I just finished reading Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: how daring slaves and free Blacks spied for the Union during the Civil War by Thomas Allen and would highly recommend it. I started reading it because it is not very long and I thought it would be a good one to recommend to go with the Get a Clue @ Your Library...but was surprised how it was hard to put down.

The book has quite a bit about Harriet Tubman, who is best known for being the escaped slave turned conductor on the Underground Railroad (and the subject of the recent award-winning picture book biography Moses: When Harriet Tubman led her people to freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford, beautifully illustrated by Kadir Nelson).

However, this is not a biography of Tubman, but a tribute to the efforts of many former slaves who worked "undercover" gathering intelligence that strongly impacted the outcome of the Civil War. For example, Mary Jane Richards, worked as a house slave for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and passed on overheard conversations. She not only read war documents left around at the Davis home (even though it was illegal for a slave to learn to read or write), but had a photographic memory enabling her to pass them on almost verbatim.

Confederate officers and soldiers were often unguarded in their conversations around slaves because of their horribly misguided notion that the slaves hadn't the capacity to understand what was being said.

Another interesting area covered in this book was spy techniques and codes that were used, including a "clothesline code" that passed on information by slaves working undercover within a Confederate camp...for example hanging a pair of pants upside down indicated a specific direction that troops were being sent.

Overall, this book gives you a strong appreciation for the brave and cunning efforts of spies--mostly escaped slaves--during the Civil War. I highly recommend this to students and teachers.