Nearly a Century Later, Harriet Tubman Gets Pension for Wartime Service

TBO ^ | 10/30/03 | AP

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

AUBURN, N.Y. (AP) - The U.S. government is finally settling up with abolitionist Harriet Tubman for her service as a scout, nurse and spy during the Civil War. An appropriations bill headed to President Bush includes $11,750 to preserve and maintain the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn - an amount equal to the pension Tubman should have received from 1899 to 1913 if calculated in today's values, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday.

Tubman requested the pension for her wartime service but never received it.

She was paid a widow's pension of $8 a month for the service of her second husband, Nelson Davis. Congress ultimately raised the amount to $25 a month, but Tubman received only $20 a month until she died in 1913.

Tubman, a former slave, led more than 300 runaway slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, a string of safe houses and hiding places from the South to the North.

[Steely Glint]

Can my grandfather many times removed now be granted his Revolutionary War pension that the panel turned down because even though he fought in thirteen campaigns he wasn't a Regular? Plus interest and inflation adjustments?

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

What standard has been set?

[mhking]

Did ANY women who served receive their pension? I doubt it.

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[stand watie]

YES. SOME did.

many federal females NEVER got a dime, though some did get their correct pension.

when the former CSA states started paying veterans pensions, the female rebels (some of whom had been armed/uniformed!)generally got pensions on the same basis as the male veterans.

free dixie,sw

[billhilly]

This seems to me to be a good thing. It can't be equated to reperations, for those of you who want to argue.

I'm guessing that no reporting of outside income, or counting of chickens, hogs, goats or canned jars of vegetables came into play in those days, so Harriet Tubman, with her twenty dollars a nonth in 1913, probably lived rather well by the standards of those days.

[Held_to_Ransom]

Certainly she did by the poverty standards of the South.