Tubman’s work didn’t end with the Underground Railroad. As a nurse in the Union Army and a spy against the Confederacy, she continued to fight for freedom.
Any student of American history is no stranger to Harriet Tubman. Called the Moses of Her People, Tubman famously escaped slavery herself in 1849 and then returned to guide family and friends to freedom along the Underground Railroad. She freed dozens of people through her work in the 1850s. Perhaps her most significant, but less celebrated, contributions came during the Civil War, when she worked for the Union as a nurse, soldier, and spy.
When Araminta was in her early 20s, she married John Tubman, a free Black man, and changed her name to Harriet. Even though her husband was free, Harriet Tubman was not. Like most enslaved people, she and her family were in constant risk of being split up if their owners decided to sell.Toughness, determination, and resilience—all of these factors contributed to Harriet Tubman’s many successes on the Underground Railroad and her work during the Civil War.
That May, a group of Black Americans fled their Virginia enslavers and took refuge at Fort Monroe. Early in the war, there was no universal approach about what to do with refugees like them, but General Butler took an aggressive stance. The Union was at war with the Confederacy, which meant that he could seize the property, including enslaved people, of enemies of the state.
Governor Andrew asked Tubman to travel to Port Royal to aid the growing refugee community there in the Sea Islands. Tubman welcomed the new assignment, and, after getting her affairs in order at home, she departed in May 1862.This 1863 card, designed by Henry Louis Stephens, was part of a campaign to recruit Black soldiers into the Union army.When the war began in April 1861, free Black people had limited opportunities to contribute to the war effort, especially on the battlefield.
Abraham Lincoln presides over the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet on July 22, 1862. This engraving by A.H. Ritchie is based on a painting by F.B. Carpenter.When the U.S. Army decided to let Black Americans fight, volunteer Black regiments arose in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Kansas, and South Carolina. Two Union colonels, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and James Montgomery, would command two of these regiments. They arrived in South Carolina, where Tubman was stationed.
In the early morning hours of June 2, the Union forces attacked, wreaking havoc on the rice plantations along the river. Tubman led her own raiding party of eight men, helping to liberate enslaved people and seize whatever resources they could. Tubman later recalled how people seemed to drop what they were doing when they realized the Yankees were there:
The success of the raid on Confederate supplies and homes along the Combahee River in June 1863 owed much to Tubman’s advice and planning and her leadership of one of the raid parties.Tubman also described her triumph in a letter she dictated to a friend:
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