The Tubman Command Page 3

  An older soldier with heavy eyebrows and a coarse mustache dyed black, General Hunter showed his age that morning despite efforts to hide it. Lines ran down his cheeks. The wig that covered his bald spot rested awkwardly. While men elsewhere waged Armageddon, General Hunter guarded the last federal foothold on the Confederate coast. His troops had fought a few remote, backwater skirmishes in Florida, but every one of them yearned to do something bigger—something that burned a hole in history and scattered Dixie’s ashes. Unfortunately, the catastrophe in Charleston Harbor the month before showed they had little idea how. They’d spent weeks preparing to attack the birthplace of the Rebellion, only to be smashed within minutes. Underwater mines called torpedoes had trapped their ships right in Fort Sumter’s line of fire. It was another humiliating defeat in the long line of disasters that had begun two years earlier in the very same spot.

  Hunter shoved aside a stack of telegrams and stubbed out his cigar in a chipped teacup. “What makes you think your men can do what our navy can’t?”

  “We don’t have to prevail against Sumter, just circle around and bushwhack the Secesh from behind. Attack some plantations. Get crackers on the defensive,” Colonel Montgomery argued. The Kansan balanced his lean weight on the balls of his feet. His rumpled blue uniform hadn’t seen the flat side of an iron in a week. “They want their fill of war? We’ll give it to them. Now!”

  Harriet knitted her hands tightly. They were her feelings exactly. The Secessionists had dominated from the start. It was time to turn the war around.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson pulled his chair close to the table. He straightened a notepad, took up a pencil in front of him, and studied his rival. Each of the former preachers hoped to cover his regiment with a little more glory than the other—as everyone with eyes in their head knew. Thomas had assumed command of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers three months before Colonel Montgomery took up the 2nd.

  “This isn’t Indian-fighting,” Thomas said. He sat erectly, which made him seem taller than he was, and his fine locks brushed his starched collar. “Congress doesn’t think colored men can learn discipline. We need to prove they can fight.”

  Montgomery’s chin jutted out. “What we need is to win.”

  Harriet caught herself leaning forward and drew back with her face cautiously blank.

  “Not at the price of dishonor,” Thomas retorted. “You gave your troops too much license in Florida. We’re training soldiers, not bushwhackers. Damaging civilian property breaks every rule of civilized warfare.”

  “No idea what you mean,” Montgomery said, though his eyes gleamed at the reference to his first raid, when his men confiscated local foodstuffs to fill out their scanty rations. “I make it a point not to interfere with private property. I just reminded the boys they have a right to defend themselves if attacked by Rebel pigs and turkeys.”

  General Hunter withdrew another cigar from his top pocket and bit off the end. “I’d order our colored troops to burn every goddamn mansion in Charleston to the ground if I could, but we have barely enough men to hold the Sea Islands, much less attack overland,” he said. The general took up a box of locofocos, struck one against a small piece of iron, and puffed on his cigar to light it. He blew out the smoke, turning the air around his head a deeper blue. “And conscription just won’t work on people used to being swooped up like chickens whenever their masters needed cash.”

  Harriet knew exactly where they could get more volunteers. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. She burned to speak up, but Hunter would listen better if he asked the question. Men always did.

  The debate over how to recruit colored troops had simmered ever since the navy’s invasion sent planters fleeing from the islands off South Carolina’s coastline a year and a half earlier. The day they attacked Port Royal, one white family had abandoned a steaming pork roast, a full pitcher of mint julep, and over five hundred slaves. The poor four-year-old operating the fan over their dining table wasn’t unstrapped from his perch for an hour.

  Yet there had been switchbacks on the path to freedom for those accidentally liberated. The Union declared the Rebels’ property forfeit, but when Hunter freed the human portion of the Confederate “contraband,” Lincoln canceled the order. When Hunter turned slaves into soldiers, Congress pitched a fit and refused to pay them. And when the president issued his Emancipation Proclamation, he took aim only at states in rebellion. Plantation owners in Harriet’s home state of Maryland could keep all the slaves they wanted, so long as they didn’t backtalk the federal government.

