Harriet Tubman, Union Spy (Part 2)

There was a whole lot more to Harriet Tubman's life and work than her time as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. During the United States Civil War, she worked as a Union spy, eventually earning the nickname "General."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stephew missed in History class from how works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey Wilson.
Then I'm Holly Frye. We are picking up today where
we left off in the life of Harriet Tubmant and

(00:21):
the last time we talked about her life while enslaved
in Maryland and her work with Underground Railroad. There's the
parts of her life and work the people are generally
most familiar with unless they have watched drunk history, thanks
in part to a reponderance of children's books about her
and the prevalence of the Underground Railroad and elementary school
lessons about slavery in the United States. But there was

(00:43):
a whole lot more to Harriet Tubbans life and work
than her time as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
Even during the years between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty,
while she was actively leading enslaved people from Maryland into Canada,
she was also working with the move ments for abolition
and women's rights, and she traveled all over New England
to this end. She was connected to abolitionist John Brown

(01:07):
before his raid on Harper's Ferry, which was part of
a failed plan to start a slave uprising in the
months before the Civil War, and in Troy, New York,
she helped prevent an escaped slave named Charles Knall from
being captured by slave catchers uh and being returned South
by literally shielding him with her own body. Basically, she

(01:27):
did a lot and a lot of her work beyond
the underground railroad is overlooked entirely besides that drunk history
episode that I keep mentioning because it is quite funny, uh,
And that's what we're talking about today. We've talked in
more detail about how the Civil War started in our
podcasts on Robert Small's and there's some overlamp in this

(01:48):
story in that one. So if you've heard those podcasts,
some of this information might ring a bell. Very long story,
very very short. As the balance of power in the
United States government started to tip in sae for a
free States, slave states felt increasingly threatened. Many promise to
secede if Abraham Lincoln were elected president, and he was

(02:08):
so they did. Senator William H. Seward, who actually had
sold Harriet Tubman land in New York that was adjacent
to his own property, was one of the legislators who
introduced measures meant to try to appease the Southern States
in an effort to stop this secession crisis. These measures
included the return of escaped slaves back south. When this happened,

(02:32):
a lot of Tubman's friends started trying to get her
to flee back to British North America, which would become Canada,
from Albany, New York, where she had settled with her
aging parents. Because Seward and Tubman knew one another, people
were afraid that he can bite send her back to
Maryland as a show of goodwill to the South for
the sake of trying to hold the union together. The

(02:53):
idea that people would even think this really shed somewhit
on the links that like the the federal government slashed
the Northern States were willing to go to try to
keep the South from succeeding, like the fact that that
would even occur to people. She did not heed this advice, though,
and in the end Stewart did not use her as

(03:15):
a pawn. So we're including that mostly because it's illustrative
and it's not entirely clear what she did for the
first six months or so of the war. Her biographers
actually disagree, and even with that disagreement in mind, there
are still gaps left open where there's no information. But
by October of eighteen sixty one, she had started passing

(03:35):
the Union information about how the war was affecting enslaved people,
delivering her intelligence to Franklin Sanborn. Sanborn had been one
of the Secret Six co conspirators in John Brown's raid
on Harper's Ferry prior to the war. That fall, she
also traveled to Boston to talk to John A. Andrew,
who was the governor of Massachusetts, about how she might

(03:57):
serve the Union in the war. He thought, given how
long she had been undertaking secret missions into slave territory
as part of the Underground Railroad, and how staunchly opposed
she was to slavery, that she might make a good
Union spy. Once the Union captured the Sea Islands off
the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, the same

(04:17):
islands that were so familiar to pass podcast subject Robert
Smalls Tubman did indeed go there to serve. In early
eighteen sixty two, she was sent to Beaufort, South Carolina,
and from there to Port Royal Island. Her cover was
that she was there as part of a humanitarian mission
arranged by Boston Society's Rebolition to try to provide clothing

(04:38):
and other necessities to Port Royal Islands formerly enslaved population,
and she did do some of this humanitarian work, as
well as acting as a nurse to both soldiers and contraband.
Contraband is the catch all term for formerly enslaved people
who made their way to Union controlled territory. Her first
months in Port Royal were difficult. A number of missionaries

(04:59):
and or volunteers there died due to disease and extreme heat.
General David Hunter had issued an order that all enslaved
people in Union held territory be declared free, but Abraham
Lincoln had reversed that order, afraid it would provoke the
South even further, and this reversal, of course, enraged both
enslaved people and abolitionists. It's another example of lengths to

