Harriet Tubman

• 1. Introduction

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  Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross, never forgot the moment she first felt free. Years later she described it this way: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

  Tubman's crossing is the quiet center of a life that stayed anything but quiet. Three questions run through this documentary. What turned an enslaved girl into someone whom others named after a biblical prophet? Why would a person who had reached safety choose to walk back toward danger, again and again? And how much of the legend that grew around her can the surviving record actually support?

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• 2. Childhood Under Threat

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  Rit Green and Ben Ross had nine children, according to court records, and their fifth child was Minty. Rit cooked in the household of the Brodess family. Ben managed the timber work on Anthony Thompson's plantation, near the Blackwater River in Dorchester County, Maryland. The couple had married around 1808. Rit's mother, Modesty, had been brought from Africa on a slave ship, and nothing is known of the family's earlier ancestors.

  As a child, Minty was told that her character resembled that of an Ashanti person. No evidence has been found to confirm or deny that lineage.

  Three different birth years appear in the records. Tubman herself reported 1825, her death certificate lists 1815, and her gravestone says 1820. Historian Kate Larson's 2004 biography chose 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other documents, including a runaway advertisement. Later biographers have accepted March 1822 as the likeliest date.

  Edward Brodess sold three of Rit's daughters, Linah, Mariah Ritty and Soph, and the family never saw them again. When a trader from Georgia came to buy Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid the boy for a month. Other enslaved people and freedmen in the community helped her. In the end Brodess and the trader walked toward the slave quarters to seize the child. Rit told them: "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and dropped the sale. Biographers agree that the family's retelling of this scene shaped Tubman's belief that resistance was possible.

  At five or six years old, Minty was hired out as a nursemaid to a woman she knew as "Miss Susan". She had to rock the cradle, and whenever the baby woke and cried, she was whipped. One day she was lashed five times before breakfast, and she carried the scars for the rest of her life. She fought back, wore layers of clothing against the blows, and once ran away for five days.

  A planter named James Cook sent her to check his muskrat traps in the marshes, even after she caught measles. She grew so sick that he returned her to Brodess, and her mother nursed her back to health. Homesick, she compared herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", a reference to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew stronger, she was put to field and forest labor, driving oxen, plowing and hauling logs.

  The injury that shaped Tubman's life came in her teens, at a store where an overseer confronted a man who had left work without permission. She and others tried to shield him. The overseer hurled a heavy metal weight at the man, and it struck Tubman instead. She said it "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was laid on the seat of a loom and went two days without medical care. Her mother was then allowed to tend her, and Tubman stayed in a coma for weeks.

  Afterward, Tubman suffered from extremely painful headaches and from seizures. She would appear to fall asleep while insisting she stayed aware of her surroundings. Larson suggests temporal lobe epilepsy, possibly caused by the brain injury. Catherine Clinton suggests narcolepsy or cataplexy. Whatever the cause, the condition stayed with her for life. She also began to have visions and vivid dreams, which she took to be revelations from God.

  Tubman could not read, but her mother told her Bible stories, and she likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the white preachers who urged enslaved people to be passive and obedient. She looked instead to the Old Testament tales of deliverance. Her faith would soon be tested by a marriage, a will that nobody honored, and a sale that never quite happened.

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• 3. The Escape North

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  Around 1844, Tubman married John Tubman, a free black man. Little is known about him or about their time together. A child's status followed the mother's, so any children of the couple would have been enslaved. Such mixed marriages were common on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where about half the black population was already free. Larson suggests the pair may have planned to buy her freedom.

  Soon after the wedding, she exchanged the name Araminta for Harriet, her mother's name. The exact timing is unclear. Larson places it right after the wedding, while Clinton links it to Tubman's plans to escape.

  In 1840, Anthony Thompson's son kept a promise his father had made and freed Tubman's father at the age of 45. Later in the 1840s, Tubman paid a white attorney five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer found that Atthow Pattison, grandfather of Mary Brodess, had written a will freeing Rit and any of her children at 45. Any child born after that age was to be free from birth. The Pattison and Brodess families ignored the will, and enforcing it was beyond Tubman's reach.