  When the proclamation was at last read aloud under Port Royal’s biggest shade tree on Emancipation Day—that blessed January 1, 1863—a thousand contraband surprised the Northerners with a raw, heartfelt version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Harriet asked one old Gullah man how he knew the song, and he said with a smile, “Dat de first ting I larn aftah freedom.” The government finally approved colored units, but hardly a man didn’t worry about being double-crossed once the white gentlemen of the United States patched up their spat. Despite ten thousand freed slaves on the Sea Islands, colored regiments lacked sufficient volunteers.

  Colonel Montgomery glowered at Hunter. “I didn’t join up to twiddle my thumbs.”

  “And the president didn’t assign me command over our first colored regiments to watch them commit suicide,” Hunter said. “God rest John Brown, but I’m not presiding over another Harper’s Ferry. We need more men in uniform to have a hope of taking Charleston, and Lincoln isn’t sending them anytime soon. The president’s barely holding Washington.”

  Now was the moment. Harriet scuffed her shoe against the plank floor as if shifting to get more comfortable. Colonel Montgomery’s head flicked toward her. General Hunter followed his glance.

  “Moses,” Hunter said. “What’s your report?”

  Harriet nodded at the map. “May I, sir?”

  “I’m waiting,” Hunter said.

  Harriet strode to the map across the room while Colonel Montgomery took a seat and tipped back in his chair, scratching his armpit in contemplation of the worn chart. The Jayhawker appeared blind to everything except how to destroy the Secesh. Harriet liked him more all the time. Some beanpole had pinned the map, so she reached as high as she could to tap a squiggly line that burrowed deep into the mainland. The Combahee River watered South Carolina’s richest rice plantations before flowing to the sea.

  “We can recruit right here, General,” she said, pointing to the river. “Y’all keep twisting the arms a men that got freedom right now on the islands. They ain’t sure a Lincoln’s plan and whether he gone stick to it, but they safe for the moment. The men over here,” she said, and again tapped the squiggle of the Combahee, “live in a special kind a hell. They gone do anything to get out.”

  The grooves in Hunter’s face deepened. “Our troops can’t just sail up there, Moses.”

  “Yes, they can,” she said.

  The room grew quiet. Harriet waited.

  Hunter flicked fresh ash into the chipped teacup. “There’s artillery and pickets around every bend.”

  “Artillery’s gone, sir.”

  “Gone? How do you know?”

  “A man who escaped the Nichols place told us they drew the cannons away from Fields Point, where the river meets the Sound. Took the cannons off Tar Bluff, too. Hauled em up Stocks Road and onto the Savannah railway last week. I checked his story yesterday with my own eyes.”

  “Perhaps the guns are in the trench,” Hunter said. He drew again on his cigar. The tip glowed red.

  “Don’t reckon so, sir,” Harriet said. “Cannons been on top a them guard posts all year. We spotted em from the river.” She had seen the Confederate earthworks numerous times, slithering on her stomach through stubby cordgrass wherever the marsh hardened, slipping through the mouth of the Combahee in a dugout when the first inklings of sunrise cast the guns in silhouette.

  “Why would the Rebels remove their artillery?” Hunter said.

&
nbsp; “Don’t know, sir. Contraband say their owners head to high ground during the sickly season. Maybe Beauregard pulling his crews back ahead a the vapors. Whatever he’s thinking, the cannons are gone, along with their crews. Ain’t nobody there except a handful of guards on picket duty.”

  Harriet paused. Snares took patience.

  “That ain’t all,” she said.

  “What else?” said James Montgomery.

  Harriet looked at the Kansan whose gnarled hands gripped the arms of his chair as if ready to bare-knuckle fight the next man who walked through the door. This was the subject where every officer conceded her authority. What slaves knew. It was the reason she was there. The fly in the buttermilk and only Southerner in the room. Governor Andrews of Massachusetts, Harriet’s old acquaintance, had promised she would be useful. Desperate as he was, General Hunter had asked her to spy behind enemy lines, more or less as she had done on the Underground Railroad. With the Union courting extinction as each defeat knocked the wedge between the states deeper, Hunter apparently decided her sex didn’t matter.

