Today’s Google Doodle is of Harriet Tubman.   Born a slave, Harriet Tubman escaped and would become a leading “conductor” on the “Underground Railroad” which helped slaves escape from  bondage in the South to freedom in the North and in Canada, prior to the Civil War.  Nicknamed “Moses,” she took made more than nineteen trips back into the slave-holding South to rescue more than 300 slaves.  Her greatest rescue mission, however, came during the Civil War, when she planned and help lead a Union riverboat raid at Combahee Ferry in South Carolina on the first of June, 1863, freeing 724 slaves.

Paul Donnelly of the New York Times described the scene on the 150th anniversary of the raid:

It is arguably the most beautiful scene ever recorded in war. Two Union gunboats, the Harriet A. Weed and the John Adams, converted ferryboats, churning up the Combahee River with their big side paddlewheels. Steam whistles signal, while in the bow of the Adams, a small, powerful woman is… singing. From all around, hundreds hear Harriett Tubman’s call and run for the boats, for freedom. At least 727 men, women and children escape, mothers carrying babies, including one pair of twins: the largest liberation of slaves in American history.

Perhaps half a million slaves escaped to the Union Army during the war, and in the end the war itself liberated nearly four million. But Harriet Tubman’s achievement on the Combahee River 150 years ago was unique. And it wasn’t just her singing.

Read the rest of Donnelly’s account:  Harriet Tubman’s Great Raid

Voices of the Civil War Episode 17: “Combahee River Raid”