By the middle of September 1864, Major General Philip H. Sheridan (North) had a big army in the lower Valley and a problem. He did not know how strong Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early (South) really was, and Early, leading the Confederate Army of the Valley, was spread out and shifting his divisions around Winchester. Attacking a concentrated enemy in good ground is a bloody business; attacking him while he is dispersed is a chance. Sheridan needed to know which situation he was looking at. The answer came to him by the most improbable courier of the campaign.

There was a Unionist living in Winchester named Rebecca Wright (North), a Quaker schoolteacher whose loyalty the Union general George Crook (North) could vouch for. Sheridan wanted to get a message to her and a message back, through enemy-held country, without it ever being found on the messenger. The man who carried it was Thomas Laws (North), an enslaved Black man of Clarke County, Virginia, who held a pass that let him cross between the lines to sell produce. Union scouts recruited him, and Laws agreed to do a thing that could have gotten him killed on the spot: he carried Sheridan’s message into Winchester and Rebecca Wright’s reply back out, the paper concealed in tin foil and held in his mouth, so that a search of his pockets and his cart would turn up nothing.

Rebecca Wright’s reply was the hinge of the whole battle. She told Sheridan that Early had just been weakened, that a Confederate division and its artillery had been detached and sent away from the Valley toward Lee’s army in the east. That was exactly the intelligence Sheridan had been missing. Early was not the concentrated army Sheridan feared; he had given up a chunk of his strength and was strung out around Winchester. With that paper out of Laws’s mouth and on his desk, Sheridan stopped wondering and started planning. He would attack on September 19, 1864, and try to destroy the Army of the Valley before it could pull itself back together.

Laws was, by the law of the society Early’s army was fighting to defend, property: a thing owned, not a person with rights. And he risked his life to hand the Union the information it needed to win. The Valley was a slave-worked breadbasket, and the man who helped break the army defending it was himself enslaved, betting his life on the side that would free him.