Posted in Abolitionists, Civil War

Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth Considering Taking Harriet Tubman’s Name Off Ship

   Published Date: July 5, 2025

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to consider removing the name of Underground Railroad conductor and Abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s name from a Naval vessel. The ship is one of the John Lewis-class of oilers that had been named for civil rights leaders over the last nine years. Hegseth has said he wants to restore a “warrior culture” in the Navy by renaming the ship and others like it. Edda L. Fields-Black, the Pulitzer Prize winner this year for her account of Tubman’s raid at Combee during the Civil War, has written an OpEd in the Washington Post today opposing the deletion of Tubman’s name. According to the author:

“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….
…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.”

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Author: Patrick Young