Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When I went on the Amazon website two weeks ago to add yet more research materials to the plenteous supply I’d already amassed and read for a long-overdue novel about Harriet Tubman’s amazing services to the Union in the Civil War, I was, frankly, crushed to find that Ms. Cobb had gotten there before me with her soon-to-be-released novel. It would have been disheartening to find that an amateur novelist had written and published such a book. But from a celebrated historian and gifted novelist (I had only to read the first few pages offered by Amazon of Hamilton’s Wife to make that apparent) it was something like a blow from a prize fighter. Therefore, I was entirely unprepared for the novel I have now received and read. Why a credentialed historian would do such violence to the actual history of Ms. Tubman’s Civil War services is beyond my comprehension. To make of a woman capable of traveling through slave territory nineteen times, leading more than a hundred desperate slaves to freedom without ever being caught or losing a single soul, into a frail thing dreaming longingly of the husband who denied her fifteen years before as this book opens, is a violation of the strength of character of Harriet Tubman. Yes, yes, we all have needs. But Ms. Tubman was a woman who always put others’ needs above her own. And to complicate her mission for a fling with one of her married (sic) scouts is something that would never have occurred to such a strongly religious woman, with a deeply felt mission. She was in South Carolina for one thing only: to help free her people. And to make the Generals and Colonels and Doctors who were in total respect and awe of Ms. Tubman’s uncanny abilities, into sexist men slighting yet another woman, does those men a serious injustice too. General David Hunter sent a ship, after all, to bring Ms. Tubman to the three-state Department of the South under his command, holding the ship in port for two days until she reached it. He had such confidence in her abilities and character that he immediately provided her with a safe place to stay, a signed pass entitling her to the use of the commissary for her food, and free passage on any vessel she might need to accomplish the tasks he would assign her. Plus a $200 advance on her pay. Instead, she used the money to build a wash house for the ‘contraband’ women to make their own money and lighten the burden on the government to support them. Characteristic of a woman who always, always, put others’ needs above her own. All of that is well-documented history. As is the fact that it was General Hunter himself who gave Harriet that first assignment, to prepare for a raid up the Combahee River by spying on those vast plantations, to get information from the slaves about where their masters’ supplies of cotton and rice and grain were stored for Union seizure, and what they may have overheard (slave-holders constantly underestimated their slaves’ abilities to comprehend, let alone to pass on, secret information) about Confederate plans and troop placements. He gave her $100 to hire scouts with personal knowledge of those plantations, primarily to identify where all the – many more than five – ‘torpedoes’ had been sunk along that river, and where the sandbars were, so the Union gunboats could safely travel up it. Not to remove torpedoes, but to destroy bridges and railroad tracks. And certainly not to free particularly the slave men for recruitment into the Union Army, with the women and children to be taken aboard only to make the men more willing to come. Harriet would never have agreed to such a priority, let alone have conceived such a plan herself, which devalued women and children. Most of the scouts Harriet hired were runaways from the Combahee plantations, so they got fully trustworthy information from their former friends, who had done the sinking of the mines, after all, because it was such a dangerous job. It would have made no sense for Harriet to ride up and down that river with her scouts, hoping to spot torpedoes under the murky waters. She was chosen for the job because of her ability to slip in and out of ‘enemy’ territory without detection, and that’s what she would have done. Alone. And she’d have spoken primarily with other women. To be seen talking to a man would have drawn far too much unwanted attention. And then there is having her bake all day and peddle her pies and gingerbread. What, to make her a ‘real woman’?! Ms. Tubman began baking at night after a long day of nursing in the hospitals, to support herself after she forfeited her pay and food access to lessen the distance between herself and the Gullah and ‘contraband’ women, who at first put her at arm’s length because of her special standing in the military. And she paid youths to sell those pies and gingerbread and root beer; she hardly had any time for such things herself. Because she was nursing, not sweeping in the hospitals, using her Mammy Doctor’s knowledge, passed down among the slaves, for making teas from roots and herbs to cure the dysentery sweeping the camps from unsanitary practices. She also appeared to change the course of serious contagious diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis without ever catching the disease herself. So miraculously did she accomplish that, in the doctors’ and commanders’ minds, that she was taken to Georgia and Florida too to work her magic cures. (My own suspicion is that she simply told the disease-stricken soldiers, particularly the blacks, with a conviction that she herself held, that God needed them to get well so His plan could be fulfilled of freeing the slaves.) Clearly, I could go on and on, but I will just express my great sorrow and indignation that Harriet Tubman and those three remarkable men, General Hunter and Colonels Montgomery and Higginson, who labored with mutual respect in that terrible war for the objective all four of them shared, the eradication of slavery once and for all, have been so fundamentally misrepresented. There is plenty of evidence of sexism and racism in our burdened culture, now as then. But apparently the strength of the woman’s character and freedom from prejudice herself, made her beloved by all who met her. She was often a house guest of her Northern abolitionist friends for weeks at a time, and was as beloved by Thomas Garrett as by Frederick Douglass. To have represented her as a lesser, needy woman is a disservice to a true heroine and to herstory. If a man had written it, we would be howling for his blood.