  By 1849 Tubman had fallen ill again, which lowered her value to slave traders, and Edward Brodess could not find a buyer. Angry that he kept trying and that he still held her relatives, she began to pray for him to change. She later said: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When a sale seemed close, her prayer shifted. She asked God, "if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way". A week later Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for what she had asked.

  The death of Brodess made a sale more likely, because estate settlements often broke families apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the decision, despite her husband's efforts to talk her out of leaving. She said afterward: "there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".

  On the 17th of September 1849, Tubman and her brothers Ben and Henry slipped away. She had been hired out to another Anthony Thompson, the son of her father's former owner, at Poplar Neck in Caroline County. Her brothers likely worked there as well. Because all three were hired out, Eliza Brodess probably did not see their absence as an escape for some time. Two weeks later she placed a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering up to US$100 for each of them. By then the brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have regretted leaving his wife and children. They turned back, and Tubman had to return with them.

  Sometime in October or November, Tubman set out again, this time alone. Before leaving, she sang a farewell meant to hint at her plan to a trusted fellow enslaved woman named Mary: "I'll meet you in the morning", she sang, "I'm bound for the promised land."

  Her exact route is unknown, but she relied on the Underground Railroad. This informal network included free and enslaved black people, white abolitionists and other activists, and Quakers were especially prominent in Maryland. The Preston area near Poplar Neck had a large Quaker community and was probably her first stop. From there she likely followed a common route northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware, and into Pennsylvania. The journey of nearly 90 miles on foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.

  She traveled at night, guided by the North Star, and tried to avoid slave catchers hoping for a reward. At one early stop, the lady of the house told her to sweep the yard so she would look like a hired worker. After dark, the family hid her in a cart and drove her to the next friendly house. During the day she probably hid in the woods and marshes she knew well. Other escapees used the same routes, so she said nothing about the details of that first journey until much later in life.

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• 4. Rescues and the Name Moses

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  While Tubman saved money from odd jobs in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The law forced law enforcement officials to help capture escapees, even in states that had banned slavery, and it heavily punished anyone who aided an escape. More people who had fled slavery now sought refuge in Southern Ontario, where slavery had been abolished.

  In December 1850, Tubman learned that her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's children were about to be sold in Cambridge, Maryland. Her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her in Baltimore until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. While the auctioneer stepped away for lunch, the family escaped to a nearby safe house. At night Bowley sailed them 60 miles in a log canoe to Baltimore, where Tubman met them and brought them on to Philadelphia.

  Early in 1851 Tubman returned to Maryland to guide away more relatives. On this second trip she recovered her youngest brother, Moses, along with two other men. News of her exploits had encouraged her family, and she grew more confident with every trip.

  Late in 1851 she went back to Dorchester County to find her husband, John. She learned that he had married another woman, named Caroline. Tubman sent word for him to join her, but he insisted he was happy where he was. Suppressing her anger, she found other enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia.

  In December 1851, Tubman guided a group of 11 escapees north. Evidence suggests they stopped at the home of Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist who had himself escaped slavery. Douglass later wrote to her, contrasting their labors. He said he had "wrought in the day" and received encouragement in public, while she worked "in the night", with "the midnight sky and the silent stars" as her witnesses. Apart from John Brown, he wrote, he knew no one who had willingly faced more perils and hardships for enslaved people.

  Between 1851 and 1862, Tubman made about 13 trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and rescued some 70 people. They included her brothers Henry, Ben and Robert, along with their wives and some of their children. She also gave detailed instructions to another 50 to 60 people who escaped on their own. The nickname "Moses" came from the biblical prophet who led the Hebrews out of Egypt.

  In 1855, Tubman's father bought her mother from Eliza Brodess. Even with both parents free, the area stayed hostile. In 1857 word came that her father risked arrest for sheltering a group of eight people fleeing slavery. Tubman led her parents north to St. Catharines, in Canada, where a community of formerly enslaved people had gathered, including some of her relatives and friends. Her final rescue still lay three years ahead, in November 1860.

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• 5. Method and Legend

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  Tubman began her escapes on Saturday evenings because newspapers would not print runaway notices before Monday morning. She also worked mostly in winter, when long nights and cold weather made it less likely that anyone would see her. Her work demanded improvisation.

