New history places Harriet Tubman and her Black regiment as agents of change, not passive victims
On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman led three hundred Black soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Regiment up the Combahee River in South Carolina to destroy an essential bridge, raid plantations, and liberate hundreds of enslaved people.
This raid, as Edda L. Fields-Black explains in her book, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” was “one of the most successful Union expeditions of the entire Civil War in terms of property damage and number of enslaved people freed.”
While individuals like Robert Smalls, or groups like the Massachusetts 54th Regiment — the first regiment of African Americans from the North to serve during the Civil War — occasionally receive mention in the slew of books and other media that seem to have documented every conceivable facet of the Civil War, the Black soldiers who joined Tubman have been largely ignored.
Fields-Black’s “Combee” rectifies this neglect by recounting the history of those Black people who played a meaningful, if overlooked, role in the Union victory. Through painstaking research into Civil War pension files, where former Black soldiers as well as their widows revealed incredible accounts of their lives on plantations along the Combahee River, Fields-Black provides a rich, textured portrait of the lives of Black people previously ignored in historic accounts of the Civil War era.
Harriet Tubman is Fields-Black’s central character. The Black feminist icon never wrote about the Combahee River raid, or about her life for that matter, but her courageous actions in 1863 have become the stuff of legend, even inspiring Black Feminist Lesbians in the 1970s to name their group the Combahee River Collective. Despite this, only over the past two decades have scholars and journalists published biographies about Tubman.
These works, however, focus mostly on Tubman’s life before and after the Civil War. Fields-Black uses the raid as a window into an underpublicized story of Black soldiers who risked their freedom and lives to destroy an institution that held millions of Black people in bondage.
Her account traces the roots of white and Black settlement around the Combahee River in the 1730s, when white settlers divvied up 100 acres, 119 lots, a chapel, a free school, and 70 common acres to form a new town called Radnor, located at the landing of the Combahee River on a road connecting Charleston and Port Royal, South Carolina. For the next one hundred years, the forced labor of thousands of Black people made the Lowcountry white enslavers who lived around the Combahee River some of the wealthiest in the nation. When nullification gave way to secession, they voted unanimously with others to secede from the United States. Nearly four months later, the newly established Confederacy sent troops to Charleston’s Harbor to take Fort Sumter.
When Harriet Tubman learned this, she became eager to join the US military for the cause of Black liberation, despite President Lincoln’s claim that the war was only to preserve the Union rather than end slavery. Regardless, Tubman regarded this conflict as an abolitionist war. Toward this end, the white abolitionist Wendell Phillips convinced Massachusetts Governor John Andrews that Tubman, with her decadesworth of experience traversing the southern landscape undetected, might help the US military defeat the Confederacy by gathering information from enslaved people about Confederate strategy and supplies. By spring of 1862, Tubman had called out to free Blacks, white abolitionists, and sympathizers to meet at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston to raise funds to support her family in New York while she went south to aid the US Military.
However, as “Combee” shows, Tubman’s initial interaction with US military officials was off-putting, to say the least. When Tubman met the New York officer assigned to travel with her South, he made a snide comment about Tubman looking “young enough” to be his servant. As Fields-Black explains, “Tubman decided then and there that she ‘didn’t like dat man no how’ and she would not go anywhere with him, especially as a servant.”
Discouraged, but not dissuaded, by the arrogance and condescension of the military officer she had been assigned to follow, Tubman left for South Carolina alone, defying the federal government’s rule that Black people only travel South when accompanied by a white military officer in the role as servants. Tubman made her way to Baltimore, then to Beaufort, South Carolina, in the vicinity of the Combahee River, where she would make history as the first Black woman to lead a military operation during the Civil War.
Fields-Black describes the enslaved people living on the plantations along the Combahee River as change-agents rather than passive victims of enslavement waiting for white soldiers to save them. Indeed, her larger project is to supplant the narrative of heroic white liberators through this case study of Black freedom seekers, who joined over seven hundred enslaved people for a cause greater than that of preserving the nation.
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 FieldsBlack identifies as “a small fissure” in the wall around the institution of slavery.