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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.
I was just at the African American history museum recently. My mother recently published a paper on the graves, names, and locations of slaves that our ancestors owned.
I bring those both up just to say that in my observation there is a large amount of myth and uncertainty even in things that feel like recent history.
Even internet history is convoluted and difficult to untangle. And we often have all the logs and evidence available!
Harriet Tubman's general exploits seem plausible. There were almost certainly former slaves that worked in semi clandestine roles to ferry other escaped slaves up north. There were almost certainly stories of harrowing close calls. We know for certain there was an "underground railroad" for those escaped slaves, or at least as certain as we can be about these things (maybe a bunch of people all lied convincingly in a similar way).
It also seems like she isn't a very trustworthy narrator. She probably lied about her personal role or took on the stories of others she had heard from. Or maybe she under embellished and the truth is crazier than the stories we got. History sometimes has some off the wall weird shit happening.
I'm not entirely sure how much it matters. Even prominent placement in a video game seems underwhelming. Those leader portraits can and are replaced by game mods. I'm almost certain there are mods that switch out the German leader for Hitler.
Most importantly of all, stick with Civ 4. It's the best in the series, and the peak of the genre. We need more autists like the dwarf fortress guys making video games. Work on the same thing for twenty years and retain all creative control within a family sized social unit. If it was them making the civ game they would have just encoded a whole leadership class that represented Tubman and stuck a random name generator on top of it. We wouldn't have this silly controversy, and more importantly no one without an extreme interest in the game would even be able to articulate a culture war critique of how it was handled.
I've been a big fan of the Civ series since buying the Civ II disks at Kmart in 1996. I'm somewhat up to date on the Leader drama, and I haven't really seen much about Tubman tbh. There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so. Most of it is international, and less about which leaders are chosen and more about which nations are included. The fan groups for Korea and Poland both launched aggressive, decade long campaigns to get included, which were successful. Both also got female leaders who were minor characters from their nation's histories with very little good information about their actual lives. Tubman at least lived in the moden era.
Hot take, Civ rankings from best to worst imo. 4 - 6 - 2 - 5 - 3 (I never played 1) . Honorable mention to Colonization II, which is built on the Civ 4 engine. Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.
The biggest thing going for Civ 4 that makes me (any many, many others) consider it the best was the incredible freedom for modders to alter the game. Vanilla out of the box Civ 4 was mid, the mod community was amazing. Civ 5 changed a great deal about how the game worked, a significant overhaul of the underlying mechanics that turned a lot of people off. Civ 6 addressed many of the problems with 5, while bringing back a lot of the modding freedoms of 4. 3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.
Very good! But, bad replay value. And I still don't know why we haven't had a remake.
I mean, there was Sid Meier's Beyond Earth.
It was OK I guess.
I really wish we had the level of UI accessibility of that game combined with the deep mechanics and settings of alpha centauri. Friends have played beyond earth with me, nobody wants to play alpha centauri.
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