Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Fifth Fact

JosieHolford / June 16, 2020

There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject:

If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States.

Fort Bragg in North Carolina is ripe for renaming as Fort Tubman. The successful military operation she helped lead – the Combahee Ferry Raid – was in neighboring South Carolina and Tubman was never paid for her services to the Union Army.

It’s the largest US Army base and home of Airborne and Special Operations forces. It was established in 1918 and named for  Gen. Braxton Bragg, a native of North Carolina,  who fought in the Mexican-American War and later for the Confederacy, commanding the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War.

In Take the Confederate Names Off Our Army Bases retired Gen. David Petraeus says it’s time to remove the names of all the Confederates who betrayed their country.  Furthermore, he says, Bragg was an undistinguished military commander incapable of playing well with others. (Incidentally his mother was convicted of the murder of a freed slave.) 

And this brought a poem to mind.

Six year old Ben is doing a project for school. He thinks everyone knows about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. But not so many – perhaps – about her role as soldier, skilled scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War.

The Fifth Fact

For Ben’s project he must research five facts
about his African-American hero and write them
on poster board. He chooses Harriet Tubman,
whose five facts are:Her father’s name was Ben.
Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was born
in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland
and died in New York. Ben asks for advice
about his fifth fact and I suggest:She led more than
300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does
now and says,Everyone knows that, Mom.
So I try to remember the book we read yesterday,
search for the perfect fact, the one that will match
his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind.
Remember, I ask, she was a spy for the North
during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it:
Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during
the civil war. It was a war between the north
which is where the slaves were trying to get
and the south which is where they were.
Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form
that said All the slaves everywhere are free!
which is one of the reasons they were fighting.
On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse
to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike
close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue
past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor
stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken
and Fish in the ‘Hood and Top Twins Faze II
Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station
and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes.
There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue
from the Soldier’s Home to the White House –
much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood,
at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet
of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around
his street corner every morning to bow to the president
at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now
since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home.
But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died,
all the centuries we drag into the next century and the next.
Writing here, in my new neighborhood, the city old
and new around me, I see Harriet Tubman
and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories
and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s
summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving
from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys.
North up Georgia Avenue in our own soldiers’ home –
Walter Reed – the boys and now girls too
mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms
and our capacity for love. Where is their
sworn poet? Harriet Tubman born
so close. All these heroes under our feet.
– Sarah Browning

A raid of the Second South Carolina Volunteers among the rice plantations along the Combahee. Published in the July 4, 1863, issue of “Harper’s Weekly.”
The Pratt Memorial Library.

And while we are at it, where’s that $20 Harriet Tubman bill?

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11 thoughts on “The Fifth Fact”

  2. Great post. We home educate our kids here in Scotland, and for the last 6 months have been concentrating on the USA, not just the tourist attractions, but the makings of this great nation.
    Harriet Tubman was one of the favourite characters to learn about, and respected by us since reading the background story. The other favourite is Sacagawea.
    I will be following you now, to learn and teach our children more about the history of the USA.

    Reply

  4. We visited the store in Maryland where she was injured by the store owner and got a real sense of the geography where she was raised. Thanks for even more background. And why were bases ever named after traitors to begin with?

    Reply

    1. As to why the ten Army bases were named for traitors – senior Confederate commanders – who fought against U.S. troops during the Civil War in order to preserve slavery ….

      The bases are all in the former Confederate states across the South. Most seems to have started as Army camps during WW1 and then rapidly developed in the years between WW1 and WW2.

      The expanding Army needed large tracts of cheap land for sprawling bases and for the terrain and climate needed for training. The rural South had such land available. They placated local (white) community leaders by soliciting suggestion for names. Those locals went back fifty years to suggest their “heroes” of the Confederacy. (ironically is seems that many of these bases are named for bumbling, bungling and incompetent military commanders.)

      The Army didn’t seem to mind the choice of names so long as they got their land and the place to establish the bases and build them fast.

      So the base names were the product of a reassertion of Southern white supremacy. Many of the statues to Confederate leaders were put up in this same post WW1 era. – sixty plus years after the end of the Civil War. It was the height of the Jim Crow era when white violence (lynching etc) was widespread across the South.

      The naming of the bases and the installation of so many statues at this time an assertion of white supremacy. They were symbolic threats and warnings.

      Reply

    1. And she was never paid for her extensive contributions to the Union Army and she died in poverty.

      It’s criminal – but typical – of the racist tRump administration to have put the issue of that banknote on hold. I just hope it’s fast tracked by President Biden. Symbols tell a story and they matter. Harriet Tubman was incredibly brave, resourceful, resilient, persistent and fierce. A true American hero.

      Reply

  6. As a non-American I’m sorry that I’ve never heard of Harriet Tubman, she sounds heroic. Thank you for filling in that gap, and isn’t it a shame that she hasn’t been more widely recognised? What an excellent post.

    Reply

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