Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
Edda L. Fields-BlackMost 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, & went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, & 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, & 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, & pilots & participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman & her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, & their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations & liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language Souuth Carolina Volunteers & risked their lives in the effort.
Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, & estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, & sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's de
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