Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
Oxford University Press, 2024
Agent: Elise Capron
The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.
Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.
Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.
Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.
After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.
Accolades:
Booklist Top Ten History Books of 2024
Reviews:
"In her groundbreaking book... Edda Fields-Black tells the rousing story of the Union army's Combahee river raid, which led to the liberation of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans in 1863. Skillfully using pension files and planter records, Ms. Fields-Black...recovers the lives of 'the Combahee freedom seekers through multiple sets of transactions' -records of slave sales, Confederate compensation affidavits and land purchases."
-- Wall Street Journal
"Fields-Black's deep research and breathtaking prose bring to life the 'nameless and faceless enslaved people' who, no less courageous than Harriet Tubman herself, participated in the Combahee River Raid, their heroic actions creating what Fields-Black identifies as 'a small fissure' in the wall around the institution of slavery."
-- Boston Globe
"Remarkable new history..."
-- The New Republic
"Sprawling and kaleidoscopic, this is a marvel of deep research."
-- STARRED review, Publishers Weekly
"A scholarly and remarkable work about enslavement and Civil War...Readers will gain a deeper understanding of that era's times and experiences, and Fields Black's connection to one of the participants makes it a personal work as well."
-- STARRED review, Library Journal
"With an extensive cast of characters, dramatic action, and findings of great significance, Combee is an exceptional work of American history."
-- STARRED review, Booklist (and named Top 10 History Books of 2024)
"Through herculean research and cross-referencing of land, bank, U.S. Army pension and slavery transaction records, Fields-Black is able to name names and offer readers a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. Combee holds many additional revelatory threads and insights, but this act of resurrection alone makes the book profoundly important."
-- The BookPage
"Edda Fields-Black takes a legendary event and an iconic figure and with pathbreaking research and elegant prose gives us a striking, living, and breathing history of Black courage and freedom dreams at the dawn of emancipation."
-- Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the National Book Award
"Thanks to her careful reading of Civil War-era documents and historical sources, some never before utilized, Edda L. Fields-Back gives eloquent voice to South Carolina's rice kingdom's enslaved men and women, including her own ancestors, and offers new insights into the experience of more prominent figures, most notably Harriet Tubman. COMBEE makes us think in new ways about the role of African Americans in the destruction of slavery, and the hopes, betrayals, and transformations that accompanied emancipation."
-- Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
"These stories, these places, these events of Combahee are legendary. But these stories are not legends, and these actions of Harriet Tubman and her fellow freedom fighters are not mythology - these are the true accountings of heroism, determination, and unparalleled commitment to freedom. This book demands that you feel the chills of muddy water; burn with the anger of suffered indignity; and immerse yourself in the adrenaline and courage of some of the bravest people our nation has ever known. In a time when truth seems malleable, books like COMBEE and historians like Dr. Edda Fields-Black are essential to preserving and propelling stories like this into the consciousness of the world. The story of Combahee River Raid is one of the greatest American history stories of all time - and we should all know it."
-- Dr. Tonya M. Matthews, President and CEO, International African American Museum
"A stunning piece of historical reconstruction, unlike anything I've ever seen. COMBEE offers the story of some 750 people who freed themselves in the raid; they were illiterate and didn't leave us letters, diaries, or autobiographies, for the most part. That Edda Fields-Black has reconstructed these people's lives is truly extraordinary. This is an amazing story."
-- James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics and Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, both winners of the Lincoln Prize
"A riveting and original account of Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid, COMBEE is an absolutely essential book-not just for understanding the distant past, but for offering context and insight into tragic events in our own times, and the shadow of racism that still looms over Charleston, Charlottesville, and the nation."
-- Tera W. Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
"Despite boatloads of Civil War books, no one has dug more deeply into the 1863 Combahee River Raid than Edda Fields-Black. COMBEE brings that daring event alive and establishes its important place in the broader narratives of Harriet Tubman's life and the war to end slavery. Poring over pension files, trapsing through Lowcountry marshes, and tracking down plantation descendants, Fields-Black has left no pluff mud unturned in pursuing this dramatic story, weaving together the lives of her central "freedom seekers"-including her own third great grandfather-with those of Northern commanders and liberated Black Carolinians."
-- Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740
"Fields-Black vividly recounts one of the most dramatic events of the Civil War era, revealing Harriet Tubman and her revolutionary glory in exciting, original ways."
-- Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh
"Edda Fields-Black doesn't just bring fresh energy to Harriet Tubman's story but, from the shadow of memory, rescues a generation of people who throughout the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, fought for their freedom, crafted a new cultural, political, and economic identities, and provided a model to the nation for a new birth of equality and justice following the Civil War."
-- Paul Gardullo, Supervisory Museum Curator and Director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
"Fields-Black's deep archival research on the participants in the raid transforms our understanding of the event. Tubman doesn't disappear, but now the stories of the other participants emerge. In so doing, they will actually reemphasize the heroism of Tubman herself, as an apotheosis of Black (and Black women's) resistance traditions."
-- Edward Baptist, Cornell University
"There is a gripping and well-told story about Harriet Tubman and the Civil war at the center of COMBEE, but what stands are the details around the edges of the story, about the history and daily lives of enslaved and free people on the rice plantations. I came away from the book with a realer, thicker understanding of the lives of the people of Combee."
-- Walter Johnson, Harvard University, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
"In Combee, Edda Fields-Black gives an underappreciated episode in the history of Harriet Tubman, the Black freedom struggle, and the Civil War the careful and care-full treatment it deserves. More than that, this book brings to light whole worlds contained within a grain of time, lifting up the names and stories of freedom seekers whose voices still resonate powerfully today."
-- W. Caleb McDaniel, author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, winner of the Pulitzer Prize