CHURCH CREEK, Md. — Harriet Tubman, like most Black women of her era and many Black women today, was often dismissed, underestimated and ignored.

That’s what made her such an effective spy and scout. It’s also the reason that it took our nation 160 years to honor her properly for her military service.

They finally did this on Veterans Day, coming in entourages and motorcades to her land — the vast, lonely expanse of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — to see Tubman posthumously became a one-star brigadier general in the Maryland Army National Guard.

A governor, generals and scores of veterans drove past the loblolly pines and tall saltmeadow cordgrass that Tubman navigated on foot, in the dark, over and over again.

“She walked from there to New York or Philadelphia, just using the stars and the water,” Maj. General Janeen Birckhead, the head of Maryland’s National Guard, said Monday.

Those years as a conductor on the Underground Railroad prepared her for the extraordinary service that the military honored at last.

“Today we celebrate one of the greatest authors of the American story,” said Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D). “Maryland’s own, General Harriet Tubman.”

Her military service isn’t a familiar part of Tubman’s legacy for most Americans. We hear her story in the context of honoring Black leaders or women. But not so much on Veterans Day.

“Yeah, usually it was that she freed slaves and that she was the conductor of the Underground Railroad,” said Birckhead, who grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and is familiar with the stories of Tubman she learned in school.

But as she grew older and entered the military, Birckhead began to appreciate the significance of America’s first Black, female combat veteran.

“A general takes care of people, absolutely,” Birckhead said. “But a general is also tactical. A general is operational. A general is strategic. And she was all of those things.”

For many, she was called “Moses.” But Birckhead called her “General.”

At the start of the Civil War, Tubman was known for her talent and bravery guiding more than 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. She was so good that there were rumors that she was an Ashanti sorceress who could take on the form of a leopard, according to the Army Historical Foundation.

“Tubman was not a commando or a steely-eyed killer, but she was able to do what neither of those types could do: pass through enemy lines and talk to her people about the local situation,” the historical foundation wrote. “She was what intelligence analysts today would call a ‘human terrain specialist’ who knew how to work with the people to accomplish the mission.”

Her most daring raid was in June 1863, when Tubman directed three steamships up the Combahee River in South Carolina.

Because of the intelligence collected by Tubman and her knowledge of the terrain that night, more than 750 enslaved people were liberated.

“They came down every road, across every field, just as they had left their world and their cabins; women with children clinging around their necks, hanging to their dresses, running behind, all making at full speed for ‘Lincoln’s gunboats’,” wrote a reporter who interviewed Tubman for the Springfield Weekly Republican on Jan. 30, 1869.

Tubman was initially denied the monthly $25 military pension for her service. Instead the government offered her the $8-a-month widow’s pension after her second husband, Nelson Davis, died. A slap in the face.

Rep. Sereno Payne of New York lobbied on her behalf, arguing that her own valuable service should be enough to earn her a war veteran pension. After arguing about it for a year, Congress offered her $20 a month.

The $20 still bedevils her legacy. Ten years after it was announced she would be the new face of the $20 bill, it still hasn’t happened.