It was Edda Fields-Black’s Op Ed in the NYTimes that led me to COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press 2024). In the editorial, she describes how the newly digitized US Civil War Pension Files made it possible for African Americans to find information on their forebearers who were slaves—far more than what was formerly available from the “small irregular pieces of an enormous puzzle.”
One cannot overestimate the information provided on the pension files—a “treasure trove,” Fields-Black writes. An example she provides in the Foreword is of her ‘great-great-great uncle Jonas Fields, who enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, 128th Regiment, Company C, in April 1865, not long before the war ended.” Medical records show his height, complexion, eye color. She writes: “It is enough for me to imagine that Jonas was taller than most, dark, and lean, like the men in my granddaddy’s family.” And following this, she can trace, not only the slave holder who owned him and his family and where he was a slave, and the fact, for example, that the slave holder separated him from his first wife, and so much more—about her family, and hundreds of others, whose stories fill this book.
This discovery became the seed of this spectacular book which follows her decision to research rice production in the South Carolina plantations, after having studied rice farming in West Africa.
COMBEE is both history and story. This is the story not of a battle, but of a raid that Edda Fields-Black signifies as the largest slave rebellion in US history. On one hand, hers is the story of how, in one less-than twenty-four-hour period, several boats carrying Colonel James Montgomery, the Second South Carolina Volunteers (one of the earliest Black regiments of the Civil War), batteries of the Third Rhode Heavy Artillery, Harriet Tubman, and her men—all former slaves turned scouts, spies, and pilots—catalyzed the self-liberation of more than seven hundred people, along with destroying many of the plantations on the Combahee, a coastal river of South Carolina. On the other hand, this book—by way of the extensive footwork required to attain the information, along with the word-work required to restore agency to those who secured their own freedom at such great risk—re-voices the narrative altogether. Fields-Black shines a light into every corner of this raid, offering never before told histories and stories of liberation gleaned from piecing together letters and archival records of those forced against their will into bondage.
It is not just the unearthing of this incredibly valuable information that is the draw here. It is how Fields-Black restores the “humanity” of those enslaved against their will—a phrase that is used repeatedly in this book. It feels to me—someone who has essentially learned her history through fiction—seminal in its execution. It places the toxic system of slavery front and center.
Here is an unfailingly consistent attempt to undercut, to expose, to clarify, and to articulate the normalization of the institution of slavery in the country that was founded in the name of freedom. The author uncovers this buried history and gives voice to those who made this history. Here’s a scholar whose excavations verge on the anthropological, whether it is to enhance the histories of Harriet Tubman and place her contextually around others like her, most notably Frederick Douglass, or to celebrate and reclaim and when possible name the hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers who went from working the land to fighting for the country that had betrayed them, risking their lives, their bodies already broken by inconceivable labor. Not only the males suffered from broken bodies. Fields-Black cites the greater odds for prolapsed uterus among the women in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, for having to return to rice fields too soon after giving birth.
When one considers Harriet Tubman, one must consider the courage it took for a freed person, who by dint of her countenance and the color of her skin managed the difficulty of “venturing back into slave societies.” Especially one without the agency of literacy. Edda Fields-Black writes: “The majority of well-known Black abolitionists…became literate after emancipation….Tubman and most of the men and women enslaved on Combahee River rice plantations on the other hand, remained illiterate,” although some were able to sign their names. “Tubman told her story in public lectures and dictated her life story to others…. But for most of those who never learned to read and write, we do not know their names, have not heard their voices, and do not know their stories.”
We are taken deep inside the stories of those whose love for freedom never wavered, who, when the chance came, risked everything—and we can very well understand why Harriet Tubman was given the name “Moses.” There is something epic about this book—something almost biblical or Homeric. As if an invitation for healing. The effect feels like a repudiation of so many prior histories that have essentially normalized a racism that still persists.
At times, Fields-Black’s prose reads as fiction, complete with the sense of character and Fields-Black’s gift of dramatization, of setting the scene. We learn and feel so much with respect to Harriet Tubman, along with John Brown, Frederick Douglass, just to name a few. Not to mention the freedom seekers who heretofore were unknowns until their heroic stories were unearthed and pieced-together.
Fields-Black tells their stories by charting literally hundreds of lives and their titles, or the names the slaves chose for themselves, from spreadsheets. She writes that it was “not unusual for enslaved people to use surnames within the confines of enslaved communities to show familial relationship,” but because “enslaved people in the South Carolina Lowcountry did not always choose the name of the slaveholder who held them in bondage…they sometimes chose the name of the one who previously held them.” There was also a “basket name,” which was specific to the Gullah Geechee community, which is well-known today. It was a unique practice to be given “a pet name or nickname by which family and close friends called an individual…that was kept secret” from those outside the community. The Gullah Geechee community’s culture, language, and spiritual practices are creolized, incorporating West African elements.
