Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

Carnegie Mellon historian Fields-Black (Deep Roots) exhumes in this immersive study new information about the Combahee River Raid by Black Union troops and Harriet Tubman’s pivotal role escorting 756 enslaved people to freedom. Fields-Black, whose ancestors fought in the raid, exhaustively mines U.S. pension files, including Tubman’s, to profile many of the 300 Black soldiers who on June 2, 1863, were led by Union colonel James Montgomery into the “breadbasket of the Confederacy”—the rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina—where they destroyed $6 million in property and helped hundreds of enslaved people escape on Union gunboats. Fields-Black weaves into her narrative an impressive and varied array of topics, among them genealogies of the region’s plantation owners, an overview of the rice plantations’ brutal conditions, and Harriet Tubman’s early life and crucial wartime work for the U.S. Department of the South as an “indispensable spy and scout” who recruited other Black spies for the Union. As for the Combahee raid itself, Fields-Black mines the dramatic operation for enthralling detail. (When the rush of enslaved people to the shoreline became frantic, Montgomery shouted to Tubman “to sing to the freedom seekers to bring calm” and she did so to the abolitionist tune of “Uncle Sam’s Farm.”) Sprawling and kaleidoscopic, this is a marvel of deep research. (Feb.)