The Combahee River Raid of 1863

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

The opening shots of the Civil War were fired at 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Seven southern states had already seceded from the Union before the battle, beginning with South Carolina in December, 1860. After the Confederate victory at Fort Sumter, another four states joined the Confederacy. The battle lines were drawn for the deadliest war in American history. With its superior naval power, the union established a blockade of the southern coast to prevent, or at least to attempt to prevent, the Confederacy from trading cotton for arms with foreign countries. The blockade was difficult, however, especially since resupplying required traveling far to northern ports. The union, in need of a southern base, captured Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, between Charleston and Savannah, on November 7, 1861, in a battle known to the Gullah Geechee still today as, "Gunshoot at Bay Point." When the white inhabitants fled, they ran so quickly that they left behind not only their homes and their crops, but also 10,000 people they had enslaved. Those formerly enslaved people would be freed on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Until then, they were military contraband of war. The Union held Port Royal for the remainder of the war, which allowed for what became known as the Port Royal Experiment, a kind of proto reconstruction in the Sea Islands. The United States government and private charities provided material help for the formerly enslaved population in the form of food, clothing, and medicine. And the government put them to work harvesting and processing the cotton that the plantation owners had left behind. Philanthropic and abolitionist northerners answered the call for volunteers, and came to Port Royal starting in March of 1862. Many of those volunteers got to work teaching the formerly enslaved, who were eager to learn. By the end of 1862, over 2000 Black children across the Sea Islands were learning subjects like reading, math, and history. It wasn't just white northerners who came to help. Charlotte Forten, granddaughter of the prominent freeborn Black abolitionist James Forten, chronicled her experience, writing in the Atlantic, "My heart sings a song of Thanksgiving at the thought that even I am permitted to do something for a long abused race, and aid in promoting a higher, holier, and happier life on the Sea Islands." Harriet Tubman, who had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849, arrived in Beaufort in 1862. It was, of course, not her first time back in the south since her escape. She had returned around a dozen times, liberating 60 to 70 people, including many of her family members. As Tubman could not read or write, her purpose in the Sea Islands was different than Forten's. At the request of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, Tubman traveled to South Carolina to join the Union Army as a nurse, cook, laundress, and most importantly, a scout and spy. Although Tubman's Chesapeake Creole was almost mutually unintelligible from the low country Creole spoken in South Carolina, she was able to form a rapport with liberated slaves, that the white union officers could not. Tubman debriefed the freedom seekers who arrived in Beaufort, learning the disposition of the Confederate forces, along with important geographic features of the nearby regions. In June, 1863, Tubman and the US Army put this intelligence to use. Late in the night on June 1, three Union gunboats sailed from Beaufort, about 20 miles north to the Combahee River. The rice plantations on either side of the Combahee, were still in Confederate hands. But they were a lower priority for protection from Confederate forces than were the nearby railroads, especially during the hot summer months when most plantation owners would flee for higher ground to avoid summer illnesses. Under the guidance of Tubman, and the eight or nine scouts she had recruited, abolitionist Colonel James Montgomery led the troops of the Second South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, which was made up of free Blacks and former slaves, and a battery of the Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. With intelligence from escaped freedom seekers, they were able to avoid torpedoes in the river, although one of the gunboats, the Sentinel, ran aground on a sandbar. Soldiers from the Sentinel boarded the other boats instead, and the Harriet A. Weed and the John Adams continued on their mission through the night. Along the riverbanks, the Union army destroyed seven rice plantations in the heart of the Confederate breadbasket, burning the mansions and rice fields, and causing $6 million worth of damage. At the site of the Union gunboats filled with Black soldiers, the enslaved workers on the plantations ran to the water, hauling their children and their belongings. There was no room on the ships for their bags and their baskets and their pots and pans. But the soldiers rescued as many people as they could fit on those two remaining ships, liberating seven to 800 people that night. In Tubman's account, she put the number saved at 756. The scene on the ships was chaotic, and Colonel Montgomery asked Tubman to, "speak a word of consolation to your people."  With their different dialects and backgrounds, Tubman didn't see these freedom seekers as any more her people than Montgomery's but she understood their fear. And she began to sing an abolitionist song of the day, called, "Uncle Sam's Farm," which included the lines, "Come along, come along. Don't be alarmed. Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm." She later recalled, "I kept on singing until all were brought on board." Within days, 150 of the men who had been liberated, immediately enlisted in the very regiment that had freed them, the Second South Carolina Volunteers. Joining me now to help us understand this incredible story is Dr. Edda Fields-Black, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War."