(05:23):
which the federal government was willing to go to appease
the slave States. Uh that could be a whole other
podcast anyway. Eventually, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January
one of eighteen sixty three, which freed the enslaved population
in the states that were rebelling against the Union. Also
in January, Colonel James Montgomery was authorized to recruit black

(05:48):
soldiers into military service and train them to be soldiers.
Once those two things happened, Tubman started investing her pay
into building a washhouse so she could teach formerly enslaved
women how to make a living for themselves. She invested
most of the rest of her money into similar endeavors,
and she gave up her privilege of military rations because

(06:08):
she thought it was causing jealousy among the people she
was working with. Instead, she made root beer pies in
gingerbread in her off hours so she could sell them
and earn her own keep. The presence of a black
fighting force played a role in Harriet Tubman's most famous
action during her time as a Civil War spy, which
was a raid up the Cumby River in June of

(06:30):
eighteen sixty three. You know, it's a little early, but
that is a pretty exciting story. We want to keep
it all together, so we're going to get to it.
After a brief word from a sponsor. By the summer
of eighteen sixty three, Harriet Tubman was definitely putting her
underground railroad experience to use as a spy in addition

(06:53):
to her humanitarian work. Earlier that year, she had been
issued a hundred dollars by the Department of the South,
which she used to create a spine network. Her spies
were all Contraband who had had experience as boat pilots
or doing other work on the water. Tubman ran this
network under the auspices of Colonel James Montgomery, who was
also by that point commanding the newly created second Regiment,

(07:15):
South Carolina Volunteer Infantry African Descent. That June, General Hunter
wanted to plan a raid of the Cumby River, which
was home to a number of plantations. It's possible that
the whole raid was Tubman's idea, based on intelligence that
she'd gathered from her network of spies. Exactly where this
idea actually came from is hard to pin down, but

(07:37):
the fact that Tubman played a critical role in it
is absolutely undeniable, along with the fact that she told
Hunter she'd only participate if Montgomery was in command. It
also seems as though she and her spine network participated
in other similar raids as well, but the Cumby River
raid is definitely the most famous. The plan was to
take a force up the Kumby River, evading and to

(07:59):
save ing minds that had been laid there, and then
raiding the rice and cotton plantations that lay along its length.
They would take what they could carry, liberate the enslaved
labor force, and then towards the rest of it. Apart
from the obviously humanitarian success of liberating hundreds of people
from slavery, this would also destroy a source of Confederate
assets and wealth. Tubman and the eight or nine scouts

(08:23):
that she employed together worked out the locations of all
the minds that needed to be disabled and spread the
word to the enslaved people on the plantations of what
was about to happen. She and at least some of
these scouts were aboard the lead boat when it's set
off up the river. Three gun ships in about three
hundred Black troops were involved as well. On June one,

(08:44):
eighteen sixty three, they started their journey at the river.
They raided plantations in Cullaton and Bufort Counties, liberating the
enslaved people there, capturing what provisions they could and destroying
what they couldn't, so that the Confederacy couldn't continue to
use it. This whole thing happened with no injuries to Tubman,
her spies, or the Union fighting force who also participated,

(09:07):
possibly because the people who owned and ran the plantations
found the sudden appearance of the second regiment armed terrifying.
Farther upriver, plantation owners fled in advance of the incoming raid.
The rate captured about fifteen thousand dollars worth of property
and eight hundred and forty slaves, according to a letter
from a member of the Massachusetts fifty four Colored Regiment,

(09:29):
which was published in the New Bedford newspaper. According to
a letter that Tubman dictated herself, there were seven hundred
and fifty six slaves who were liberated. It was this
and other actions that wound up earning Tubman the nickname General,
with newspapers even going so far as calling her the U. S.
Armies first woman general, even though she didn't actually hold

(09:50):
an official military rank. She is, however, the only woman
known to have led a military operation like this during
the Civil War. Aside note, after this mission, Tubman wrote
a letter to ask for money to buy a bloomer
dress of sturdy material because she tripped on her own
dress and tore it to shreds while trying to hurry

(10:11):
escaping slaves to the boats. A bloomer dress, as the
name suggests, had billowy pants under a shorter skirt, so
it would have been much more practical for running around.
That story really cracked me up. I need a better outfit. Yeah,
that's one of the One of the things that I
am to you while I was researching was this story