  On one trip she wore a bonnet and carried two live chickens so she would look like someone running an errand. She suddenly found herself walking toward a man who had once enslaved her. She tugged the strings tied to the birds' legs, and their flapping gave her an excuse to look away. Another time she recognized a former enslaver on a train. She grabbed a newspaper and pretended to read. Everyone knew she could not read, and the man ignored her.

  In an 1897 interview with historian Wilbur Siebert, Tubman named some of the people and places that helped her. In East New Market, Maryland, she stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister. She also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. From there she went northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and then to the Camden area. There free black agents William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs guided her past Dover, Smyrna and Blackbird. Other agents took her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, a Quaker named Thomas Garrett arranged transport to the office of William Still or to the homes of other operators near Philadelphia. Still is credited with helping hundreds more people reach safer places in New York, New England and Southern Ontario.

  Thomas Garrett once said of her: "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Tubman spoke of "consulting with God" and trusted that He would keep her safe. Her visions from the old head injury continued, and she read them as divine warnings. She also used spirituals as coded messages. By changing the words of "Go Down Moses", she could tell fellow travelers whether it was safe or too dangerous to continue. As she led people across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!" In a dictated letter to a friend, she said, "God set the North Star in the heavens; He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free."

  Tubman carried a revolver to defend against slave catchers and their dogs. She threatened to shoot anyone who tried to turn back, since a returning traveler could endanger the whole group and everyone who had helped them. She told of one man who insisted on going back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "Go on or die." Several days later he crossed into Canada with the others. Historian Jonathan Chism has studied these stories cautiously. He argues that they reflect the extreme conditions of escape, and he notes there is no evidence she ever killed anyone.

  By the late 1850s, Eastern Shore slaveholders were holding public meetings about the growing number of escapes. They cast suspicion on free blacks and white abolitionists. They did not know that the culprit was "Minty", the petite, disabled woman who had run away years earlier.

  A popular legend claims a $40,000 reward for her capture, but that figure is manufactured. In 1867, while supporting Tubman's claim for a military pension, an abolitionist named Sallie Holley wrote that $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". A real reward that large would have drawn national attention. A claim of $12,000 also circulates, but no documentation has been found for either amount.

  Tubman and the people she assisted were never captured. Years later she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say - I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

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• 6. John Brown and Auburn

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  In April 1858, an abolitionist named John Brown was introduced to Tubman. Brown was an insurgent who argued that only violence could destroy slavery in the United States. Like her, he spoke of being called by God and trusted the divine to protect him. She claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting him before they ever met. He called her "General Tubman".

  Brown valued her knowledge of support networks and resources in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists did not endorse his tactics. Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for people freed from slavery. He believed the enslaved would rise up across the slave states once the first battle began. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves living in Southern Ontario who might join his force, and she did.

  On the 8th of May 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Canada, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Word of the plan leaked to the government, so he put the scheme on hold and raised funds for its eventual return. Tubman helped him with that effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.

  In early October 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to attack, Tubman lay ill in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It is not known whether she still planned to join the raid or had grown doubtful. When the raid took place on the 16th of October, she had recovered and was in New York City. It failed. Brown was convicted of treason, murder and inciting a rebellion, and he was hanged on the 2nd of December. Many abolitionists saw him as a noble martyr, and Tubman was effusive in her praise. She told a friend: "He done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."

  Earlier in 1859, Frances Adeline Seward had sold Tubman a 7-acre farm in Fleming, New York, for $1,200. Seward was the wife of abolitionist Republican Senator William H. Seward. The neighboring city of Auburn was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman used the chance to bring her parents down from Canada. The farm became a haven. For years she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place to black Americans seeking a better life in the North.

  Soon after buying the farm, Tubman returned from Maryland with an eight-year-old girl named Margaret, whom she called her niece. According to Margaret's daughter Alice, Margaret remembered a prosperous childhood home and a twin brother left behind. Alice called the episode a "kidnapping", saying Tubman had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where nobody cared for her. In her 2004 biography, Larson speculated that Margaret might have been Tubman's own secret daughter. She later found evidence that Margaret was the daughter of Isaac and Mary Woolford, a free black couple who lived near Tubman's parents and had twins named James and Margaret.

