A man, a woman, a child and an infant ride together on one dark horse at full gallop across open ground in the gray light of dawn. The man wears a brimmed hat and white shirt, the woman behind him holds an infant, and a small child sits in front. Mist blurs the hills, and the horse's long tail streams behind. Eastman Johnson painted this family of fugitive slaves racing toward Union lines around 1862.

On the back he wrote that it was "a veritable incident in the civil war seen by myself at Centerville" on the morning of McClellan's advance toward Manassas, in March 1862, according to the Eastman Johnson catalogue raisonné. The catalogue lists three versions of the composition, and on the back of this oil on paperboard Johnson later painted a different scene, Scythe Sharpening. The painting descended in Johnson's family and came to the museum in 1940 as a gift of Gwendolyn O. L.

Conkling. It is in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.