(10:32):
about the bloomer dress. Uh. The Coumpy River raid was
the most dramatic moment in Harriet Tubman's Civil War service.
I mean a troops troops of one of the first
regiments for black soldiers making their way up the river
and burning down plantations is by itself pretty dramatic. But

(10:53):
for about a year after it was over, she stayed
in the Sea Islands. She maintained a spine network, acted
as a nurse, and can can you, supporting herself with
her baking and root beer. Following the raid, a big
part of her work turned towards seeing to the welfare
of the people that she had just liberated. While healthy
adult men were mostly recruited into the army, many others

(11:14):
were ill or injured, and none of them had what
they needed in terms of basic necessities. So as Harriet
continued her work as a nurse, she also developed a
reputation of being particularly skilled with herbal remedies, including a
treatment for dysenterry during an outbreak in eighteen sixty three
and eighteen sixty four. I mentioned it in the previous episode,

(11:35):
but we should pointed out here again that a lot
of this was probably folk traditions that had been passed
down from her ancestors who had learned them in Africa
and then brought them. Her grandmother was most likely a
member of the Ashanti tribe. In early eighteen sixty five,
Harriet Tammon went on leave and left the Sea Islands
to go north to try to visit her parents. Her

(11:56):
leave wasn't originally planned to be very long. The goal
had been to go back to the Sea Islands and
continue to educate the freed population on how to make
a living on their own, but she got sick while
she was away, and the war was nearly over when
she went south again, so she was still in the
North when Lincoln won reelection and when the Thirteenth Amendment
was passed an abolished slavery. When she did go south again.

(12:19):
Rather than to see Island, she spent time working as
a nurse in military hospitals in Virginia. In addition to
this work in nursing, she observed abuses that were going
on in some of the hospitals that she visited, and
she reported this information back to officials in Washington. After
the Civil War was over, Tubman and a number of
her abolitionists and civil rights allies really struggled for years

(12:43):
to try to get back pay for the time that
she had spent working for the Union Army, as well
as a veterans pension. These attempts were really unsuccessful because
she hadn't been enlisted. Because women couldn't enlist, she wasn't
viewed as a veteran even though she spent all that
time serving. Once the war was over, Tubman went back
to Auburn, New York, and we're going to talk about

(13:05):
her time there after. We paused for a brief word
from a sponsor. So going back to our tail. While
Harriet Tubman was on her way back to Auburn, New
York after the Civil War, a train conductor tried to
remove her from the train car that she was on.

(13:26):
She was traveling on a government pass rather than a
full price ticket, and the conductor, in addition to calling
her a racial epithet, tried to forcibly remove her from
the train. Seven had been doing manual labor for most
of her life. She was consequently very strong and she
resisted him powerfully. He called three men's who assist him,
and they threw her bodily into the baggage car. Her

(13:50):
arm was injured in all of this, and it's unclear
whether it was sprained or broken, but she wound up
having to wear it in a sling for a long
time afterward. She considered suing the railroad, especially because the
injury meant that she couldn't work, but nothing ever came
of it, apart from abolitionists and civil rights circles using
it to illustrate this discrimination on the railroad. Back in Auburn,

(14:12):
Tubman started something that would be her focus for the
rest of her life, and that was caring for people who,
because of age, poverty, illness, or other circumstances, couldn't take
care of themselves. Her home became a temporary lodging for
people that she had guided to freedom as they returned
back from Canada hoping to make their way home. She
typically had at least two or three people staying with

(14:34):
her who were elderly, sick, or otherwise in need of care.
She developed a reputation for never turning away anyone who
needed her help, whether she could actually afford to help
them or not. She also collected clothing and their nations
for schools for South Carolina's newly free population. Along with
other members of her household, she tried to make a

(14:55):
living through growing vegetables and fruit, raising chickens, bartering, and
doing domestic work. One of her Sarah Hopkins Bradford biographies
was actually a fundraising effort during this time. Their nations
from former abolitionists and civil rights reformers also helped to
pay the bills. Although she generally was extremely reluctant to
ask for money for herself, she would, however, ask for

(15:17):
money to help the people she was trying to help.
In the years after the Civil War was over, the
United States was struck with ongoing waves of racial violence.
In one of these, John Tubman, Harriet's former husband, was
shot and killed by a white man named Robert Vincent,
who was found not guilty by an all white jury,

