaved and the other half was not. And John had been smitten ever since he spied Harriet felling a hickory all by herself—one tiny woman against the forest, he’d said, singing like an angel and swinging an axe like the devil.

  Daylight filtered through the thin fabric. Harriet lowered the sheet in the stuffy boardinghouse on Port Royal Island and gently pressed two fingers against her lips, as John had done in her dream. She breathed slowly and deeply through her nostrils, filling her lungs. She could almost smell him.

  His voice still sounded in her ears. “You know I can’t, sweet baby,” he’d whispered. Tracing a line down her cheek, his fingers had come to rest on her lips, quieting her objections. Then he’d lifted his head and kissed the dent above her left eyebrow—she felt it even now—in that tender way he once had. The gesture never failed to soothe her, though she couldn’t abide a kiss on the back of her neck where the whip scars of childhood still tingled and shied at any touch.

  Why wouldn’t he go with her? She’d tried so many different ways to phrase the question, this way and that, though she knew all of them made him feel weak. If she wanted to be his woman, she needed to let him be a man. Or so Mama said, and she had been married to Harriet’s father nearly three decades. They’d brought nine babies into the world despite seeing each other only on the Saturday nights that Daddy’s owner let him visit. Mama cried and begged whenever Harriet talked about running away and told her to obey John. Mama thought that’s how matrimony worked, or so she pretended. If she was a good wife, and Daddy a strong man, they would be together always. But Harriet knew that marriage was like a bizarre children’s game. One cruel tap on the shoulder by the master and you were gone.

  John had promised again and again that he would ear
n enough money to free her. In the dream, now fading so quickly she couldn’t recall how it ended, his voice hadn’t been much louder than the cicada that used to hide in the corner of their one-room cabin. But he must have said—as he had many times in person—that she shouldn’t worry. That he’d saved nearly half the cost. That she’d see. But Harriet had never seen. She wanted to believe her husband was right, yet she also knew Brodess would sell her the minute he felt like it. And when she’d become pregnant, she decided she couldn’t fool herself any longer. From then on, as her belly got bigger, it squeezed against her love for John Tubman.

  Harriet sat up in bed. The limb of a live oak tree outside her window swayed in the sea breeze, trailing gray Spanish moss like an old man’s beard. A cart passed on the street below, and a dog barked. The occupied town was stirring. Somewhere on the far side of Beaufort, an army bugle piped reveille.

  She thought about the morning ahead. If she and Septima finished their baking before noon, Harriet would make it to Hilton Head Island on time. General David Hunter needed to know what they’d found on yesterday’s scout of the Combahee, stealing past Rebel soldiers on picket duty who guarded the mouth of the river against Yankee warships. Though she felt scarcely rested, Harriet threw off the sheet and swung her feet onto the cool floorboards. It had been fifteen years since she left John Tubman and joined the Underground Railroad. If that no-good, no-account ever dreamed about her, which he probably didn’t, he wouldn’t imagine she’d become a spy for the Union army.

  The woman on the far side of the whitewashed kitchen looked up brightly from her mixing bowl as Harriet entered the small outbuilding and took an apron from a hook on the back of the door. Harriet looped the strings behind her. “Morning, Septima. Thanks for starting without me,” she said. “Felt like the sun climbed out a bed early today.”

  The apron tied high on Septima’s swollen abdomen was dusty with flour and looked ready to come undone. Her green turban was smoothly wrapped, though, and a necklace of tiny seashells indicated a resolve to preserve appearances despite the big belly. Behind the worktable stood a brick fireplace with a beehive oven. Nearer the door sat a weathered sideboard from which the finer crockery had disappeared early in the war. Something sweet bubbled in an enamel pot on a stove against the far wall while a tortoiseshell cat supervised from a windowsill that overlooked an orange tree spangled with white blossoms.

  It was a southern kitchen like any other except for the absence of slaves, which gave it a cheerful air, as if there was extra breathing room. Set back from the main house to prevent the spread of grease fires, it possessed windows on three walls, another feature that put Harriet’s mind at rest, as she instinctively preferred as many escapes as possible.

  “Morning, Miz Harriet,” Septima said with a smile, her slim fingers kneading continuously. “Don’t you worry on it. De beer is on t’ bile, and I got de biscuits jest bout confangled.”

  Harriet walked over to look in the mixing bowl. It had taken a year to accustom her ear to the local Gullah dialect that combined African expressions with an English so retooled that it sometimes constituted a secret language. She saw that Septima had nearly finished the biscuits. Clumps of gingerbread stuck to the back of her hands. “That looks a bit wet,” Harriet said. “May I fetch up more flour?”

  “Yes’m. I might a added too much ’lasses. But we almos’ out a flour, I b’lieve.”

  Harriet took the limp sack from the sideboard. From the weight, there might be a cup or two. She carefully tipped the large, floppy bag and a small amount of pale flour dusted the tacky dough. “That enough?”

  “Maybe jest a bit more.”

  Harriet jiggled harder. The flour was stuck in the folds, so she gave the bottom seam a good, strong shake. The remainder dumped into the bowl, and a puff flew up into her face. She straightened and sneezed. Then sneezed again.

  Septima’s eyes widened. She burst into laughter. Her apron came loose, and the strings flapped down altogether.

  “Ki! You done turned white, Miz Harriet. Now you one a dem high-falutin’ Buckra. Don’ have to work no more.”

