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So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.
This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.
Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).
Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):
We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.
First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.
This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.
Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.
Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.
In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.
Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.
I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.
A big part of the issue with Tubman is that professional historians didn't really start taking African American History seriously until the 1970s, which was coincidentally around the same time that popular "revisionist" history started making inroads. Tubman is an interesting figure because her contributions to American history aren't unique, but her status is because she's identifiable. She's representative of a group of anonymous people who did similar things but didn't get the same profile. The upshot is that she didn't attract the same interest from historians looking to examine her life in detail. While social history, also of increased prominence since the 1970s, does look at people who aren't "great figures", it also consciously avoids trying to create them. For instance, a social history of the Underground Railroad would gather recollections from as many people as practicable and avoid placing emphasis on any one individual.
It wasn't until the early 1990s that the idea of examining the American mythos itself became the subject of serious discussion. Mystic Chords of Memory looked at how historical myth is created and how it changes over time. James Loewen isn't a historian and his work is controversial, but Lies My Teacher Told Me was a popular success and thus drew attention to the idea of heroification and raised general awareness that history isn't the pat story you got from high school textbooks. It still took another ten years before historians started looking at Tubman, and by then the process of making her into a heroic figure was complete, her life story filled with the kind of anecdotal detail that historians find suspect.
The consensus that emerged in the 2000s was basically that ther broad arc of her story is true but that some of the details have largely been either exaggerated or fabricated. She was a well-known and respected conductor on the Underground Railroad, but the number of people she helped escape was not in the hundreds but was more like 70. She did work as a nurse and spy during the Civil War. She had some kind of relationship with John Brown; she was prominent enough among the abolitionist community that she is mentioned in his writings. Bradford heavily relied on interviews with Tubman, but she also wrote to contemporary figures Tubman had mentioned for verification, and these letters survive.
I believe her participation in the Combahee Ferry raid is also pretty well supported.
I actually looked into this the other day. As it happens, Tubman was posthumously promoted to one star general last month, and her participation in that raid is given as part of the justification. Wikipedia says she lead it, linking to the website of the National Mall eyesore as a source. It says:
As its source, it links to History channel website:
So her leadership in that raid has already turned into just accompanying soldiers.
I looked at other sources talking about her promotion, like NPR and Smithsonian, both obviously very sympathetic to Tubman. They are much more careful about describing her role. NPR says she “helped guide” soldiers, which makes sense if you understand her role as a spy and a scout. Smithsonian says she “oversaw military operation”, which is close to claiming her to be leading it, but then it clarifies that she “worked with” Colonel Montgomery on it, and anyone with experience in corporate performance reviews knows that “worked with” means “been there but hasn’t actually contributed much”.
So, it seems like the Wikipedia and NMAAHC are basically full of shit when they say she led the raid, but somehow the belief that she did is widespread, apparently thanks to Wikipedia. Additionally, promoting her to Brigadier General for her military role is extremely jarring. While I think it would definitely be reasonable to posthumously grant her a military rank for her spying and scouting role, a 1 star general rank is much too high, and frankly insulting to other Civil War participants, like eg Colonel James Montgomery, who actually led the raid.
Either way, in my mind, Tubman joins the long list of diversity heroes whose actual achievements have been wildly overstated, like Ada Lovelace, or Margaret Hamilton.
All of this is really just a fancy way of them stating that she basically showed the path to the Unionist unit.
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