(15:37):
and that event took place in eighteen sixty seven. In
eighteen sixty nine, Tubman remarried to a man named Nelson
Davis at Central Presbyterian Church in Auburn. Davis had also
liberated himself from slavery. He had served in the Civil War,
and he had been boarding in her house for about
three years. In eighteen seventy three, Harriet Tubman and her

(15:58):
brother John Stewart had an unfortunate run in with a
couple of con men. They claimed to have five thousand
dollars worth of gold, which they were going to sell
Stewart for a mere two thousand dollars. They framed it
with a story that was taylor made to play on
tubman sensibilities. They said it was a trunk full of
gold that an ex slave had carried out of the
South and wanted to sell to her because he needed

(16:20):
money and he didn't trust white people. Stewart did not
have that kind of money, and neither did a sister.
But because of her work during the abolition movement and
her reputation from the underground Railroad, she was very well
connected with some of Auburn's most affluent and influential citizens.
Stewart looked some of them for money and a future.

(16:41):
A few people tried to discourage him from this whole
endeavor because they suspected correctly that it might be a scam,
but a man named Anthony Scheimer advanced them two thousand
dollars in cash, which the fraudsters said could only be
delivered by Tubman to a secret location. When the time came,
she went in to the woods by herself and found

(17:01):
the gold man, who claimed he had forgotten the key
to the trunk. She waited there for him while he
went to get it, and after he left, someone knocked
her out, probably with chloroform, tied her up, gagged her,
and stole the two thousand dollars. She actually managed to
get home again while she was still bound and gagged.

(17:23):
Authorities briefly suspected that Tubman and Stewart were in cahoots
with these conmen, and Scheimer claimed that he had loaned
the two thousand dollars with Tubman's house as collateral, so
her home and the shelter she was affording to many
other people were all at risk. In the end, though
Tubman and Stuart were cleared of all suspicion, with multiple

(17:43):
prominent people in Auburn speaking up for her absolute, unfailing integrity.
In the eighteen seventies, Tubman began attending the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn, where her husband was elected
as a church trustee. In eighteen seventy five. Tubman's father died,
her mother died in eighteen eighty her husband, Nelson Davis,

(18:06):
died of tuberculosis in By the late eighteen eighties, Tubman
was trying to turn her home based care for other
people into a more official charity, in part because most
of the places that we'd call nursing homes today weren't
open to black people, so she wanted to start a
quote home for aged and indigent negroes, which she hoped

(18:27):
to name John Brown Hall. To that end, she expanded
the industries being done at her home to include a
pig farm and a brickyard. She bid on neighboring land
and buildings at auction, even though she didn't have the
financing lined up to pay for him. Having successfully won
the auction, she called on her network at church and
in the community to scrape together a down payment and

(18:49):
secure a mortgage. From here, she turned to public appearances
and a new edition of her biography in the hope
of funding the rest of the one thousand, four hundred
and fifty dollars she needed. A lot of her speaking
engagements were at meetings and rallies to promote women's suffrage,
and she also spoke at the founding convention of the
National Association of Colored Women. But even so, raising the

(19:12):
money that she needed was extremely difficult, and she wound
up needing to remortgage her own home in eight After
speaking extensively at meetings and conventions for women's suffrage and
the National Association of Colored Women, reissuing her biography, and
continuing to try to fundraise for John Brown Hall, by
the mid eighteen nineties, Tubman realized she simply could not

(19:34):
do it all on her own. She turned to both
her friends from the Abolition movement and friends from the A. M. E.
Zion Church for help. Unfortunately, these two groups did not
work well together and they were sometimes at cross purposes. Yeah,
some of the biographers that look at this part of
her life get into probably some implicit racial bias on

(19:56):
the part of her friends from the Abolition movement. Because
there were definite, least some cases where it was like
her white abolitionist friends were making decisions based on what
they thought was best without actually consulting what was needed
or or what the people that they were trying to
fundraise for actually wanted. Over the years, the name and

(20:18):
the purpose of this project shifted as well. It went
from being John Brown Hall, which was a home for
im impoverished elderly people, particularly black women, to the Harriet
Tubman Home, which was both a residence for the elderly
and an industrial school to educate black women to do
domestic work. She actually felt kind of conflicted about this goal.
There's a whole other debate going on at the time

(20:42):
about what types of education the black community would be
best served by, Like was it best to have vocational
education so that people could learn to make a living
for themselves outside of the like the umbrella of slavery
and then um and then that would trick down to
like the next generations going to more academic colleges. Or

