“I grew up like a neglected weed, – ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented.” Harriet Tubman, 1855
Just over 160 years ago, Harriet Tubman was building intelligence relationships in a foreign territory, developing networks to provide information, and securing access to important economic assets of the Confederacy. By doing so, she set in motion a raid that achieved the essential aim of combat – furthering political goals through force. For Tubman, the aim was the abolition of slavery, and for the Union, the capitulation of the South. For today’s special operations forces, the Combahee River Raid and her life’s work delivering strategic effects through action embody the best of U.S. historical military tradition, and a chronological study of her struggle reveals several valuable lessons. While the full scope of Tubman’s contributions is incomplete, recognizing the limitations of our current historical reference points draws the value of Tubman’s ability to link force to political action in stark relief, and warrants her place as forebearer to special operations.
Constraints of our Chosen History
While special operations formally originated with the Office of Strategic Services during WWII, the force has always traced its lineage further, seeking tactical and intellectual founders to inspire today’s practitioners to refine their craft. The most common patrons of modern American special operations are commonly considered Robert Rogers, the British army officer from the Indian Wars, and “the Swamp Fox” Francis Marion, who conducted a guerilla campaign during the Revolutionary War.
Both men took well-understood tactics of the Native Americans and operationalized them to support conventional campaigns. They are credited as founders of guerilla tactics and Ranger operations, and the U.S. military has worked thoroughly to integrate their original lessons into doctrine, delivering the principles Army-wide to generations of soldiers at Ranger school and other courses. The result is an almost ubiquitous understanding of the value of asymmetric tactics and their application, with nearly any soldier or marine able to parrot “speed, surprise, and violence of action” whenever the answer or motivation seems appropriate. While this is a notable success, it is largely insufficient for the future development of the force.
Since the founding of Special Operations Command in 1987, and especially since the Global War on Terror, the special operations units within the joint force have honed their ability to find and destroy the enemy while developing similar levels of lethality in their counterparts worldwide. If anything characterized special operations activity during the Global War on Terror, it was highly lethal tactical activity with frustratingly elusive political effects. Constant engagement by special operations developed elite units across the globe, particularly Iraq’s Golden Division and the Afghan Commandos, who excelled in direct action raids. Despite their tactical successes, these forces seldom advanced the political causes of their sponsor states. While these units were less likely to commit abuses than local militia, being raided by the Afghan Commandos did not turn a villager into a supporter of the nation’s central government. In fairness to these units, they were designed to conduct discrete counterterrorism operations, not spread and sustain the central government’s influence. But that is both the challenge and the point: advancing strategy through operations is hard. Special operations success in the 21st century depends on the rare individuals who can simultaneously direct intelligence to support operations and align military force with political objectives.
The chosen forebearers of any organization should provide constructive value to develop the current generation, and if the current generation of special operations forces (SOF) is going to continue creating outsized effects in modern conflict, we need to look beyond Marion and Rogers and draw inspiration from other parts of history to ensure that whatever domain in which SOF engages, U.S. military actions advance the political objectives undergirding the United States’s application of force. The story of Harriet Tubman’s life work reveals several valuable lessons in this arena.
Harriet Tubman as a Strategic Actor
Within U.S. national history, Harriet Tubman is a multifaceted political actor who advanced the cause of liberty through distinct lines of effort at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Through her actions within the Underground Railroad, direct advocacy for freedom in the public sphere, conduct of intelligence operations, and leadership of an advance force on the Combahee River Raid during the Civil War, Harriet Tubman demonstrated her resolute ability to apply a variety of different skills relevant to today’s SOF, all in direct support of a noble political goal: the subversion and abolition of slavery.
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in coastal Maryland in the early 1800s and was hired to various households and farms to provide labor. During her childhood, her mother, Rit, threatened violence against their owner and a prospective buyer from Georgia when the men attempted to enter the slave quarters and seize Harriet’s brother for sale. This act of resistance and its retelling throughout her childhood likely developed her belief in the effectiveness of resistance. As Tubman grew out of adolescence, she began seeking ways to physically distance herself from domestic tasks under the close watch of her overseers, instead preferring manual field labor where she was able to learn more about the outside world and opportunities for escape.
Illiterate throughout her life and suffering from a severe head injury from her time as a slave, Tubman’s historical contributions to the emancipation of enslaved blacks had to be captured by other members of her community. Her contributions were those of action, taking physical risks and influencing others to advance a broader cause. In this way, her approach of radical action supported by advocacy, as compared to discourse without risk, offers a reference model to current U.S. forces.
Tubman had married a free Black before her first escape from slavery in September 1849. He was unwilling to travel north in support of his wife’s freedom, so Tubman escaped with her two brothers only to have them force her back into captivity after becoming overtaken by fear. Undeterred, Tubman liberated herself a second time a month later, beginning a cascade of antebellum activity back into hostile territory to guide others to freedom. A mid-range estimate of Tubman’s impact during her involvement with the Underground Railroad depicts thirteen trips into hostile territory, freeing fifty to seventy people directly and providing explicit instruction and guidance to the same quantity before self-guided rescues. Her use and development of human and physical infrastructure, tradecraft, and cover is a direct analog to SOF support to Non-conventional Assisted Recovery. The individual risk she took and the success she delivered were well recognized in the abolitionist movement, with Frederick Douglas writing:
Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.
