Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero by Kate Clifford Larson

Author:Kate Clifford Larson [Larson, Kate Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Ethnic Studies, Slaves, Social Science, African American Studies, Historical, Slavery, Cultural Heritage, Women Slaves, African American Women, Antislavery Movements, Antislavery Movements - United States - History - 19th Century, Fugitive Slaves - United States, Slaves - United States, Tubman; Harriet, Underground Railroad, Fugitive Slaves
ISBN: 9780345456281
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
Published: 2004-12-28T08:00:00+00:00

By the first of July plans were in the making for an assault on Charleston, under the leadership of General Gillmore, and the regiments in the Port Royal district were mobilized for action. It would be an immense undertaking and a difficult fight. After days of bombardment and combat, Gillmore was certain that the Confederate defenses on Morris Island at Fort Wagner had been debilitated enough for a frontal assault. Others, however, thought the defenses had not been sufficiently damaged and that the Union assault forces would be exposed “like a flock of sheep.”99 On the morning of July 17 the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, under the command of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, was called into action and readied for the assault.100 On the evening of the eighteenth they moved into position on the beachhead on Morris Island, opposite Fort Wagner, in preparation for their attack the following morning.

Tubman had followed the regiments up the coast to their positions outside Charleston Harbor. Probably there as a nurse and cook, but perhaps even as a scout, Tubman witnessed the carnage inflicted upon the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts on July 19 at Fort Wagner.101 She later told an interviewer that she served Colonel Shaw his last meal.102 She had probably become quite familiar with Shaw and his regiment since they had arrived in Beaufort six weeks before. Frederick Douglass's two sons, Lewis and Charles, were members of the Fifty-fourth, and Tub-man no doubt knew both young men.103

Tubman's description of that fateful day, as stunning in its poetic form as it was haunting, would long be remembered: “And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.”104 Union losses were horrific: 1,515 dead, wounded, missing or captured, compared to only 174 Confederate casualties. The Massachusetts Fifty-fourth was particularly hard hit, with 256 casualties, many of them missing and presumed dead.105

The wounded were transported to Beaufort, where Tubman tended to them. Charles A. Smith, a member of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, recalled meeting Tubman at the hospital when she was assigned by Montgomery to provide nursing and comfort to the wounded and dying soldiers felled during the Wagner assault.106 Tubman later recounted the dreadful conditions and the difficult environment in which they had to care for the wounded and ill soldiers:

I'd go to the hospital, I would, early every morning. I'd get a big chunk of ice, I would, and put it in a basin, and fill it with water; then I'd take a sponge and begin. First man I'd come to, I'd thrash away the flies, and they'd rise, they would, like bees round a hive. Then I'd begin to bathe their wounds, and by the time I'd bathed off three or four, the fire and heat would have melted the ice and made the water warm, and it would be as red as clear blood.

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