Interest in the freedom seekers of Mitchelville and the surrounding areas brought an outpouring of assistance from Northern missionaries and abolitionists, who organized and sent aid and teachers, while newspaper reporters came to document conditions among the refugee slaves. Government officials and notable abolitionists also visited Mitchelville to support its residents. On April 13, 1865, the day before President Lincoln was shot, abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Tilton visited Mitchelville and attended a church service there, joined by John G. Nicolay, former secretary to President Lincoln and then consul to Paris, while the Rev. Abraham Mercherson, pastor and Mayor of Mitchelville, led the congregation in prayer. Garrison was rapturously welcomed and began his address by reading Moses’ triumphal song, Exodus XV, then spoke for a half hour on the early history of the anti-slavery movement in America and said he believed the colored people were happy to have the franchise at Mitchelville. After the war, Sen. Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War from 1861 to 1862, visited as part of a Congressional visit to the South, attended church with the freedmen, and contributed money toward a new chapel later named St. Simons in his honor. Harriet Tubman came to Hilton Head Island in 1862, worked behind Confederate lines, helped persuade others to become spies and scouts for the Union army, and led a battle on the Combahee River that resulted in the freeing of more than 800 African slaves.