The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  She turned around to gauge the position of their sister ship. The Harriet Weed must have slowed its engine before they did, according to some plan of Montgomery’s, because she now hung well back in the river to allow the John Adams to make landfall. The horizon glowed dully with the approach of dawn. The moon had finally set, and the sky overhead was gray.

  Harriet left the pilothouse to join Samuel on the narrow walkway. Three decks below them, two crewmen leaped from the bow onto a rude dock. One landed on his feet. The other stumbled and fell to one knee but instantly jumped up to catch a line thrown at his head. Harriet tensed for gunshots from the fort, but the crew cleated the gunship to a piling without incident.

  Someone pushed out a gangplank. A white officer armed with a sword and musket ran down the plank, followed by a small detachment of colored soldiers, their boots thumping hollowly. Harriet counted nine men, all with rifles aimed at the earthworks. The next moment, the two deckhands untied the ship and jumped aboard again. The engine roared, and the smokestack belched a black cloud that drifted over the fort.

  As the boat pulled away on its upstream course, Harriet gripped the railing, riveted to the drama on shore. The soldiers rushed the weedy hill on which the Rebel picket station sat. One man tripped and fell as a gun went off. Harriet gasped. The soldier sprawled on the ground. He must have been hit. Then he sprang to his feet, grabbed his smoking musket, and continued upward.

  In a moment, their advance troops had overrun the earthworks and were inside. Captain Apthorp waved his hat over the wall. Strangely, no shots had been fired other than the soldier’s accidental discharge. The outpost must have been abandoned. Harriet wondered if the pickets had spotted the John Adams in the moonlight and gone for help.

  “Right behind you, ma’am,” a youthful voice said.

  Harriet turned. The ensign held the chair from the pilothouse. He set it down, facing upriver. “Captain Vaught sent this,” the young man said. “Colonel Montgomery informed him this was your plan, ma’am. Captain said you ought to have front row.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. Touched at Vaught’s gallantry, Harriet sat down. But she kept to the edge of the chair, careful not to get too comfortable. She couldn’t afford to drop off.

  The sharpshooters remained at their posts outside the pilothouse. Samuel scrutinized the murky river in the dim light. Below Harriet on the hurricane deck, two officers equipped with binoculars scanned the shore. The flood tide moved briskly now, and within half an hour, they had rounded the oxbow on the approach to the picket station at Tar Bluff. The fort appeared on the right, half a mile ahead.

  Harriet got to her feet. “Samuel. You see the torpedo?” she called above the throb of the engine.

  Without awaiting an answer, she stepped into the pilothouse. “Captain Vaught. You have the torpedo at Tar Bluff marked on your map?”

  The bearded captain stood smoking his pipe over the chart table in the corner. He looked up, and then down again at the map. He gestured toward a coordinate with his corncob. “Montgomery says it’s right here. On the near side of the landing.”

  Harriet studied the map that bore the same markings as the one she’d given Hunter. “Yes, sir.”

  Samuel put his head in the pilothouse. “Think we spotted it, Captain.”

  They followed him on deck. The sharpshooters had their rifles to their shoulders now, aimed at the fort on the distant rise. Samuel pointed downward.

  The two officers with binoculars waved up at them from the hurricane deck. “There!” one of them called and pointed to a spot some yards ahead. A faint, diagonal-shaped ripple appeared in the water, in the pattern of an arrowhead. It didn’t look any different from the trail made by a gator’s snout, but the ripple didn’t move in relation to the shore, Harriet observed, and it was in the right area.

  Captain Vaught dashed back to the wheelhouse. “Torpedo ahead, starboard! Tack to port,” he ordered the colored pilot. “Signal the Weed,” he told the ensign, who took up a wigwag flag from a metal cylinder next to him and signaled the Harriet Weed from the open doorway.

  The large ferryboat glided to the left, around the danger. Harriet leaned over the railing as they passed the snag, but the girth of the lower decks, built atop one another, obscured her view of the waterline. The ship then pulled toward the right again, aiming for the makeshift dock at the foot of Tar Bluff. The sharpshooters trained their sights, the boat crew leaped to the pilings, and a small company rushed the fort some thirty feet above their heads.

