Having To Refight It

There's a weird and ugly Lost Cause vibe about all this anti-woke, anti-DEI nonsense.

You can pull people's names off of camps and boats and buildings, and change the records so their presence in our history seems diminished. But you can't remove the people - not completely.

And you can't change what happened.

What they did, or what they said, or what others wrote about them - it's all part of what actually happened to make this country what it is, and what will continue to influence whatever it's to become.

Memory is a powerful thing, and we have to take some care to get it right.

So OK, let's pull down those statues that honor "heroes" of the Confederacy - because you're not a hero when you kill your neighbors in the name of preserving slavery.

Likewise, let's rename some of the military installations after people who weren't leading a violent insurrection aimed directly at the heart of the promise we made to ourselves that we would always keep trying to move towards that "more perfect union".

And don't try to tell me something like DEI is an attempt to change history too. It's not. There's a big difference between outright lying about what happened, and correcting the record to get us a little closer to understanding what really did happen.

If we let government arbitrarily tell us that what we remember isn't what we remember, we're not being educated or re-educated, we're being gaslighted - reprogrammed with a set of faulty instructions.

I've always gotten a kick out of learning about history, and it rankles my ass somethin' fierce whenever I learn that what they taught me in school was not the truth, or that they left out a few little details that would've made my thinking clearer and more objective.

Actually, Secretary Hegseth, Harriet Tubman was a war hero

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is wrong to consider stripping her name from the USNS Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman never formally enlisted in the U.S. military. She was a war hero nonetheless.

Many Americans know Tubman for her courage and sacrifice as conductor of the Underground Railroad, but fewer recognize her as a Civil War spy and military leader. Tubman was the first woman to lead a combat regiment during the Civil War, and in an opinion issued this year, the U.S. Army Office of the General Counsel acknowledged her as one of the few women who served as a soldier in the Civil War. Those contributions merit her the honor of her namesake, the USNS Harriet Tubman.

Now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to consider removing Tubman’s name from the ship, alongside others named after former Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. These vessels are part of the John Lewis-class of oilers named for civil rights leaders beginning in 2016. The ship named for gay rights activist and Navy veteran Harvey Milk was renamed in June. Hegseth is seeking to reestablish “warrior culture” in the military, but the removals would betray that culture. Under the Trump administration, the National Park Service also removed a portrait of Tubman and portions of text describing the history of slavery from a webpage about the Underground Railroad before later restoring them.

Tubman deserves to retain recognition of her immense contributions. As then-Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said upon announcing the ship’s name, “Our fleet benefits from having her name emblazoned on the hull of one of our great ships.” Often called the “Moses of her people,” Tubman was born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore; she escaped in 1849 and sought freedom in Philadelphia. She risked that freedom to return to Maryland more than a dozen times over the next 11 years and rescued 70 people, advising dozens more who freed themselves.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announces a U.S. Navy ship will be named after Harriet Tubman on Sept. 17, 2023, in Church Creek, Maryland. (MC1 Omar Powell/U.S. Navy)
Yet Tubman’s service during the Civil War is perhaps her most consequential legacy. After the U.S. military reclaimed Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, from the Confederacy in 1861, Tubman was sent on a critical mission to gather intelligence from the 8,000 formerly enslaved people who had escaped to Union lines. She was attached to Gen. Isaac Stevens’s headquarters and worked for Gens. Rufus Saxton and David Hunter, commanding a ring of Black men as spies, scouts and river pilots.

Tubman’s little-known mission came to fruition on June 1, 1863, when she guided three U.S. Army boats loaded with 300 Black soldiers from Col. James Montgomery’s Second South Carolina Volunteers, and a battery of White soldiers from another regiment, up the Combahee River into Confederate-controlled territory. Earlier, Tubman and her men had infiltrated Confederate plantations and identified the enslaved men who were forced to plant mines along the Combahee River to prevent Union access. With their help, Tubman’s men and the U.S. Army officers defused the mines. Those soldiers also rooted out Confederate forces, burned seven plantations— including the owners’ homes, barns, stockpiles of rice, and stables— and cut Confederate supply lines by destroying a bridge.

From those burned lands, hundreds of enslaved people flocked to the soldiers’ rowboats at the river shore. Fearful that the rowboats might capsize, Montgomery asked Tubman to calm the crowds. Using her strong voice, she started singing and was met with a joyful response of clapping and shouting. Seven hundred and fifty-six people were liberated that day; the U.S. Army did not lose a single life. The Combahee Ferry Raid is now considered the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history.

That Tubman was prohibited from enlisting in the U.S. Army did not stop her from risking her life for the enslaved, or for a nation that hadn’t yet recognized her rights as a citizen. Though she was not paid for her work, which also included nursing the sick and cooking for officers — she took in laundry to scrape by — her service with the armed forces helped make the Combahee River Raid one of the most successful campaigns of the war.

Harriet Tubman was a civil rights leader, but she was also a military hero who risked her life fighting for freedom, our nation and the perfection of our democracy. She earned the honor of having the USNS Harriet Tubman named after her. It should remain part of her legacy — and ours.