COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, Edda L. Fields-Black

In the spring and summer of 1863, as the outcome of the Civil War, and with it the fate of the nation, hung in the balance, Union forces struggled to capture the offensive. One promising place was along the coastal waters of South Carolina. A year and a half earlier, the Union Navy had taken the port cities of Port Royal and Beaufort, where the Union then made plans to attack the expansive rice plantations lining the maze of rivers that fed into and out of the South’s heartland, including the Combahee River. On the night of June 1, 1863, three federal gunboats steamed upriver from Beaufort and, starting early the next day, destroyed seven plantations along the Combahee, resulting in the liberation of more than 700 enslaved people. One of the most successful of the war, the raid was also, argues Edda Fields-Black in COMBEE, the largest slave rebellion in the continental United States. Those enslaved along the Combahee knew “Lincoln’s gun-boats” were coming and seized their freedom when they saw the chance. The raid was remarkable in several other ways: it was carried out by one of the earliest all-Black regiments, the U.S. 2nd Second South Carolina Volunteers, and its gunboats were guided by Harriet Tubman. Fields-Black here offers the  fullest account to date of this pivotal and dramatic event and the critical role that Tubman played in it. Drawing on meticulous and original research, she recreates the world of the rice plantations, and especially those in the “prison-house of bondage” who made them so profitable. She uses the archives to give these enslaved laborers names and stories, inscribing them permanently into the historical record. Among them is her third-great grandfather.