  Again, it was over in moments. Here, too, Confederate defenses were down. No rifle fire, no artillery, no guards. A buzzard, startled from its perch on the wall, winged its way overhead. The dusky river and primitive shore were so quiet aside from the noise of their ship that it seemed there had never been a war.

  Colonel Montgomery came up the ladder. He went straight into the pilothouse. Harriet followed. She kept her back to the wall. Captain Vaught removed the pipe between his teeth. It had gone out again, and he stowed it on a window ledge for safekeeping. “I thought those forts were manned.”

  Montgomery lifted his hat and pushed back a hank of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “I’m sure glad they weren’t.”

  “Might the Secesh be luring us upriver?” Vaught said. “Turning sidewheelers in a narrow channel is no easy trick.”

  “I don’t think they knew we were coming,” Montgomery said. “My hunch is they saw us and lit out for reinforcements.”

  Harriet thought of the Rebel army camped ten miles from the Combahee ferry. She prayed that Samuel’s horse trick had cemented the guards’ reputation for false alarms. If the Secesh got their field artillery down Stocks Road before the gunships escaped, their cannons would sink the wooden targets.

  “Either that,” Montgomery said, “or they’ve concentrated their pickets at the ferry for some reason. Let’s hope we don’t find an army upriver.” The Kansas Jayhawker rubbed his hands together in an unsuitably eager fashion. Harriet pictured him on a raid with wild John Brown, caution tumbling behind them on the road.

  “One problem at a time, though,” Montgomery continued. “First, we’ve got to locate the torpedo on the approach to Nichols.”

  The captain nodded as if that at least conformed to his expectations.

  “Then we’ll proceed on past while the Weed commences the operation,” the colonel said.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Harriet interrupted. “This mean the John Adams gone handle the Lowndes Plantation?”

  Montgomery looked at her as if not quite seeing her. “We’re aiming for the ferry,” he said. “The Adams’s objective is to destroy the bridge across the river and take down the Heyward and Middleton Plantations.” He turned to study the map on the table, talking to no one in particular. “But we still we need to get around the next mine.”

  Harriet felt a flutter of alarm. “We got people at Lowndes Plantation, sir. The man that helped us find the torpedoes.”

  The Kansas Jayhawker glanced up as if he had one second for Harriet and nothing more. “Lowndes was the Sentinel’s mission, and she’s sitting on a sandbar. We’ll stop on the way back if we make good time. If we have room for more contraband,” he said, and he turned back to the chart marked with various symbols.

  Harriet’s hands rolled tight. She stepped outside into the fresh breeze that had risen with the sun. It couldn’t be much later than six o’clock in the morning. They should have plenty of time to reach the upper plantations and still raid the Lowndes estate, so long as they didn’t encounter a Confederate force lying in wait at the ferry crossing. And that was good because Harriet would not leave Jacob and Kizzy behind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I stood on the river of Jordan,

  to see that ship come sailing over.

  Stood on the river of Jordan,

  to see that ship sail by.

  Spiritual

  LUSH RICE FIELDS APPEARED ON EITHER side of the river well before Nichols’s landing on the
north bank. Low levees curved with the river. Slave cabins above and beyond on the hills sat like wooden blocks some careless child had scattered on a green carpet. Dark heads dotted the fields, bent over and already hard at work in the ankle-deep water, weeding the spring crop.

  Suddenly, a small figure in a white turban around half a mile away straightened in the middle of a verdant expanse. It must be a woman, Harriet thought, since she wore a gray flour sack over a long skirt. The slave shielded her brow against the bright sunrise. She froze a long moment, and then she turned to someone stooped several rows over. Harriet wondered what the woman was saying and if she saw the Stars and Stripes flying from the mast. Would a slave so remote from any town know the flag, or that it meant freedom? Had Charles’s informant on the Nichols Plantation alerted the right people?

