Combee Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black freedom during the Civil War

Given the number of enslaved South Carolinians who were liberated by the June 1863 raid on the Combee Ferry, as well as the importance of the expedition to the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment of Black soldiers and to Northern public opinion, it is curious that the upriver incursion has attracted so little scholarly attention. The successful liberation of roughly 727 Carolinians--many of whom then enlisted in the US Army--has been relegated to chapters in biographies of Harriet Tubman, who helped guide the raid, and in works on James Montgomery, the colonel of the regiment. Fields-Black (Carnegie Melon Univ.), an authority on Carolina rice culture, spent more than a decade reading thousands of pages of pension files housed at the National Archives. Because most of the Black soldiers who took part in the raid were themselves recently liberated, Fields-Black convincingly argues that the incursion constituted one of the largest slave rebellions in North American history. Elegantly written, this thick volume is supported by 15 appendixes that include the names of liberated bondmen, the names of Tubman's scouts, military orders, correspondence by both white and Black participants, and 151 pages of endnotes. Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College

On June 2, 1863, Union forces largely comprised of formerly enslaved Black soldiers led by veteran white officers followed Harriet Tubman and her ring of scouts, spies, and river pilots up the Combahee River in Low Country South Carolina to raid rice plantations and liberate the enslaved workers. Who were these freed people? And how did they come to form the unique Gullah Geechee culture of the region? Historian Fields-Black, whose great-great-great grandfather fought in the raid, dug deep into the federal government's Civil War--era pension files and other primary sources to find out and to construct a comprehensive tour de force of historical discovery. This invaluable chronicle of an extraordinary journey of service, sacrifice, and courage gets to the core of what freedom really means. Fields-Black puts her heart into vividly documenting the lives and society of enslaved people, using every means possible, including the letters and records of the planters who held them in bondage. She notes just how rare and dangerous it was for those who escaped slavery to return to liberate friends and loved ones, which is why Harriet Tubman gets top billing in this epic story. With an extensive cast of characters, dramatic action, and findings of great significance, Combee is an exceptional work of American history.

Carnegie Mellon historian Fields-Black (Deep Roots) exhumes in this immersive study new information about the Combahee River Raid by Black Union troops and Harriet Tubman's pivotal role escorting 756 enslaved people to freedom. Fields-Black, whose ancestors fought in the raid, exhaustively mines U.S. pension files, including Tubman's, to profile many of the 300 Black soldiers who on June 2, 1863, were led by Union colonel James Montgomery into the "breadbasket of the Confederacy"--the rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina--where they destroyed $6 million in property and helped hundreds of enslaved people escape on Union gunboats. Fields-Black weaves into her narrative an impressive and varied array of topics, among them genealogies of the region's plantation owners, an overview of the rice plantations' brutal conditions, and Harriet Tubman's early life and crucial wartime work for the U.S. Department of the South as an "indispensable spy and scout" who recruited other Black spies for the Union. As for the Combahee raid itself, Fields-Black mines the dramatic operation for enthralling detail. (When the rush of enslaved people to the shoreline became frantic, Montgomery shouted to Tubman "to sing to the freedom seekers to bring calm" and she did so to the abolitionist tune of "Uncle Sam's Farm.") Sprawling and kaleidoscopic, this is a marvel of deep research. (Feb.)