In 1863, abolitionist Harriet Tubman guided a raid that liberated nearly 760 enslaved people working on rice plantations along the Combahee River, near Beaufort, South Carolina. Dr. Edda Fields-Black, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a book about the raid titled "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War." It shares the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History.
"Combee" is the first comprehensive account of the successful Combahee River raid, in which seven large rice plantations on the river were destroyed. A white commander was in charge of three federal ships manned by the U.S. Second South Carolina Volunteers, a Black regiment. Two ships made it up the river and docked at separate rice plantations. Harriet Tubman and her spies, who knew the river and interior well, guided the ships to destroy the rice plantations and to lead the enslaved people to freedom on the ships.
Before the book focuses on the raid, Fields-Black tells the stories of those forced to work on the Combahee rice plantations, gleaned from Civil War federal government pension file claims. Fields-Black says she did not want to just give a full account of the raid and how it was carried out, but put a face on the enslaved rice workers — one being her ancestor. WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn speaks with Fields-Black.
Gwendolyn Glenn: Thousands of enslaved people worked on the rice plantations, many kidnapped from West Africa because they were highly skilled in the technical aspects of rice growing, something South Carolina had failed in for the most part for decades. Fields-Black describes the Combahee area in the 1860s.
Dr. Edda Fields-Black: As far as the eye can see, these are all rice plantations. Rice was an extremely deadly crop because of chronic malaria. Rice grows in standing water. Mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, so those mosquitoes carried malaria. Enslaved people worked in the rice fields for most of the months out of the year. The enslavers would leave them in the rice fields during the months when it was very hot and the malaria-carrying mosquitoes were there in large numbers. Most enslaved children did not survive their first year, and if they did survive, then two-thirds of children did not survive until they were 15. It was also a very wealthy place for the planters. Rice planters were the wealthiest in British North America.
Glenn: Now, you won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Let's get to some of the historical aspects and congratulations on that.
Fields-Black: Thank you!
Glenn: What was going on with the war right before this raid happened?
Fields-Black: So, the Battle of Port Royal took place in November of 1861. The U.S. Navy drove its huge armada of 40-plus warships up into Port Royal Sound and took out two forts. The U.S. Army came behind them and occupied Beaufort, Port Royal and the Sea Islands, and 8,000 people who had been in bondage were liberated. This becomes a zone of U.S. occupation. Combahee — it’s 40 miles from where the Battle of Port Royal took place — so it's within shooting distance of U.S. occupation. The Confederate Army told planters in the area to evacuate because the Confederacy couldn't protect them. The lower Combahee planters decided to stay and keep exploiting their enslaved labor forces to grow more rice because it was so profitable.
Glenn: What role did Harriet Tubman play in all of this, and when did she come into it?
Fields-Black: Harriet Tubman comes down towards the end of May of 1862 as a spy and a scout for the U.S. Army Department of the South. She worked in the refugee camps, which were the front lines for freedom seekers who were coming from the plantations into this U.S.-occupied zone. She talked to all of the people who came into Union lines. These enslaved people have been forced to work for the Confederacy, building fortifications, so they saw everything. They knew how many troops there were. They knew where the armaments were.
Glenn: And they knew where the torpedoes were, as well.
Fields-Black: They knew where the torpedoes were, so Tubman got this information from the formerly enslaved, and she took it to the Union commanders. She recruited and led a group of spy scouts and pilots. She was the commander of these eight or nine men. They defused the torpedoes with which the Confederacy mined the Combahee River, and this opened the river up to the Union boats so that the Combahee raid could take place.
Glenn: You say in the book that at times she had a hard time understanding some of the people there. The Gullah language, which was very different from where she grew up in Maryland, but they learned to trust her anyway.
Fields-Black: Tubman’s spies, scouts and pilots, all except one, were from the region and would have spoken some variation of the Gullah dialect. I think that they were an important part of her communicating with the freedom seekers on the Combahee and she didn't want there to be any difference between her and the freedom seekers. She wouldn't accept privileges like shopping in the commissary, which was an officer privilege, because the freedom seekers, of course, were not entitled to these privileges.
Glenn: Now the raid occurred not long after John Brown's Harpers Ferry takeover. He was found guilty, hanged and from your account he was an associate of Tubman’s, and that whole incident played a role in her wanting to not just keep going back South to save family and friends, but to get involved more broadly.
Fields-Black: John Brown and Harriet Tubman were close associates and she carried the lessons of John Brown’s commitment to take up arms to free enslaved people with her. She's also more willing to physically engage with enslavers in order to free people. Col. James Montgomery was one of John Brown's men, and Tubman agrees to go on the Combahee raid, in part because Montgomery was the commander.
Glenn: During that raid, when more than 1,000 people came to get on these ships, Tubman got off the ship. Why did she do that?
Fields-Black: She gets off and she goes on a rowboat out to a more distant plantation. She was part of burning buildings on the plantations and we also know that she went into slave cabins and coaxed the freedom seekers who were in there to come to freedom. to trust the Union.
Glenn: You tell us in this book about the background of the enslaved people. You name them. You tell us what plantations they were on. Why was that important in writing this book?
Fields-Black: I think that on the one hand, as a descendant, we need to know our ancestors’ names and we need to be able to go back in our family trees as far as we can possibly go back. On the other hand, I did it for the history of slavery because historians haven't been able to connect enslaved people who planters wrote about in their journals, ledgers, etc., by first names only. And what I'm doing in "Combee" is showing that with the U.S. Civil War pension files, we can actually identify these people, connect them to the people in the 1870 census, which is the first federal document in which formerly enslaved people have two names, and then connect them to descend today.
Glenn: Fields-Black says the Combahee Raid was an early part of the U.S. Army's strategy to retake Charleston. One hundred fifty of the enslaved people liberated from the rice plantations joined the Union Army. Those who stayed call themselves Combee and are referred by many today as Gullah Geechee people.