  A broad causeway dividing the wet fields ran toward a mansion of modest size. The wooden house possessed a long, shaded porch along the front, with a view commanding the river. A white man and a black servant stood on it, looking toward the ships. The white man raised what appeared to be a short telescope. He stood perfectly still with his spyglass trained on the John Adams. The black man was gesturing.

  Harriet gripped the arms of her chair, and then she lifted her hand to wave in salute. She hoped the white man saw her in his telescope. She wasn’t hiding anymore. Now you know, she thought. I’m coming for you. I’m right here.

  The planter lowered his instrument. He said something to his servant, who disappeared into the house. The white man looked again through his spyglass before he ran inside, too. Was he going for his horse to alert the rebel army up Stocks Road?

  The John Adams slowed as they neared the point on the river that Harriet had marked with a nail the week before. The second torpedo had to be nearby. She got to her feet on the narrow deck to get a better view of the muddy current below. An odd patch of berry bushes grew from the side of the levee. It would be a tricky place to pick fruit—but useful as a landmark.

  “There!” she and Samuel called at the same time. He dashed to the pilothouse and was inside even before she. Harriet heard shouts from the hurricane deck as spotters below marked the torpedo, too.

  “Captain. That bush yonder,” he said, pointing. “Snag’s thirty feet out from them bushes.”

  The pilot leaned hard on the spokes of the immense wheel. The ship lumbered slowly toward the south bank. They barely missed the triangular ripple. The ensign again waved his flag from the doorway, and the Harriet Weed mimicked their course. Colonel Montgomery disappeared down the ship’s ladder, and Harriet stepped out of the pilothouse. On the hurricane deck below, she spotted Walter Plowden, who waved up at her. She waved back, and they both grinned. Harriet ducked back inside the cabin. Captain Vaught spoke to the ensign. “Signal the Harriet Weed to land,” and the young officer took up a different flag.

  The John Adams continued its pace, still moving upriver but slowly enough to watch the other ship as she rounded the torpedo and steamed toward Nichols’s landing. Captain Vaught reached for the cord of the ship’s whistle. A deafening blast resounded across the river and rice fields. The Weed replied with a shrill toot of her own. A shout went up from the deck as soldiers waved and hollered at surprised slaves who looked up like startled deer from their work. Harriet broke into a grin at the signal to commence the operation. She hoped John Brown heard their whistle from his throne in heaven.

  Harriet exited the pilothouse again and stood by her chair—too excited to sit—as they passed the Nichols mansion. The activity in the surrounding rice fields had changed. Voices filled the air as people called to one another. Dark faces headed in different directions. Some migrated toward the levee. Others streamed purposefully toward the mansion and cabins beyond. In the middle of one immense field, a man and woman argued as he tugged her toward the river and she pulled toward the cabins in the far distance. Harriet thought of Septima’s sister Juno.

  An overseer holding the reins of a spooked horse on the elevated causeway struggled to get his foot in the stirrup without letting go of his gun. He danced around the skittish animal but kept missing the swinging loop. The horse shied. The white man stumbled. His mouth worked as if he was cursing.

  Samuel came to stand by her. He pointed at the faraway overseer. “Look at that Buckra,” he said with a laugh. “Shitting his pants!”

  Rifles cracked from the deck below. Two sharpshooters had fired at the white man. Just then, he swung up into the saddle, shot his own gun in the air, turned his horse toward the road that divided the rice fields from the forest, and galloped toward the Confederate encampment.

  “Let’s hope he don’t reach the army,” she said.

  The Harriet Weed pulled neatly into the landing. Within moments, a regiment of colored soldiers sprinted from the ship with their muskets, led by a white captain. Four colored soldiers held torches they must have touched to the boilers at the last moment. Two others carried smoking metal buckets filled with hot pitch.

  Harriet stepped around her chair to watch from the rear. The federal soldiers fanned out, running toward different buildings on the plantation. A sizeable group moved in the direction of the main road, perhaps to intercept Rebel pickets before they could reach the main army. A handful made for the barns and a rice mill with a grain chute. Two men with torches ran onto the wooden porch of the plantation house, followed by one with a bucket, who spilled the burning contents onto the floorboards. Harriet couldn’t see what happened next as the John Adams rounded a bend in the river at that very moment.