  Harriet glanced around the table. Thomas wielded his pencil, and his hazel eyes darted back and forth from his notepad to the map on the wall as he sketched a diagram. She’d hooked him, too. Now she needed General Hunter. It was his decision.

  “A new Rebel unit took over jest a couple months ago,” Harriet said. “One a our men has a cousin who sweeps the tents. He overheard the new commander being chided for false alarms. Beauregard told him, drill more. Get to know the roads. It appears the commander allowed his troops to go to seed once they moved up and can’t find his own pillow in the dark. We can slip past em.”

  “Up Stocks Road?” Hunter said.

  “Up the Cum’bee. If our ships enter the river fore sunrise, we’ll reach them rice fields jest after slaves start work. More’n a thousand be dressed for the day and ready to run.”

  Hunter drew meditatively on his cigar. He looked skeptical. “And a Confederate army less than a dozen miles away, up Stocks Road,” he said. “Even if their commander isn’t the sharpest, those pickets on the river are his eyes and ears, and he’s got two thousand troops camped behind them.” Hunter squinted against the fresh plume of smoke. “What about the torpedoes? Surely the Rebs didn’t withdraw those, too.”

  Harriet knew this was the weak spot. Slaves had likely tethered the explosive barrels since alligators infested the waterways, and the Confederates relied on bondsmen for disagreeable tasks. She guessed the labor had come off the Lowndes Plantation. It was the only nearby estate that had not leaked runaways. Fugitives from elsewhere said the Lowndes overseer had horns and a forked tail. They quaked at his name.

  “We looking for someone to tell us where they been put,” she said.

  Hunter’s caterpillar eyebrows inched together. “So you don’t know where they are,” he stated flatly. The commander shook his head. “If I wanted to hazard the remainder of our navy, I’d send it back to Charleston.”

  James Montgomery shoved a hand through his wild hair and leaned toward Hunter. The front legs of his chair banged the floor. “We went all the way to Florida for thirty measly recruits, General. It’s time to smite the big rice plantations. Fill our regiments with men trapped there. It’s the only way to get enough troops to take Charleston.”

  The general tapped his cigar into the teacup. “I’m as eager to subdue Charleston as you, Colonel Montgomery,” he said, “but not without an adequate plan. This isn’t a prairie raid.”

  A blue vein throbbed in Montgomery’s high forehead. “Those raids woke the nation.”

  “The Cum’bee ain’t no Charleston Harbor, General Hunter,” Harriet observed. “The Rebs took down their big guns on the river.”

  Hunter grimaced. He spoke sharply now. “Every fool knows that artillery’s only half the problem. Torpedoes trapped us right under Fort Sumter’s guns last month. Almost cost us the fleet.”

  Harriet felt her dander rise at his words. She wasn’t a fool. “This is the time and place to strike,” she said. “’Fore the Rebs haul the cannons back to Fields Point and the commander gets off his duff. I got a good feeling, deep in my bones. I see it in my dreams. The good Lord’s looking down. He’s telling us, make our move. We can get around them torpedoes.”

  “Around five thousand pounds of powder?” Hunter said. “Around a keg you don’t see until you’re on top of it? The Cairo sank in ten minutes. A feeling isn’t a plan, Harriet. Unless you know where the torpedoes are, our ships will end up at the bottom of the Combahee.”

  Thomas stopped writing. He looked up from the opposite side of the table. A change had overtaken the room. From the corner of her eye, Harriet saw Colonel Montgomery glance at General Hunter, then drop his gaze to his chapped hands. Hunter’s expression was severe, as if he’d witnessed similar displays too many times. The only career soldier in the room, Hunter had a bullet slash across his neck from the disaster at Bull Run. The scar turned livid as a flush climbed his throat. Harriet’s gut tightened. Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought up the Almighty. Hunter might consider her religion-addled. There was a slim line, regularly crossed by reformers, between faith and folly. Yet she was sure He would have warned her if the plan were flawed. She’d seen it plainly in her mind—men and women streaming toward Jordan’s shore.

  “A military assault isn’t like smuggling a few people on the Underground Railroad, Moses,” Thomas said, “as dangerous as that is.” He tapped the tip of his pencil on the paper, and the light from the window winked off his Harvard class ring. Harriet knew he was trying to let her down easy. “Whole regiments are at risk.”

