Will there ever be an accurate movie about the life of Harriet Tubman?

Not in 2019, not in 1973, not even starring Cicely Tyson: We need the whole truth

Glory was an inspiring movie, even if the presentation is in many ways inaccurate. Hidden Figures was also inspiring, and loosely based on real events, all out of chronological order and mixing up what happened to who, when and under what administration. But when I saw the movie Harriet at the theater, I knew I was not going to buy the DVD. Its what I call a script writer's fantasy. Some people just think that history, or someone else's novel, is their own private canvass to paint their own personal vision on. It isn't.

This movie doesn't come close to depicting the life of Harriet Tubman. It just doesn't. If it were based on a comic book, like Black Panther, there would be nothing to object to. Everyone knows there is no such place as Wakanda. Its just a great plot for an engaging fantasy that makes some solid what-if kind of points. But Harriet Tubman is a real woman who lived a real life in the real world, and this movie doesn't show her for who and what she really was.

Perhaps the most ludicrous scene is the parody of Tubman's scouting missions deep into confederate territory, commanding U.S. Army soldiers. She commanded many such missions, with great success. She did not command troops who stood up on shallow draft boats at the seashore waiting for fleeing slaves to run over the hill with their clueless masters chasing close behind. Her missions covered many miles inland, identifying confederate military dispositions, seizing materiel useful to the union war effort, and recovering enslaved families wherever they lived or worked.

No soldiers with even a couple of weeks in boot camp would stand up in a boat and fire a massed volley. Their aim would be poor, and the recoil would overturn the boat, dumping them in the water. Neither did the enslaved population have advance notice of Tubman's top secret missions. Nor did those who claimed title to slaves run on foot twenty feet behind their absconding property like the cartoon characters of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. They would have ridden in force, well armed, knowing they were up against a military scouting mission.

But mostly they ran away. Thomas B. Allen's Harriet Tubman: Secret Agent, gives some detailed accounts. A typical raid up the Combahee River targeted nine plantations with up to 3000 slaves owned by one family. The raid involved 300 men on three gunboats, destroying a pontoon bridge, driving away confederate cavalry, taking over confederate rifle pits.

The only thing overseers did was run away, calling on slaves to follow, which they didn't -- they did run toward the gunboats. A line of South Carolina volunteer infantry (black) held off an attack by confederate sharpshooters and cavalry for half an hour, until the guns of the gunboat John Adams dispersed the confederates. Now that would have been an absolutely riveting movie. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, published in 1869 by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, is an excellent contemporary source.