Hi, Edda. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  10:45  
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

I am thrilled to be speaking about this really important moment in American history. I want to hear a little bit about how you came to write this book. Your other work has been on rice. And this is of course, a story of rice, but not just a story of rice. So how did you come to write this book?

Yes, I like to say that this is the best rice story that no one knows anything about. I was actually working on two other projects. In addition to being a historian, I'm an artist. And I had written a libretto and was collaborating with a classical music composer who's really amazing. His name is John Wineglass, and we were writing what became, "Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice." So it's a symphonic work, contemporary classical, about rice and slavery. And as I was in the early stages of writing that libretto, I was looking for dramatic scenes from the primary sources. And I found the Combahee Raid. I found Minus Hamilton's life history. And I was fascinated. And so I wrote, you know, that portion of the libretto, and I tucked it away somewhere. And then I was working on a book project, which I wanted to be a history of the Gullah Geechee and I kind of started in the Civil War for a variety of reasons that are, you know, too long to explain. And, again, I was writing about the Combahee River Raid. So my interest was piqued. Both of those projects grew in different directions. And I was there in the middle, I came to a point where I had to, I had to rein them in. I couldn't continue to go in these different directions. And so the intersection point, of course, was the Combahee River Raid. And I couldn't imagine at that moment that there was something about Harriet Tubman's life that we didn't know. You know, I just couldn't even fathom it. And even though there had been little written on the raid, I figured there was a reason and that there really wasn't any there there. So I, however, did some poking around and talked to a lot of people and tried to dig into a couple different kinds of primary sources, one of which was the pension files. And I struck gold. I found on my first try, the companies that were formed after the raid, companies G and H of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and within pension files that I drew from those companies, I found testimony of the Combahee freedom seekers testifying about the raid. So from that point, I I figured I had to figure it out, that there was something there that was pretty special. And I wanted to know more and I thought that this could really reveal a part of this history that we had never heard.

Kelly  14:05  
So I have to ask about your research methods because as I understand it, you built this enormous database. This must have been just painstaking work. Can you talk me through a little bit what what it takes to find the stories in these records?

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  14:28  
A lot of patience. The funny thing is that after I really got lucky on my first try on my first trip to the National Archives, and the first set of pension files I requested and I was back at home and it was months later. Then it did take me months and months and many many pension files before I found more evidence. So I I was, you know it's it's funny to look at these things in hindsight because in hindsight, you have everything figured out. And I have to remember what it was like at the time where I didn't know anything. You know, the only thing I knew was that these files were long, some of them. Some of them were 300 pages long of cursive writing. Okay. I was transcribing them myself in the beginning. And I was only going to read it once. I was sure about that. And I, you know, I, there's so much detail in the files. It was this the thing where I didn't even know yet what I was looking for. A couple of files in I started, you know, with each file, I was sort of building my knowledge and building the questions that I wanted these files to answer. And I figured I had to capture all of that. And thankfully, I figured this out at the very beginning. So that again, because it was cursive, and it was pretty neat cursive, but it was cursive, nonetheless, that I was going to read it once, I was going to do a full text transcription of it. I didn't care how many pages it was. And then I would enter by hand, these transcriptions cut and paste into a database. So I started with a database that was about 40 lines, 40 columns long, 40 columns wide. And the rows were the veterans. I had pulled the names of the veterans in companies G and H from a couple of sources. And you know, we so much at the time was not digitized. Okay, I'm going back now to 2016. So much was not digitized. So I'm ordering rosters through interlibrary loan at the at the library, and I had an undergraduate to put them into this sheet Google Sheet. So as I got files, and as people, because the thing about a pension file is it's not just the veteran, it's not just the widow. But it's all these people who come to testify. And a lot of times, that's the most interesting testimony. So I had to capture all of it, I had to know where I got it, I had to be able to retrieve it. And I'm only going to read this thing once, okay, so I'm not going to take notes on it, I'm going to transcribe it, put it in the database. Then I started a second file, because it was clear to me that I had some repeat offenders, if you will, I had some people who testified a lot. I had some people whose testimony was very detailed. I had people who knew all the news about everybody else, and they were happy to tell it. I had people who testified about the raid, right. So I broke those folks out into another database. And began to and I also wanted to be able to identify approximately the birthdate of the person. And believe it or not, this is actually very hard for enslaved people. It was less difficult for the veterans than it was for the widows, because the veterans had enlisted. And so at least there's a birth date on their enlistment record. I wanted a general, you know, notion of how old the person was, if I could get a couple points of data, I broke them out and put them into another database. And then with my research team, we began to layer all kinds of other documents into this database, whether they were slave transactions, and that would be wills, estate records, bills of sale, mortgages, marriage settlements, I think that's about it. I'm sure you're missing something, as well as things like their freedmen's bank account, right, or the census. And their life if they told life histories. And I wanted to compile all of this. And it's the people for whom I had the most data and the richest testimony. Those are the people who became the main characters in the book.