  In November 1860, Tubman carried out her last rescue mission. She had spent the 1850s trying and failing to free her sister Rachel and Rachel's children, Ben and Angerine. When she reached Dorchester County, she learned that Rachel had died. The children could be freed only with a $30 bribe, and Tubman did not have the money. They stayed enslaved, and their fates remain unknown. Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, instead. Slave catchers forced them to hide for weeks, the weather turned unseasonably cold, and food ran short. The Ennalls' infant was quieted with paregoric while slave patrols rode past. The group reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on the 28th of December 1860.

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• 7. Scout and Spy

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  At Fort Monroe in Virginia, Union General Benjamin Butler declared escaping enslaved people to be "contraband", meaning property seized by northern forces, and put them to work, at first without pay. This happened after the Civil War broke out in 1861, when Tubman had a vision that the war would end slavery. The numbers of "contrabands" at Fort Monroe and other Union positions climbed quickly.

  In January 1862, Tubman volunteered to help refugees in the camps, especially at Port Royal, South Carolina. There she met General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition, who declared the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free and began gathering a regiment of black soldiers. President Abraham Lincoln was not yet ready to enforce emancipation on the southern states and reprimanded Hunter. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response on moral and practical grounds, saying: "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he's a great man, and I am a poor negro; but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free."

  At Port Royal, Tubman worked as a nurse, preparing remedies from local plants for soldiers suffering from dysentery and infectious diseases. At first she drew government rations. To end the impression that she received special treatment, she gave up the right to them. She earned money instead by selling pies and root beer that she made in the evenings.

  When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman saw it as a positive but incomplete step. She turned to more direct action against the Confederacy. In early 1863, working under orders from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. They mapped the unfamiliar terrain and surveyed the people who lived there. She also worked with Colonel James Montgomery, supplying intelligence that helped in the temporary capture of Jacksonville, Florida, in March 1863.

  Later in 1863, her intelligence played a key role in the raid on Combahee Ferry. She guided three steamboats carrying black soldiers under Montgomery's command past mines in the Combahee River. The troops assaulted several plantations, set them on fire, and seized thousands of dollars' worth of food and supplies. Tubman's spy network had warned enslaved people in the area. When they heard the steamboat whistles, they understood they were being freed.

  Tubman went ashore to help them onto the boats, ruining her dress in the process. She sang lyrics from "Uncle Sam's Farm" that urged people to "come along, come along". She later described a scene of chaos, with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Armed overseers tried to stop the exodus, but the tumult overwhelmed them. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, the steamboats headed for Beaufort with more than 750 formerly enslaved people aboard.

  Newspapers praised her "patriotism, sagacity, energy, and ability" in the raid. More than 100 of the newly freed men joined the Union army through her recruiting. The raid revived the title "General Tubman" that Brown had once given her. Her contributions have sometimes been exaggerated, but she is widely credited as the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault.

  In July 1863, Tubman worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle to historian Albert Bushnell Hart: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."

  For two more years she tended newly freed people, scouted into Confederate territory and nursed wounded soldiers in Virginia. She kept nursing there for several months after the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865.

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• 8. Later Years and Legacy

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  For more than three years of Union service, Tubman received a total of $200. She was not a regular soldier, she was only occasionally paid as a spy and scout, and her nursing was entirely unpaid. Her unofficial status made her service hard to document, and the government was slow to acknowledge any debt. Her work for her family and for the formerly enslaved kept her poor.

  In July 1865, a promised appointment as an official military nurse fell through, and she headed home to New York. On the train that October, she held a half-fare ticket granted for her service. A conductor ordered her out of a regular car and into the smoking car. When she refused, he cursed at her and grabbed her, and other men helped him force her into the smoking car, injuring her. White passengers cursed her and urged the conductor to throw her off.

  Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, running the farm and taking in boarders to support her aging parents. One boarder was Nelson Davis, a farmer born enslaved in North Carolina. He had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He worked in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they fell in love. Although he was 22 years younger than she was, they married on the 18th of March 1869 at the Central Presbyterian Church. In 1874 they adopted a baby girl named Gertie.

