Tubman was not a pure pacifist, despite her devout belief in God. She carried a pistol as well as prayed on her journeys and was a friend of John Brown, the legendary White armed rebel of Harper's Ferry. He called her General Tubman. "When the Civil War began, Tubman prophetically stated that it would end slavery, much to the disbelief of her abolitionist friends. General Tubman, who in a sense had been fighting her own small-scale civil war since 1849, became actively involved in the war effort. In addition to caring for wounded colored soldiers, she used her intelligence-gathering skills to help subvert the Confederacy at the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina" (Gill 2004, p.3). Yet the federal government's refusal to grant her a pension for her services during the Civil War meant that Moses died penniless, in her nineties. Tubman's legacy came not in the love shown to...
[ View Full Essay]