Kelly  19:12  
So the other type of research then that you did was to actually go to these physical locations and experience what it's like to be in a rice field and what it's like to go down this river. Could you talk a little bit about how that puts you then as a writer in the mindset of the people that you're writing about? 

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  19:34  
Yeah, that was really important to me. That was really, really important to me. I wanted to try to understand the raid from the perspective of enslaved people. And that in and of itself is very daunting, because there's so many aspects of that experience that I could never access, you know, even as an African American, even as a descendent, you know, even as a granddaughter of the region, I will never thankfully, you know, be enslaved and compelled to do the kind of labor that they were forced to do in these rice fields. But I wanted to, you know, I wanted to get the landscape. I wanted to be very clear about the landscape. And I wanted to know, you know, what would it have been like, at 4am in early June, you know, and be able to paint that picture. So I did a number of things. And first of all, let me say that I had my partner and my partners in crime. I was hosted by Nemours Wildlife Foundation, which is in Beaufort. So I lived on the Combahee. I lived on the Combahee for over a year. I was not there consecutively, but there was a stretch about a nine months stretch when I was there every month for about 10 days. So what that meant is that first of all, I hiked in the rice fields, as often as I could, you know, just about every other day, sometimes every day, weather, time permitting, I saw those rice fields in every season. And I saw them in every stage of tide. And I saw the critters, I saw them, you know, develop over over their life cycles. And I got to know their sounds, I got to know their you know what they sounded like when they jumped in the water. That was very important. So that was one thing and I'm someone who knows rice fields very, very well. There were scientists, this was a it's a it's a Wildlife Foundation. So there, it's a research center. So there are scientists there who work there, some of whom live there, you know, I'm in, in the house, where everybody has lunch, and people have breakfast in their offices. So it was easy for me to run downstairs and say, "Hey, I have a question." And we would jump in the truck and go and look at it. And I should say I had access to six of the seven plantations. So from plantation to plantation, I would walk, you know, we would walk we would drive I would ask questions, etc. One thing as much time as I've spent in the rice field I had never done was walk barefoot in the rice fields. And that was one of our little reenactment projects. And we did walk barefoot. I wanted to understand how people who were in the rice fields got to the boats. And I had a theory that they ran through the rice fields, which was totally wrong, totally impractical. So it was it's more likely that people climbed out onto the dikes and ran, walked, you know, on the dikes which are these earthen embankments that hold the Combahee River back from the rice field or that separate, you know, different fields. They're much sturdier. They're a lot less slippery, and they're a lot less prickly. So that would be the most practical thing, as opposed to trying to run through the rice fields. We went up the Combahee. I went up the Combahee a couple times, but I guess three times. The raid took place under the full moon. So we went up at night under the moon, with no modern gadgets. We went up with we used a motor but my colleague and friend set the motor so that we were traveling very slowly about the I can't remember the mileage of the gunboat that was sort of the lead boat in in the expedition. So we tried to recreate it. And what I learned and what my scientist friends had told me was that the moon shimmers off the water. So you're going up this very serpentine river and the Combahee has some very serious curls, as they call them in the low country. And you're you're navigating by the moon that is shimmering off the water. And it's in the middle and on one side you have rice field and on the other side you have marsh. So I had to learn to stay in the middle, as we went up this curly river. I went up the next day, and we ran aground at the mouth of the Combahee coming off the Coosaw River and of the, you know, three gunboats were used in the raid. They came up from downtown Beaufort went up the Coosaw and ran aground. So we had a similar experience there and  I also had friends who took me into the creeks. And so this is also I write about this in the book, because when the gunboats pull up at Joshua Nichols boat landing, they came through a creek in the rice fields. And so we went up in that creek. And it's interesting just how tight it is, you know, and how important it was that the John Adams was double ended, to go in and be able to come right back out, because that creek, those, those ricefield creeks are pretty small, when you think of boats this size. So those were, all of those experiences really gave me a better sense of, of the landscape and how to communicate that landscape. I will say that the alligators and the snakes are also important part of the story. So as we're walking barefoot through the rice fields, we encountered a baby alligator. And the mother alligator was not far behind. So this is how I know that it's not a good idea to try to run through ricefields.