(21:04):
was it better to give people a more academic education
that would basically expand everyone's social standing and awareness. There's
a whole big debate about it. Um and then Harriet
Tubb and herself was kind of conflicted because she didn't
actually like doing domestic work. She had not been happy
doing that when she was younger. They didn't totally get

(21:24):
behind the idea of using her name to train black
women to do domestic work, but that's where it all
ended up. In eighteen ninety, Harriet applied for a Civil
War widows pension and she was finally granted one in
the amount of eight dollars a month. She and some
of her supporters once again renewed an effort to get
a pension based on her own service, and ultimately her

(21:46):
widows pension was raised to twenty dollars a month in
light of her work as a wartime nurse. She also
received a small lump sum of about five hundred dollars,
and that payout happened in eight This wasn't a lot
of money, though, and as we kept saying about, Harriet
Tubman was more interested in helping other people than she

(22:07):
was seeing to her own financial security. It's pretty clear
from her actions. So she spent the last years of
her life in poverty while still trying to see to
the needs of people who were even less fortunate than
she was. This sometimes drew the concerns of her old
friends and allies from the abolitionist movement UH. They were
worried that she was being taken advantage of sometimes, and

(22:28):
that worry actually was not entirely misplaced. In nineteen o seven,
she was robbed of money she had been given as
a Christmas gift, and that robbery was probably done by
someone who had been living with her. On May nineteenth
of nineteen eleven, she became ill enough to have to
move into the Tubman Home as a resident and be
looked after by nurses. She died there on March tenth

(22:50):
of nineteen thirteen, at the age of roughly ninety three.
In two thousand and three, a payment of eleven thousand,
seven hundred and fifty dollars was included in a Senate
appropriations bill basically as back pay for Harriet Tubmans wartime service,
with the idea that it would go toward restoring historical
sites that were associated with her life and work uh

(23:13):
and as was announced in April of which fostered a
flurry of requests about her. She is slated to appear
on a redesigned twenty dollar bill in the US on
the back will be the White House and President Andrew Jackson,
who is currently on the front of that bill. There are,
of course, many other lifetime and posthumous uh accolades granted

(23:35):
to her, and many things named after her, all kinds
of stuff. But that's really the highlights of the life
and work of Harriet Tubman, who's pretty awesome. Like a
lot of people know the Underground Railroad part, people that
watch drunk History or have seen that video on the
internet know the part about the Cumby River Raid. I

(23:55):
don't feel like it's particularly well known, especially maybe outside
of are New York. Then once the war was over,
she basically spent the rest of her life trying to
take care of people, even though she did not have
the money to take care of herself. She was basically like,
I'm just I'm going to take care of these old
people who don't have anybody to look after them. I'm

(24:16):
gonna do whatever it takes to scrape up enough money
to make that work. I have one question, what is it?
Did she get the Bloomer dress? I don't know. That's
a great question, though my next question it would be
a listener mail I do. But before I get to

(24:38):
it um. I read two different biographies of Harriet Summon
for this, Uh. Like I said, the academic work on
her it is hard to come by. And so the
one of the funny things about it was that one
of the writers in the preface was talking about as
they were doing this research and going to all of
these sites and like pouring through archives, they kept seeing
the same name ahead of theirs in the in the registry,

(25:02):
and it was the writer of the other book that
I read. And the other thing is that the both
books and a lot of other writing does a lot
of comparison to Harriet Tubman and so Journer Truth, because
they have some things in common and they also have
some some differences. And one of the things that one
I don't remember which book it was, but one of

(25:23):
the things that one of these two books pointed out, uh,
was that so Journal Truth was not in favor of
bloomer dress. Harriet Tubman was like, can I plase have
a bloomer dress so I don't trip over myself while
escorting people to freedom? And so Journal Truth was like, no,
this is not what women should be doing with their

(25:44):
clothing anyway. I do, in fact, also have listener mail.
The slice boosterer mail is from Rachel and actually we
got a tweet about the same thing also, uh and
what a read it? And then I must talk a
little bit about how we came to that. So this
is for Rachel, and Rachel says Dear Holly and Tracy.

