A lesson learned from HARRIET TUBMAN: MILITARY SCOUT AND TENACIOUS VISIONARY, by Jean Wiesen and Rita Daniels

 Much is lost when we don't allow people to reach their full potential.

    This write-up will be much shorter than my usual ones, not because Jean Wiesen and Rita Daniels' Harriet Tubman: Military Scout and Tenacious Visionary is a bad book, but it is a very short and light one. Indeed, it was actually a nice contrast to my prior book, the long and intense Lower Than the Angels, as I always have so much going on in the early fall that short and sweet was nothing to complain about! Neither Wiesen or Daniels are professional historians, and the book feels much more aimed at general audiences, and indeed would be a good place to start on Tubman for my high school students. Nonetheless, I did appreciate the book's efforts to tie Tubman in with the larger story of the Ghana culture that her family had been ripped away from generations prior, as it tells the larger crime of how much the world might have lost by supporting and abiding by the slave trade for centuries.

    I have my issues with Harriet Tubman, notably with its pretty jumbled timeline as it gets into Tubman's later years (I'm too much of a history geek to let go of the way it wildly jumps back and forth at times). Nonetheless, I found the first sections of the book gripping, as it describes what a prosperous and brilliant civilization the Ghana nation had prior to the traumas of colonization. The world might never know how many scientists, inventors, and artists were stripped of their humanity and sent off in crowded, diseased ships across the Atlantic Ocean throughout the 1600's and 1700's, and Wiesen and Daniels tell a moving tragedy as they speculate just what the whole experience might have been like for Tubman's grandmother Modesty (her slave name, as her real name has been lost to history). The authors offer a picture tour of the African slave dungeons, with the door that led to the slave ships eventually being given the dark title "The Point of No Return." Tubman likely learned much from her mother and grandmother as they kept alive the African traditions of herbal healing and caring for elders, and of the importance of music in promoting survival and coping with traumatic incidents. Tubman carried those traditions on as she used music as a coded weapon to aid people in escaping from Southern slave-catchers.

    The book's high point is in telling the tale of how Tubman became the only woman to have any command role of a military operation during the American Civil War, as she aided Union soldiers with her expert knowledge of the South's terrain and where Confederates might have hidden vital supplies; her services eventually convinced Congress to grant her a meager lifelong military pension. It definitely loses steam in its final chapters as it jumps around Tubman's various causes in her later life, but I was still fascinated to learn about how involved she was during the early women's suffrage movement, and in advocating a more universal health care system for America's elderly. Overall, Tubman's extraordinary life showed just how much the country had to learn from black people who had been ripped from their original homeland and enslaved for generations, and just what people were capable of achieving when they were given actual opportunities to grow and lead. Tubman remains an icon of her era, and a testament to how the rich traditions of African cultures evolved and enriched the overall American experience.

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