In addition to utilizing tradecraft to guide people through underground safehouses, Tubman began to involve herself in clandestine political activity before the outbreak of the Civil War. She was involved in recruiting freed slaves as militia and applying her detailed area knowledge in support of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Though this attempt at initiating a slave uprising through a targeted act of political violence ultimately failed, Tubman’s involvement shows an evolution in her thinking on the use of force to achieve political goals. This act, designed to instigate revolution through specific acts of political violence, was influenced by the Haitian revolution and likely represents a unique intellectual development by Brown and possibly Tubman. Despite Italian anarchist Carlo Pisacane developing the idea of direct action for propaganda purposes in 1857, there is no evidence this concept was translated and made its way across the Atlantic in time to inspire the unconventional warfare tactics of John Brown and Harriet Tubman. This willingness to use force to create a specific political effect, in this case instigating a rebellion, advances the understanding of the utility of force beyond that practiced by either Robert Rogers or Francis Marion, and should be immediately recognizable to special operations personnel trained in unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency.
Civil War Service
When the Civil War began, Tubman participated in various capacities, developing human networks, treating casualties, and guiding a Union force deep into Confederate territory during the Combahee River Raid. In military terms, her actions encompassed preparation of the environment, advance force operations, and special reconnaissance. By remaining resolutely focused on direct emancipation through liberation, Tubman linked politically charged action to operations designed to degrade the Confederate economy.
In advance of the Combahee Raid, Massachusetts Governor John Andrews deployed Tubman as a spy to a Union encampment on the sea islands of South Carolina near Beaufort. Here, she began developing access and an intelligence picture of the rice plantations in coastal South Carolina for future operations by integrating into the local Black community. The southern rice plantations were a foreign environment for Tubman. After sugar plantations in the Caribbean, rice plantations were the second most lethal geographic environment for all races in the Americas. In addition to overcoming endemic disease, Tubman worked in a cross-cultural capacity as she could not fully understand the dialect spoken by the slaves on the rice plantations. Despite this language barrier, Tubman leveraged her network to identify the locations of sea mines in the Combahee River, the enslaved men who emplaced them, grain stores, and capital stocks on the targeted plantations.
At the same time, three all-black companies of Union soldiers under Colonel James Montgomery, a former Jayhawker from Kansas, prepared a punitive raid designed to destroy the productive capacity of the plantations by liberating their human capital, destroying their facilities, and seizing any available grain stores. This raid, and others like it, were intended to decrease the supply of rice to Confederate troops and generate forces by training and enlisting the liberated slaves into Union formations.
The raid had a simple operational plan that relied on three factors. First, the Confederate army had withdrawn a majority of its forces during the summer months to avoid the endemic diseases during the “sick season.” This light disposition created space on the battlefield to achieve a relative Union superiority on the plantations and carry out their destruction. Second, the operation was planned to coincide with a full moon and high tide, giving the steamboats used for infiltration the ability to arrive at the objective area with a lower risk of detection. Finally, the network Tubman developed provided access to an otherwise impassable route by removing the mines ahead of the assault force, ensuring tactical surprise.
During the infiltration, one of the boats was grounded on a sandbar in the river, reducing the assault to only two remaining boats after cross-loading their soldiers. To ensure access, Tubman and a small retinue of Black soldiers landed and ensured the mines had been removed from the waterway to fully open the Combahee River. Her network completed their mission, and the Union forces proceeded upstream, displacing a small Confederate force picketing the approach, and occupying the surrounding plantations. The raid liberated 756 slaves and destroyed nine plantations and tens of thousands of bushels of rice. After the raid, 150 of the newly liberated joined Montgomery’s force and began Union service. The raid was deemed successful, and the plantations remained inactive throughout the rest of the war.
Conclusion
Tubman’s service to her ideals and nation has already earned her a permanent place in American history. However, for the special operations community, her service is a particularly valuable model to consider when imagining the parameters of possible action. Her acts in the Underground Railroad, innovations in the utility of political violence with John Brown, and service to her nation in the Civil War demonstrate a wide range of activities and skill sets applicable to special operations today. As the current force iterates its tactics and structure to face future threats, it is important to remember the absolute dedication to a righteous cause that enabled Tubman to continually link tactics to strategy through action. That same focus and willingness to take risks will need to continue for today’s SOF personnel to successfully advance the United States’ interests across all domains, against all adversaries. The number of towering figures in special operations history is truly an embarrassment of riches, and it is time we consider Harriet Tubman as an integral part of this Hall of Heroes.
Wyatt Thielen is a Special Forces NCO with over a decade of service implementing American policy abroad, and a current graduate student at Johns Hopkins SAIS focused on Special Operations policy, employment, and force management.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Image: Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) at midlife. (Library of Congress)
If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.
Leave a Reply