Combee : Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black freedom during the Civil War / Edda L. Fields-Black.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024]Description: xxxii, 742 pages, 72 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps, portraits ; 25 cmContent type: - text
- still image
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780197552797
- 019755279X
- Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black freedom during the Civil War
- Tubman, Harriet, 1822-1913
- Combahee River Raid, 1863
- South Carolina -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Campaigns
- United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Participation, African American
- United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Participation, Female
- United States. Army. South Carolina Volunteers, 2nd (1863-1864)
- Freed persons -- South Carolina -- History -- 19th century
- Raids (Military science) -- History -- 19th century
- United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- African Americans
- Combahee River (S.C.) -- History, Military -- 19th century
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Library Journal Starred Review
Booklist Top Ten History Books of 2024
Most 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, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and 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, and 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, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.
Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.
After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [565]-716) and index.
Timeline -- A note on names -- Foreword -- Part 1: "The prison-house of bondage." Last captives ; Old heads ; Stolen children ; Prime hands ; Freedom seekers ; Pikins ; John Brown's "men" -- Part 2: The proving ground of freedom. "Gun shoot at Bay Point" ; Broken promises ; Beaufort's boatmen ; Two of us ; Forever free -- Part 3: The Combahee River raid. "A pleasure excursion" ; Day clean ; "Some credit" ; "Great sufferers" -- Part 4: "We's Combee!" Reaping dead men ; Charleston siege ; Closed his eyes -- Afterword -- Appendixes.
"This book offers the first full account of Harriet Tubman's Civil War service and the Combahee River Raid. It details how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. It also recounts the story of enslaved families living in bondage and fighting for their freedom, using their own distinct and individual voices. The book uses more than 175 US Civil War pension files of the regiments of Second South Carolina Volunteers, including Tubman's. It is based on original documentation and written by a descendant of the enslaved men and women who fought in it, and in the process liberated themselves" -- Provided by publisher.
"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. The result is an American epic ; rich, dense, layered, and pulsating with the life of those whose lives were changed by the Combahee River Raid, both in the short run and over the longer term. Destructive as it was, a humbling blow to the Confederacy's morale, the raid was also an act of creation, contributing to the formation of the community that thrives to this day in the Gullah Geechee Corridor. Combee will become and remain the authoritative work on the raid, all its historical actors, and its long aftermath." -- Jacket flap.