Harriet Tubman Becomes Union Spy and Intelligence Chief

The Union Army recruited Harriet Tubman in 1862 to lead an intelligence network in South Carolina. She organized a ring of Black scouts who gathered information behind Confederate lines, leveraging the invisibility that enslaved people had long cultivated. Her intelligence work directly enabled the Combahee River Raid of June 2, 1863, in which Colonel James Montgomery freed more than 700 enslaved people — the operation she planned.