What happened
Abolitionist Harriet Tubman was posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard Monday, 161 years after she became the first woman to oversee an American military action during a time of war. In that June 1863 raid, Tubman used intelligence she had gathered to direct three Union Army steamboats up the Combahee River in Confederate-held South Carolina, liberating more than 750 enslaved people.
Who said what
“Today we celebrate one of the greatest authors of the American story,” a “soldier and a person who earned the title of veteran,” Gov. Wes Moore (D) said at a Veterans Day ceremony at Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “Maryland’s own, Gen. Harriet Tubman.”
Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849, used skills she had honed liberating more than 70 other enslaved Black people in her subsequent work “as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War,” The Associated Press said. Her “military service isn’t a familiar part of Tubman’s legacy for most Americans,” The Washington Post said, but the fact she was “often dismissed, underestimated and ignored” is what “made her such an effective spy and scout” and also explains why “it took our nation 160 years to honor her properly for her military service.”
What next?
Tubman’s “status as an icon of history has only been further elevated within the last few years,” the AP said, but decade-old “plans to put Tubman on the $20 bill have continued to stall.”