  She trained her gaze on Hunter. “I know we need a plan, sir. You don’t have to tell me—”

  “Well, I am telling you,” the general snapped. “Unless you’ve got intelligence on the torpedoes—coordinates on a map—we’re focusing elsewhere. Like on the defense of these goddamn islands.” He collected the correspondence in front of him. A moment later, he glanced up. “Gentlemen? Dismissed.”

  Colonels Higginson and Montgomery rose to attention. General Hunter straightened his papers as if she’d wasted his time. Harriet walked back to her chair, so exhausted that her shoes scraped the floor. The excitement that had driven her had evaporated like brandy dashed in a pan. She felt unsure about everything of which she’d been convinced moments before.

  Hunter might be old, but he was experienced and canny. The officers under him were responsible for hundreds of men. Although John Brown had called her General Tubman, she’d always operated alone. A civilian—and a woman, at that—she didn’t know the first thing about an armed assault. She’d never loaded a cannon or drilled a regiment. She couldn’t write an order or read a telegram. In a dozen missions on the Underground Railroad, Harriet had freed at best a hundred people under cover of darkness in terrain she knew like her mother’s voice. Steal a thousand slaves in broad daylight up a strange river studded with mines? No chance. That would take a magician, not a Moses.

  Harriet retrieved her satchel from the back of the chair. As she lifted the strap over her shoulders, she recalled the heckler with a drunkard’s purple nose who had slandered her at the Melodeon lecture hall in Boston. “Trickster!” he’d shouted from the back of the mobbed auditorium. The insult had upset her abolitionist companions, but Harriet had been proud that day. She’d bamboozled the planters of Maryland again and again—to her boundless satisfaction. Slaveholders underestimated her. No man ever suspected what one puny woman could do. That had been the secret to her success.

  The corner of her mouth twitched. Trickster, sure enough. If she took down the rice plantations of the Combahee, it would be the greatest trick of her whole career. With the Lord’s help, the best thing she ever did. It would prove black troops could fight. Help Hunter recruit enough men to subdue Charleston, symbol of the Rebellion. Give other mothers a chance to keep their babies.

  Her mood flipped like the boom on a boat. Ambition lifted her sails. Let them try to
stop her. Men studied their maps and chomped their cigars and made their plans and told women to wait. Yet she knew what lifetimes of safety didn’t allow most officers to see, just as soldiers afraid to get their feet wet couldn’t find the paths in the trackless marsh. The signs added up: the guns, the new Secesh regiment, their lazy commander, the turn of the season. Years before, God had told her to go back one more time, then another, then another, to set His people free. He’d shown her the way every time. Running wasn’t wrong if you brought others with you.

  Harriet sucked in her breath. But it would not be easy. It might not even be possible.

  The welts on the back of her neck prickled. Goosebumps chilled her arms. She drew the strap of the satchel tightly across her breast as she made her way to the door, comforted by the revolver’s bulk. To persuade Major General Hunter, she would have to get onto the Lowndes Plantation even if the devil did live there and find someone to reveal the location of the torpedoes.

  The thought made her head hurt. She had been in Satan’s house before. If he caught her, she wouldn’t get out alive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sun has just gone down in Charleston Harbor. . . In half an hour, five out of the nine [Union] ships, were wholly or partially disabled! Such is the ghastly fact in its naked proportions . . . Stretching from a point close to . . . Fort Sumter, completely across the channel to Fort Moultrie, is a stout hauser, floating on lager-beer casks . . . strung with torpedoes.

  New York Times, April 1863

  THE UNIFORMED CLERK AT THE COMMISSARY near Major Hunter’s headquarters reached for the pencil behind his ear and leaned a spindly forearm on the counter. The edges of his government logbook curled with humidity, and a molasses thumbprint obscured the pre-stamped page number at the top. A thin man with a receding hairline, Private John Webster glanced over the cheap wire spectacles balanced on the tip of his bony nose. His gaze shifted to some hazy point behind Harriet, then back again, eyes not quite on her. “How much do ye want this time?” he asked with an immigrant’s lilt, possibly Scottish.