The Rice on the Combahee
June 1863 · Harriet Tubman, guiding a Union raid that has freed more than seven hundred enslaved people
Three gunboats have come up the river in the dark, past the mines, because she knew where the mines were. By dawn there are more than seven hundred people on the decks and in the flats (whole families, cooking pots, a woman with twins slung over her shoulders), and the plantations along both banks are standing empty.
The standing order is to destroy what the plantations produce. The rice mills, the storehouses, the barns, the crop in the fields. It is the food that feeds Confederate soldiers, and burning it shortens the war.
It is also the food that feeds this district. Everyone who did not get to the boats this morning is still here (the old, the ones who were locked in, the ones who ran the wrong way), and they will be here in November with nothing.
The officers will follow her lead. She has been in the country for more than a year and she knows what the winter does.
The torches are already lit.
Burn it all
Take the people, leave the storesOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
The raid burned the rice mills, the storehouses and the fields, and brought out more than seven hundred people in a single night, the first military operation in American history planned and guided by a woman. Tubman had scouted the mines herself through a network of local informants. She was paid almost nothing for the war, spent thirty years petitioning the government, and received a pension of twenty dollars a month in 1899. She died in 1913 in the home for the aged she had founded and then had to be admitted to. Over ten years and roughly thirteen trips on the Underground Railroad she brought out about seventy people and never lost a passenger, carrying a pistol, and not only for slave catchers.
The philosophers weigh in
Burn it"One district's hard winter against a season of the whole institution. I would not enjoy the sum, but I would not pretend the alternative is free either: leaving the barns is also a decision about who suffers."
Spare it"The people on the boats can be counted and photographed. The ones on the bank in November cannot, and that is exactly why the arithmetic always comes out in favor of the torch."