An edited documentary on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. It sets her story against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 — which, by hardening Northern opposition to slavery, expanded the very network Tubman used — and recounts her escape from a Maryland plantation and her roughly nineteen return journeys to lead as many as three hundred people, including her own parents, to freedom. The film explains the codes of the railroad: following the North Star and “the Drinking Gourd,” marked trees, safe-house lanterns, spirituals, and the extraordinary bounty placed on her capture. A vivid introduction to one of America’s great liberators.