(26:06):
I started listening to stuff you met some history class
just a few months ago, but now it's one of
my favorites to listen to you during my hour long
subway commutes. I love supporting content written, produced and recorded
by women who strive to include diversity and support hashtags
like hashtag not only in the South, which is the
thing that we made up one time to point out
a lot of people think that racism is only a

(26:28):
Southern problem, and that's false. To get back to the letter,
it's because of this that I'm writing you in regards
to your most recent episode Six Impossible Episodes. I was
thrilled that you mentioned Kitty Genovise is I think it
is a really misunderstood homicide case. But there was something
that you didn't mention that I think you'd be interested
in knowing. Kitty Genovise was a lesbian living with her

(26:49):
partner Mary and Zielanco at the time of her murder.
Forty years after her murder, NPR ran an interview with
Maryanne Zeilanco that was produced by Sow Portrait Productions and
which Marianne remembered Kitty and spoke about their relationship. The
Chicago Tribute also ran an article in two thousand four.
Another witness to the crime, Carl Ross, has also had

(27:10):
his name associated with the murder since his response of quote,
I didn't want to get involved when the cops questioned
him repeatedly since he was friends with Kitty and directly
witnessed the murder. But it's possible he had a good reason.
It's believed that, in addition to the fact that he
was drunk the night of the murder, the fact that
Ross was gay is why he did not call the police.
There's another here's another article that talks about this, and

(27:33):
then she hasn't linked to it. The fact that Kenny
Genovies and potentially Carl Ross were gay is not well known,
although it has come more to light in the last
few years. I'm not sure if it had any effect
on why she was murdered, but I do think it
is an important thing to remember when talking about Kenny
Genovies and Carl Ross. Homosexuality was illegal in forty nine

(27:53):
states in ninety eight, including New York, and they had
very good reason to be afraid of the police. I
thought you and the other listeners and stuff you miss
in history class would be interested in this information. Thanks Rachel,
Thank you Rachel. Um So, had we done a whole
episode on Kenney Genevies, I probably would have found this information.

(28:14):
But because we the six impossible episodes format is usually
a shorter thing with less involved research, I did not
find that information. Uh So I did not know it
until Rachel wrote this email. But Rachel is absolutely right
um and looking into it further after getting this note
that the fact that there were other gay people living

(28:37):
in her neighborhood and the fact that she she herself
was a gay most definitely uh had an effect on
on how people felt like reporting it and UH and
whether they went to the whether whether they were okay
with going to the police. Um. It also definitely played
a part in how the case was investigated. There were
actually some speculations from law enforcement that Mary and was

(29:00):
involved in the crime in some way, which she was not.
Like Kitty Tenovies is Kitty Genevies is murderer, was a
serial killer who picked her at random, like the wrong
place at the wrong time. Um. But yeah, it's completely
logical that people who uh, it's completely logical that that

(29:20):
a gay community would have been reluctant to get involved
with the police. Um in nine. And it also was
completely logical that Marianne herself, since she was Kitty's girlfriend
and not just her roommate, probably would have been reluctant
to have that brought out as well, because in addition

(29:41):
to the fear of arrest and the fear of retaliation
by the police, would be the fear of people getting
fired if it came out in the newspaper that they
were gay. Like, there's a lot more going on there
and other violence being incited. I mean there's very real danger. Yeah,
like it's being out. Yeah, it's really easy to sit

(30:02):
in your armchair and be like, of course I would
have called the police. Uh, but in the moment, I
think there's a lot more nuance there. Um. And Carl
Ross I think eventually did call the police. He just
didn't call the police in the first moment that he
realized what's going on. Also, Kenny Geneviz's brother made a

(30:23):
documentary about her, and it's called The Witness, and I
haven't seen it because at this point it has only
played at a couple of film festivals. Um. But actually
I think by the time this episode comes out, it
will have opened in New York City and possibly also
l A. I'm not sure where it's opening from there.
The website is a little vague, but it is basically

(30:44):
her her brother researching the story of his sister's death
and researching what happened and talking about the fact that
she kind of became this emblem of passer by nonchalance,
uh for completely unfounded reasons. And then it also talks
like explores what the gay community was like in this

(31:05):
part of New York in so I am very interested
in seeing it if I am able to not totally
clear exactly where it will be playing. UM, So thank
you so much Rachel for writing to us about that.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where a history podcast at how
stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook

(31:26):
dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at
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You will find lots of stuff about the United States
Civil War. You would like to come to our website,

(31:47):
which is missing history dot com. You will find show
notes for all the episodes Holly and I have ever
worked on. The full details about two biographies that I
read of her will be in those show notes. We
also have an archive of every episode we have ever done.
All that kind of good stuff, so you can do
all that and a whole lot more at how stuff
works dot com or mythed in history dot com for

(32:10):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it
has to works dot com. M H.