More than a century after her death, the Maryland National Guard and Gov. Wes Moore commissioned abolitionist Harriet Tubman as a one-star general.
The Underground Railroad leader was the first woman to lead an armed military operation during a war, USA Today reported. She led a Union Army raid during the Civil War according to U.S. Army historians. The raid freed more than 750 enslaved people.
Tubman was also a spy, scout nurse and cook with the military, WJZ reported. She gave the Union Army intelligence about the Confederate supply lines, locations and missions.
Tubman did get a widow’s pension 20 years after the Civil War for her second husband’s service. She did not get her own military benefits, CNN reported.
She also had no official rank her family said. Tubman’s great-great-great grandniece, Ernestine “Tina” Martin Wyatt, said that her distant aunt was an informal veteran. “She gave up any rights that she had obtained for herself to be able to fight for others.”
Tubman as of this week now holds the rank of brigadier general after the Veterans Day ceremony held at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center, USA Today reported
The honor was called “long overdue” by Maj. Gen. Janeen Birckhead, who said that a state law passed this year allowed for Moore to award the rank.
“Harriet Tubman should be revered always for risking her life and her own freedom and the cause of justice for the enslaved,” Birckhead said. “Now we make the grassroots honor, in a formal way, to proclaim that Harriet Tubman was courageous, she sacrificed, she’s a skillful leader and she advanced the survival of a nation.”
“There is nobody who defined ‘leave no one behind’ in the way that Gen. Tubman left no one behind,” Moore said.
Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland but escaped in 1849 when she was about 27 years old. She lived as a free woman in Philadelphia but returned to Maryland as a conductor on the series of networks called the Underground Railroad at least 13 times to free her family and other enslaved people. In all she saved about 70 people risking her own life. If she had been caught, she would have been sold back into slavery under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.
After the Civil War, she pushed for women’s suffrage working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the National Park Service said.
She also purchased a house in New York in 1859, eventually establishing a home for the elderly on nearby land, which is now part of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park. The home operated from 1908 to the early 1920s.
Tubman died at the care home she established in Auburn, New York, in 1913 and was buried at Fort Hill Cemetery.
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