  Alone now, their ship glided alongside the low dike another mile or so, following the curve of the fields. Workers stared disbelievingly as the ship moved past, but some were already headed back toward their cabins. A few ran. One raggedy man climbed the dike and tried to hail the boat, but the vessel sailed on.

  Harriet called across the water. “Get your people,” she said and pointed in the direction of the Nichols Plantation. “There’s another ship!”

  The man kept waving. Sweat from the morning’s labor coursed down his face. A boy and girl with bare feet stood at the bottom of the levee looking up at him. Samuel cupped his hands to his mouth and leaned over the railing. “The landing. Get to the landing,” he yelled.

  The man nodded, climbed back down into the field, and grabbed his children by the hand.

  An acrid scent arrived on the water breeze. Harriet looked downriver. Three massive columns of black smoke rose over the Nichols Plantation. The air smelled of burning timbers and scorched rice. Their troops must have found the storerooms.

  The incoming tide continued to push strongly. The John Adams steamed upriver faster now. As they rounded an oxbow, Harriet wondered when they would reach the Lowndes property. They soon passed an inlet at the edge of a flat marsh, and she recognized the tributary up which Walter had rowed her a few nights earlier. Jack’s Creek, he’d called it. Incredulous faces met them again as the levee reappeared on the other side of the reed-choked marsh. The workers must not have heard the commotion downriver, though they had likely caught the odor of smoke. Seeing colored soldiers, several people bolted toward the ship. A group of women weeding near the edge of the dike turned their faces in unison, like sunflowers.

  Troops arrayed on the hurricane deck waited with remarkable stoicism at the railing for their turn to disembark and take up the attack, but one man suddenly lifted his rifle overhead. He shook the gun to attract the attention of someone on shore. “Ma,” he shouted. His voice broke. “Ma—!”

  Several women in the field started forward instinctively, and then they stopped. One took a few more halting steps before throwing down her hoe. She began to run. Her arms pumped wildly. She pelted forward without speaking. The man at the rail kept calling, “Ma!”

  A trunk minder must have opened the gates the night before, when sweet water flowed past on the ebb, because the woman’s skirt trailed and floated in the mire of the newly flooded field. She tripped more than once in the drifting grass. Just a f
ew paces from the dike, her foot tangled with some weeds, and she sprawled headlong. Her face and dress were covered with mud when she scrambled up the levee on all fours.

  By then, the John Adams had passed the spot where she jumped to her feet and waved her arms, but the troops on deck parted to allow the young soldier to run the length of the railing with his musket jiggling on his back. He looked ready to jump in the river and swim for her, but at the stern, he stopped. Mother and son appeared rooted, afraid to break eye contact.

  Tears streaked the woman’s face. “William!” she cried.

  Other soldiers shouted and pointed, some downriver to Nichols, others upriver to Lowndes. The young man yelled back. “Downriver, Ma! Downriver.”

  Harriet turned her chair to face the bow, and she gripped the arms to steady her trembling nerves. It was hard to know if the woman would make it in time. Godspeed, she prayed, Godspeed. Only one thing was certain. If a Confederate force awaited them at the ferry, other mothers would soon be left on the bank.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I was awakened in my bed by the driver, who rushed precipitately in my room, and informed me that two of the enemy’s ships were in full sight.. . . I arose, dressed myself with all possible speed . . . and, sure enough, there were the two steamers—one quite small, and the other very large, crowded with armed men in dark uniform. It seemed to me that I also saw women seated in chairs upon the upper deck of the large steamer.

  Joshua Nichols, Combahee Planter

  COLONEL MONTGOMERY RAN UP THE LADDER a while later and stepped inside the pilothouse. Harriet followed impatiently.

  “How far to the ferry?” Montgomery asked Captain Vaught, who kept the unlit pipe clamped between his teeth.

  The captain set the pipe on his chart table. He took out his pocket watch. “We’re at three-quarters flood. Maybe half an hour. Six thirty at the latest. We’ve still got to pass the last torpedoes.”