Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman

A year later, Harriet has finally persuaded the Union Army to accept her as a recruit. She arrives in Beaufort, South Carolina, the headquarters of the Union Army’s Department of the South, where she meets with Major General David Hunter. Hunter is pleased to have Harriet working for him. As Union forces have advanced into South Carolina, thousands of Black people have fled their enslavement, and Hunter, badly understaffed, hopes to make use of their eagerness to help the Union cause. He is struggling to get officials in Washington, DC, to agree that Southern Black people should be able to join the Union Army: Because they are still legally enslaved, these people are considered “contrabands of war” (153), not free people able to join the Army. Hunter understands that President Lincoln is afraid that declaring enslaved people in the South free or allowing them to join the Army will turn border states—like Maryland and Kentucky—against the Union cause. Still, Hunter desperately needs more soldiers, so he takes the bold step of forming divisions of Black soldiers, regardless of what the president tells him to do. He asks Harriet to serve the cause by acting as his liaison with local Black communities, helping him organize the effort to feed and educate formerly enslaved people.

Harriet finds that many of the formerly enslaved people are desperately lacking resources. She organizes classes in sewing, cooking, and other useful skills so that the women can sell their labor or goods to the Northern soldiers. She uses her own money to build a washhouse where they can earn money taking in laundry. Harriet bakes and brews root beer to sell. She spends long hours working at the hospital, helping to nurse both Union soldiers and the formerly enslaved. When dysentery breaks out in Fernandina, Florida, another Union-held town, they send for Harriet’s help. Harriet uses her knowledge of local plants to brew a soothing tea for the ill soldiers in Fernandina. When she finally returns to Beaufort, she can see that serious changes have taken place: There are wooden barracks for Black residents and markets where they can sell their crops. The regiment of Black soldiers looks professional as they drill nearby, and formal schools have been set up for Black children. Harriet also hears that sentiment about Black soldiers has begun to change in the North, and there are rumors that Lincoln is about to sign an important new law. On December 31, 1862, Southern Black people gather to celebrate what is coming on the next day: On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all Black people in rebel Southern states are now free.

Once the Emancipation Proclamation is signed, Hunter’s First South Carolina Regiment, composed of free Black men, is made an official part of the Union Army. More such regiments are added over the next few months, and the Union Army is able to push west from the coastline, deeper into Southern territory. As they move into the interior, troops bring the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to those still being enslaved. The Union troops are plagued by small encampments of rebels spread throughout the area. Hunter asks Harriet to act as a spy, scouting out areas of the interior to gather information about these rebels’ locations. Harriet heads out on foot one night, moving cautiously through fields and woods, to observe the St. Mary’s River area. When dawn comes, she seeks shelter in the quarters of still-enslaved people. As Black people gather to meet the famous Harriet, she spreads the word about the Emancipation Proclamation. The enslaved people have been told by their enslavers that the Union Army intends to capture Southern Black people and sell them into slavery in Cuba; they are relieved to hear the truth from Harriet and give her helpful information to bring back to the Union forces. After a few days of scouting, Harriet has a hand-drawn map with the rebels’ locations marked on it, and she returns to Hunter.

Hunter is so pleased with her work that he puts her in charge of a small group of scouts whose job is to continue spying on rebel forces. She helps the commanders plan effective troop movements and battle plans, and the Union is able to move farther and farther inland. Enslaved people crowd toward the Union riverboats as they return to the coast, and the boats take aboard as many as they can, bringing hundreds of people out of slavery and into freedom.

Harriet stays in Beaufort for a year, working alongside the Union officers. The tide of the war begins to turn. General Sherman begins marching troops south from Tennessee into Georgia and toward the coast. Hunter tells Harriet that the war is all but won and that it is time for her to return home. Harriet agrees to take a furlough to go home to Auburn to see her ailing parents. Rit asks her why she did not send money back to them since she knows that other soldiers’ families are receiving money. Harriet thinks about the unfair way that Black soldiers are paid less than white soldiers. She explains to her mother that the Black soldiers, herself included, have refused to draw their pay until the unequal situation is resolved. She assures Rit that she has official paperwork showing that the government owes her a lot of money—$1,800—and that she is sure she will be able to collect it.

Harriet falls ill again, still experiencing the effects of her decades-old head injury. A steady stream of well-wishers brings food and other gifts to Harriet’s home, and Harriet learns that money is being raised for her family. Ben tells her that Congress has finally passed a law equalizing pay between Black and white soldiers. Black soldiers are due back pay, as well. Secretary of State William Seward has decided to take up Harriet’s cause, and when Harriet is well enough, he wants her to come to Washington, DC, to talk about the money she is owed. In February 1865, Harriet is finally well enough to travel. As she sits in Seward’s office, she learns that Charleston has fallen to Union forces, and she jokes that the war will be won before she can be reassigned to a new Army post. Noting that the only way to secure Harriet the back pay she is owed is to send her back into Army service, Seward sends Harriet to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who tells her that a new Black regiment is being formed in Charleston. It will be commanded by Martin Delaney, who will be the nation’s first Black commanding officer. Stanton assigns Harriet to Delaney’s Charleston regiment. Before she can travel to Charleston, however, Harriet learns about the deplorable conditions in the contraband hospitals of Virginia. A group of women from the Sanitary Commission begs her to refuse her Army posting and go to Virginia to help the people dying in these hospitals.

As the Civil War draws to a close, Harriet is busy organizing, cleaning, and advocating for Black hospitals. After Lincoln’s assassination, Harriet is appointed matron of the hospital for Virginia, with a full staff working under her. That summer, she finally feels that the situation at the Black Virginian hospitals is under control, and she announces her plans to return home to Auburn. On her way home on the train, Harriet is physically removed from the passenger area of the train and thrown into the baggage car because Black people are not allowed in the train’s passenger cars. Harriet bitterly reflects on all she has given to a country that still refuses to treat her as fully human.

In the years following the end of the Civil War, Harriet busies herself by starting two schools for Black children in the South, funding the schools and buying the children clothes and books with money earned from selling the vegetables and chickens she raises at her home in Auburn. She takes in several people who need a home, despite Rit’s protests that they are taking advantage of Harriet. One of these people is Nelson Davis, a former Army private whom Harriet first met in Beaufort. Nelson is suffering from tuberculosis and needs a place to recover. In the spring of 1869, Harriet and Nelson marry. A few years later, Rit and Ben pass away, and in 1888, Nelson passes away. Harriet continues to take people into her home, and she begins working for the cause of women’s suffrage. She helps build the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and is active in the temperance movement.

Harriet finds it challenging to feed her full household, and eventually, she falls behind in her mortgage payments. A neighbor, Sarah Bradford, helps her by writing her biography, and Harriet is able to use the proceeds to pay off her house. As Harriet ages and is less able to bring in money, she and a group of friends work together to try to get the government to pay her what she is still owed for her service during the Civil War. In 1890, Harriet is given a small monthly pension, but it is too small to meet her needs. Finally, after repeated petitioning, the pension is increased to $20 a month in 1898. Despite her own financial woes, Harriet does not rest in her efforts to help others. She buys more land and opens a home for the elderly, eventually deeding the place to the church when it becomes too expensive for her to maintain. Sarah’s book spreads Harriet’s fame so far that Harriet receives a letter and gifts from Queen Victoria of England, exciting her small town. In March 1913, Harriet dies at home in her own bed, surrounded by her loved ones.