  Harriet put her hands on her hips—she hadn’t time to waste—but she pinched back a smile. Sometimes she did want to play. Lay down her burdens for a spell. Septima looked so pretty with her seashell necklace and catlike eyes that Harriet wondered if she ought to bead a necklace for herself even though she couldn’t picture wasting time on such folderol. Septima grabbed the edges of her apron with sticky hands and sashayed around the table. She was nimble for a woman seven months gone.

  “Play whenevuh you want!”

  “Septima, I got to catch the packet for—” Harriet said.

  “Dance whenevuh you want! No more cooking, no how. Mm-mm.” Enjoying herself, Septima began humming a tune. She snatched up Harriet’s hands. “Come on!”

  Harriet saw Septima wasn’t going to give up. She shook her head, then laughed and squeezed Septima’s hands in return. Motes of flour flew upward as Harriet batted her lashes in her best imitation of a Baltimore belle. “All right, baby girl. Turn your partner.”

  The two women dipped and swung one another, humming, breaking into song, smiles bigger at each turn. Harriet ducked easily under the bridge of Septima’s uplifted arms. The Sea Islander towered over her like an egret twirling a sandpiper. Harriet finally stopped. She brushed the flour from her nose with the hem of her apron and slipped behind Septima to retie the apron strings. “But don’t you lay that burden on me, or I’ll never get to heaven,” she said. “Most white folk topple clean off Jacob’s ladder. Shouldering too much guilt, poor sinners.” Harriet turned back to the table. The dough looked firm. “Ready to roll that?”

  Without awaiting an answer, she fetched a wooden pin from the shelf to start the task herself. Septima tended to give the dough a heavier workout than advisable, and Harriet didn’t feel like making a lesson out of the afternoon. The day’s biscuits needed to get done—and a soft crumb kept customers coming back.

  Septima wiped her hands on her apron before taking up a wooden spatula. She scraped the contents of the bowl onto the work surface. Harriet shaped the dough into a ball that she rolled flat with the pin while Septima followed behind, cutting biscuit shapes with a tin cup. “Why you never marry, Miz Harriet?” Septima asked. “Pretty ooman like you.”

  Since Harriet had hired Septima three months earlier, she’d avoided topics she didn’t care to discuss. The curious Sea Islander must have assumed that the abolitionist everyone called “Moses” had never had much of a personal life. “I did,” Harriet said as she gathered the last remnants into a couple of lumpier biscuits for Septima’s two boys and wondered what she’d done that morning to rile John Tubman’s ghost.

  “What happened?” Deep lines furrowed Septima’s brow. A corner of her mouth quavered, and she looked like she regretted the question. “He git sold?”

  Harriet wrestled a baking sheet from a crate of jumbled pots and pans and placed it on the table. She began arranging the cut rounds. “No. He was already free. I went without him.”

  “By yo’self? Like me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Septima heaved a sigh. “’Clare to Gawd, I thought I seeing Angel Gabrul when you and Mistah Plowden chanced on we last fall. Don’t know how much longer de boys could a held out. Famembuh?”

  “I remember thinking the Lord marked you out special,” Harriet said.

  She and two other scouts had plucked Septima from a marsh along the Combahee on a moonless night, four miles south of the plantation from which she had escaped with her children. Although most of the Gullah lived on the Sea Islands, planters moved servants around as it pleased them and the Gullah dialect—whose origins time had obscured—had spread across the Low Country. Septima was born on St. Helena, called Sa’leenuh by folk on Port Royal, before being sent to the main. Harriet guessed she was around twenty-five. The father of Kofi and Jack, Septima’s two boys, had been traded away long before as a down payment on a racehorse.<
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  Septima placed the last row of gingerbread rounds on the sheet. She set the tin cup on a shelf next to the windowsill on which the cat slept and folded her hands atop her high belly. “Chillun, what bout dem? You and Mistah Tubman have any chillun?” she said after a cautious pause.

  It was a question women often hesitated to ask. Seven-year-olds sent to auction instead of school. Harriet picked up a dishcloth to avoid Septima’s eyes, folded it into a potholder, and told the lie that haunted her. “Thank the Lord, no.”

  A dodger might call it the truth. She had never possessed a child. John’s younger sister, Mary—a free seamstress married to a timberman named Isaac—lived across the yawning Chesapeake in Baltimore. Mary had been expecting around the same time as Harriet and agreed to pass off the newborn as a twin. John and Harriet’s child would come back later as their free “nephew” or “niece.” Harriet had recognized the plan’s merit. The baby didn’t belong to her anyway; it belonged to Master Brodess. But if the child went to Mary, that was different. Free mother, free baby.

  Even so, a terrible foreboding swelled along with the belly that Harriet hid under bulkier and bulkier coats that winter. Her arms actually cramped at the idea of never holding the child that tumbled and kicked just below her ribs. And even if they smuggled the infant safely to Baltimore, what if Brodess took it into his cussed head to peddle Harriet before John finished saving up? It had happened before.

  As if he had taken a cleaver and removed her mother’s fingers one at a time, Brodess sold Harriet’s three older sisters a year apart. The frigid November that traders showed up for Linah, Harriet had been but twelve. Hauling water from the creek in pails, she’d heard a child scream on the far side of the Big House. Although her hands were frozen stiff, something in that wail caused them to fly open, and she dropped both buckets. One tipped over. She didn’t stop to right it but rushed around the building to find her mother restraining a grandbaby. Linah, the child’s mother, clutched her skirt to her thighs while a man in a beaver hat rudely pushed up her cotton petticoat to get his cuff around her ankle.