It's clear from everything, you're saying that they had to have really good knowledge of the region to do this raid. So can you talk a little bit then about the importance of the intelligence that Harriet Tubman is able to gather, that the formerly enslaved people who are now in the army have with them? Like what what all of that how they were able to contribute to this incredibly successful raid?

Yeah, it was. First of all, I'll say that, you know, Tubman's role, and her role as an as a spy is not described in the military record. However, the military record is replete with references of the US Army getting intelligence from enslaved and formerly enslaved people. This was commonplace, right, because the enslaved people, as you said, knew the region. So we know that Tubman was, she worked in the refugee camp. So this is the camp that was set up to house people, and to process people who were coming from Confederate controlled territories. And they're coming into the Union controlled territory. This is after the Battle of Port Royal in November, 1861. So these people who are coming from the Confederate side, you know, they knew information about Confederate installations. They knew information about Confederate weaponry, you know, they knew a lot about what was going on over there. Tubman, we know from a letter written by William Lloyd Garrison's son, George Garrison, would interview these people. She would talk to these people, she would find out what they knew. And she would share this information with the US army commanders. And according to Garrison, she made it her business to do this with each and every person who came in to the camps. And she got more intelligence out of them than anybody else. They trusted her. They trusted her. She was a part of the community, even though she didn't speak the same dialect as as the people did in that region. And even though you know, some of their ways were a little peculiar, and her as were hers to them. We also know that Tubman found the men who the Confederates used, the enslaved men who the Confederates forced to put torpedoes on the Combahee River. And she was the leader of a group of spy scouts and pilots, she said about eight or nine men. She and her men oversaw the removal of these torpedoes, according to Tubman's nephew. So this opened up the river to the US Army, for the raid. I was able in "Combee," to track that there were people from the seven rice plantations which were raided, who escaped enslavement and got to Beaufort, South Carolina before the raid. I'm able to track them. There's several of them who were working for the US Army quartermaster. There were others of them who were working as carpenters. And some of them, including a man by the name of Friday Barrington, enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers before the raid. And Friday goes back. His mother, his father, his sister, are still enslaved on Cypress plantation. And he goes back to Cypress plantation. So it's it's highly likely that there are more individuals like that whose stories we don't know. But there are certainly Combahee people, people from the lower Combahee, people from the seven plantations that were raided and or people who were related to those people, because there was a previous US Army raid in this on the Santee river. And the Blake family owned one plantation on the Santee and one plantation on the Combahee. So there were some people, some Combahee people who had been taken up to the Santee who were freed and take into Beaufort, before the Combahee River Raid. There's a number of people with Combahee affiliations who were in Beaufort who could have also provided intelligence to Tubman, to the US Army.

Kelly  31:16  
So of the 750- some people who are able to escape enslavement in this raid, a lot of them are men of military age, and they end up immediately joining the US Army in what feels a little bit uncomfortable. Like maybe they had a choice. Maybe they didn't. Could you talk a little bit about that and what they go on to do then?

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  31:41  
Yeah, so it's interesting. I think that at an earlier period, at the very beginning of the enlistment of Black troops, before it was actually authorized by President Abraham Lincoln, there was coercion and there was force in in enlistment. I think by the time you get to the Combahee Raid, and I'm speaking from what the Combahee freedom seekers say, I would say that based on that, that they enlisted voluntarily. The wives, so I'm thinking of someone like Sarah Osborne, Sarah Smalls Osborne, who says that, you know, we all got on the boat, we went to Beaufort, and the men went to war. By June of 1863, I think they were clear that they were going to go into war to end slavery. And having liberated themselves, they were going, they knew that freedom wasn't free. And that they were going back not only to protect their freedom, but to to, you know, play a role in the freedom of other people who were still enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, because if they were in Confederate controlled territory, they weren't free. 

Kelly  33:16  
Yeah. Can you talk some about the implications of this raid? It doesn't just affect those people, although obviously it has an enormous effect on their lives, but it really in some ways changes the way the US Army thinks about what they're doing. You know, what, what all comes out of this raid?