Fields-Black creates a database to organize the material discovered in pension files of soldiers in the Black regiment receiving monthly payments for having served. She writes about the extreme complications for Black veterans and their widows to receive payments, the vast inequity between whites and Blacks following the Civil War, the immense industry of Harriet Tubman—not only for liberating those held in bondage, but also for creating opportunities for freed people.
Dr. Fields-Black informs us about the histories of the plantation owners on the Combahee, about inheritances, how they passed down their enslaved laborers, how they mortgaged their enslaved laborers to pay debts and taxes, and how they carelessly separated families of their enslaved laborers.
In addition to compiling the histories, she describes the morphological territory, the flora and fauna, and her own experience there in a disease environment so deadly that the plantation owners themselves did not live there during the “sickly season”—which ran from the beginning of spring until the first frost—leaving their enslaved laborers to suffer the various maladies, among which was the malaria that plagued the coastal areas. Along with the archival research, Fields-Black engages with the land itself, wades in swamps confronting alligators and snakes, looking for a bodily understanding for those escaping slavery in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
Fields-Black provides readers with several hand-drawn maps of the topography; she makes sure we know importance of the tides, that we understand the nature of the climate and the terrain. And, there are more than fifty pages of photographs—including portraits and aerial photos of Combahee River Raid sites, along with documents.
Although encyclopedic in its breadth, the amount of information alone does not begin to describe the pull of this book. We are compelled by the power and humanity in the storytelling, tugged by the relationship of the author to the material, by her passion—and by her own story. Dr. Fields-Black has literal skin in this story; she tells the reader early on that she learned from her uncle’s pension files that her great-great-great grandfather was a soldier in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought in the raid. Along the way, the reader senses the power of memoir here—the story of how she gathered the information for this book is as powerful as the book itself.
What this book of Dr. Fields-Black adds to the Civil War history by way of her focus on those “irregular pieces” that have accumulated and to the extent possible have found their place in that “enormous puzzle” is not merely a fleshing out of the struggles regarding those formerly unknown human beings who rose from their enslaved status and self-liberated. Many uncelebrated individuals come to life in her hands, in her words, how emotional a read this is; how very intimate; you can almost hear those voices—you can almost hear breath.
When the plantation owners, those few who chose not to vacate during this particular “sickly season,” in June 1863, remaining to secure their homes, their goods, had suddenly and without warning, heard the gunboats making their way up the river, they ordered those they held in bondage to run to the woods—but as it happened everyone who could—and 88-year old Minus Hamilton would vouch for this in his testimony—was gwine to the boat.
The plantation owners lacked foreknowledge of the raid. However, Fields-Black writes that “what Tubman described years after the end of the war as the ‘mysterious communication system’ that had spread the news of the arrival of the Union ships was, in fact, not at all mysterious once we take into account the perspectives of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers veterans and their relatives and neighbors, revealed in the pension files. It boiled down to kinship among enslaved people on seven plantations, along the lower Combahee River. They grew up together and were interrelated by blood, marriage and even fictive kinship. They did their very best not to leave their kinfolk behind.”
The raid itself takes place in the latter half of the book. By the time those three gunboats enter the twenty-five-mile-long stretch of the Combahee River with their contingents of Black regiments, readers are sitting at the edge of their seats. We have learned that in the Lowcountry “rice cultivation grew in part because some of the enslaved laborers were already skilled rice farmers.” Before the slaves are standing in the rice fields, hoeing rice at 4am when the US Army gunboats arrive, we learn that “West Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast farmers had grown rice in the uplands, inland swamps, and mangrove swamps hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans.” We know that except for these pension records, relatively little “is known about the ancestors of the Blacks who were enslaved on the seven plantations,” that in contrast to the white owners of the plantations, “the enslaved families’ genealogies were neither recorded nor published. But veterans and widows who escaped in June 1983 kept the names of their parents and sometimes even their grandparents etched in their memories.” We know the significance of Harriet Tubman in this raid, from following her path to freedom and risking it all that others might be free—before she arrived in Beaufort, SC to work as a spy for the US Army. We know few who achieved their own freedom had the temerity to go back and free others. In fact, it was exceedingly rare.
One can only imagine how it feels to know that the history Dr. Edda Fields-Black is researching is one in which her great-great-great grandfather took part. Hers is a voice that speaks for a history, a people, a family—and a self. COMBEE is above all a history book that offers knowledge culled from painstaking research. It is driven by a need to recover and restore the missing voices that sing freedom through generations of both heroism and suffering. This book is a stunning artifact in and of itself.
Edda Fields-Black
Edda L. Fields-Black is an historian of West Africa and the African Diaspora who is currently professor of History and director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center, Carnegie Mellon University. She is known for her research on peasant rice farmers in precolonial West Africa and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Raised in Miami, Fields-Black grew up with her paternal grandparents who were Gullah speakers from Green Pond, South Carolina. She earned a BA degree in English and History from Emory University and an MA degree in history from the University of Florida, before earning MA and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.
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