January 1862

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.

Susie King Taylor, who had secretly learned to read and write as an enslaved girl in Georgia, became the first Black nurse to serve with the Union Army when she joined the 33rd United States Colored Troops in 1862. She taught soldiers to read and write while also caring for the wounded, and later published her memoir — the only known account of the war written by a Black woman who served.

Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who purchased her freedom in 1855, became the personal dressmaker and confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. She founded the Contraband Relief Association in 1862 to aid formerly enslaved people flooding Washington. Her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes is a key primary source.