Chapter Seven - Civil War Combatant

CHAPTER SEVEN

Civil War Combatant

WHEN THE CIVIL War broke out in 1861, Harriet Tubman didn’t sit on the sidelines.

She had spent years waging her own underground war, so when the Union finally took up arms against the Confederacy, she saw it not just as a military conflict, but as judgment.

Slavery was the root. The South was the infection.
She was ready to cut it out.

Harriet headed south again, but this time as part of the Union Army.

At first, they didn’t know what to do with her. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t a man. She wasn’t white. But she had knowledge. She had skills. She had fire.

She served as a nurse.
Then a cook.
Then a spy.

She mapped terrain, led scouting missions, interpreted local intelligence, recruited freedmen, and tracked Confederate movements and supply routes. She moved between camps and rivers like she moved through forests in Maryland, unseen but always watching.

And then came the Combahee River Raid.

June 1863. South Carolina.

Tubman was part of a Union operation to destroy Confederate outposts and supply routes along the Combahee River. But this wasn’t just sabotage. It was liberation.

Harriet helped lead Union gunboats through mine-filled waters with intelligence only she could provide.
She guided troops to the right plantations.
She coordinated the timing of the strike.

And when the raid hit, over 700 slaves were freed in a single night.

It was the largest mass liberation of enslaved people in American history and Harriet Tubman was at the heart of it.

She wasn’t just a conductor anymore.
She was a commander.

No woman in U.S. history had ever been officially recorded leading a military operation.
No enslaved person had ever returned with an army.

Harriet Tubman did both.

And she didn’t stop there.