  A 132-page book called Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, written by her admirer Sarah Hopkins Bradford, appeared in 1869 and earned Tubman some $1,200. Even so, paying off the mortgage on her farm in May 1873 used up her savings. That October, swindlers targeted her. Two black men claimed to know a former slave with a trunk of gold coins smuggled out of South Carolina, which they would sell at less than half its value. She found it plausible, borrowed money from a wealthy friend and agreed to receive the gold at night. The men lured her into the woods, knocked her out with chloroform and stole her purse. The trunk was full of rocks.

  The crime drew local attention to her poverty. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill to pay her $2,000 for her work as scout, nurse and spy, but the Senate defeated it. In February 1880 her wooden house burned down, and with her supporters' help it was replaced by a brick home. Nelson Davis died of tuberculosis on the 14th of October 1888. The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible as his widow, and in 1895 she was granted $8 a month plus a lump sum of $500. In December 1897, Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill for a soldier's pension of $25 a month. Some members objected to paying a woman a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, Congress approved $20 a month, made up of her $8 widow's pension plus $12 for her nursing, and still did not recognize her as a scout and spy.

  A white woman once asked Tubman whether women ought to have the vote. She answered: "I suffered enough to believe it." She attended meetings of suffrage organizations and worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. She traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., to speak for women's voting rights. She described her wartime actions and pointed to the sacrifices of countless women as proof of equality with men. She was keynote speaker at the first conference of the National Federation of Afro-American Women in 1896. In 1899 she attended the second conference of its successor, the National Association of Colored Women.

  The activism brought fresh admiration from the press. A publication called The Woman's Era opened a series on "Eminent Women" with a profile of her. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston in her honor. Yet she was so poor that she had to sell a cow to buy her train ticket to the celebrations.

  In the 1870s Tubman became active at the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1895 she began discussions to create a Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged for "indigent colored people". In 1896, despite her limited means, she bid $1215 at auction for a 25-acre farm next to her own. She named one building "John Brown Hall", in memory of her ally. Fundraising was hard, and multiple mortgages complicated efforts to donate the property. After she nearly lost it, the church took it over in 1903.

  The home did not open for another five years. Tubman was dismayed when the church required residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "They make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was still the guest of honor when the home opened on the 23rd of June 1908.

  In the late 1890s, unable to sleep because of pain and "buzzing" in her head, Tubman asked a doctor at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital to operate. In her words, he "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She reportedly had no anesthesia and bit down on a bullet, as she had seen soldiers do during amputations.

  By 1911 she was so frail that she was admitted to the home named for her. A New York newspaper called her "ill and penniless", and supporters sent new donations. Surrounded by friends and family, she died of pneumonia on the 10th of March 1913. Just before the end she quoted the Gospel of John to those in the room: "I go away to prepare a place for you." She was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

  By the 1980s Tubman had become one of the most famous figures in American history. Three national park sites bear her name: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn. The Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, Canada, where she worshipped, is a National Historic Site of Canada. The first statue of her in the region where she was born was unveiled in Salisbury, Maryland, in 2009.

  In 1978 she became the first African-American woman honored on a U.S. postage stamp, and a second stamp followed in 1995. Since 2016 there have been plans to put her portrait on the front of the twenty-dollar bill. In 1944 the Maritime Commission launched a Liberty ship in her name, its first named for a black woman. On the 11th of November 2024 she was posthumously commissioned a brigadier general in the Maryland Army National Guard. Artists including Jacob Lawrence and Faith Ringgold have painted her, and Cynthia Erivo received an Academy Award nomination for playing her in the 2019 film Harriet.

  Tubman hoped to learn to write and tell her own story, but she never did. Instead, she authorized Sarah Hopkins Bradford to build her books from Tubman's recollections, news reports and letters from friends. Modern biographers criticize the first volume for its artistic license, though it shows how Tubman saw her own experiences. Bradford released a rewritten edition, Harriet, the Moses of her People, in 1886 at Tubman's request, and added an appendix in 1901.

  Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman, published in 1943, was the first full biography after Bradford's. It took Conrad four years to find a publisher. Another biography built on original scholarship did not appear for 60 years, until Jean Humez published hers in 2003. Larson and Clinton followed with their own in 2004. In 2024, historian Edda L. Fields-Black published Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

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