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  33:40  
Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think on the one hand, in many ways the US Army was engaged in some of this work, prior to the raid. I think the raid showed that these kinds of expeditions could be very successful. And they could be successful at not only liberating people, but also filling the ranks of the Black troops with soldiers, that Black men would fight for their freedom. And again, this is something that by June of 1863, the US knew, but they learned it in say St. Mary's. They learned it on the St. Marys River, the St. Johns River. These are primarily expeditions by the First South Carolina Volunteers, but they knew it in smaller numbers, right. Here, they know it en masse, and it becomes really important. By the end of the war, there were 500,000 formerly enslaved people behind Union lines. So the US Army you know the federal government knew by this time that enslaved people would escape, if given the chance, that if the US Army was there, they would go to the US Army. They would want, they would do everything they could, you know, to be to liberate themselves. And this is the, it begins to turn the tide. Right, it begins to turn the tide. It begins to look at as if the destruction of slavery was was inevitable. I think also in terms of Charleston, and the siege of Charleston, this is a very, very early step in that process. But I think it was an early beginning to the US Army and the US Navy, kind of the US Army, let's primarily, but just in general, the US military's design on the siege of Charleston, the Combahee River Raid, you know, that whole sort of expanding the US Army presence, and being successful going into Confederate territory is is beginning to embolden them to try that.

Kelly  36:25  
Could you talk a little bit about your family connection to this history and what it's like to be able to do some of that research that does connect to your, your own family, your own past?

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  36:38  
Yeah, so it was a little surprising. You know, I, I didn't know. I didn't know for sure, let me put it that way, that my third great grandfather fought in the raid, before I really started writing this book. My father was born about a mile from where the raid took place. And I thought that our family had escaped in the raid. They are so close. And so you know, as I was writing the requiem, and as I was writing the, the other book, researching, this was sort of in the back of my mind. And I, this was sort of a side project, you know, I had started the family, I didn't start it, I was given it, I was assigned it. And I kind of picked it up, I guess, around 2013. So you know, I piddled at it when I had the time. And of course, it's it's in and of itself a full time job. And everything I could find was that, you know, our family was buried on some of these plantations, or they're next door or whatever. I didn't know what was going on. And I assumed that we had escaped in the raid. We knew of Hector Fields, but we only knew Hector's direct descendants down to my father. We didn't know anything else about Hector. We didn't know his siblings. You know, we didn't know the names of his other children. We didn't know his wives' names. We didn't know anything except man, father to son, down to my dad, from Hector to my dad. And there were and I got that from the census which was given to me by one of my cousins. So I partnered, this was before the partnership. This was a friendship. This was like, you know, someone, my good friend of mine, Toni Carrier, who at the time was the founding director of the International African American Museum, was helping me. She was doing me, you know, favors trying to help me find my family. I think she was tired of hearing me complain. The master genealogist that she is, she found Hector, and there was a Hector in in the records who had a military pension file. He had enlisted, it was evidence that he enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers, but we didn't know of all those Hectors in the censuses, you know, we just didn't know if they were actually related to me. So Toni had started a USCT Pension File Project at IAAM, and they were collecting all of the pension files for the men who served in the Black, the Black men who served in the South Carolina regiments during the Civil War. And she came up you know, I think she stayed up all weekend and reading all the Fields files, she came up with a file for Jonas Fields. And Jonas Fields' sister, Phoebe Washington testified in that file that she had two brothers, Hector and Jonas. And you know, we were so confused about this Hector in Beaufort County, because our family's in Colleton County. But she explained that after that they had been enslaved in Beaufort. And after the war, Hector and Jonas went to Colleton, and they lived exactly where the Fields family that I know then lived at the time, and still today. So it was the pension file of Hector's brother, Hector doesn't have a pension file. His brother had a pension file that opened up my whole family. Now I knew Hector had two siblings. I learned the name of Hector's parents, of their parents. So now I'm four generations back, which is very unusual for African Americans. There were other people who testified in the file that they were enslaved with Jonas and Phoebe and their parents, Anson and Judy. So now I'm beginning, it's the beginnings of an enslaved community. And it gave me the notion that I could recreate, I could reconstruct the enslaved communities on the Combahee that escaped in the raid, through the pension files. And so I partnered with the International African American Museum's Center for Family History, and their USCT Pension File Project. And they acquired the pension files for those two regiments G and H. And I, I went to work.

Kelly  41:50  
That is fantastic. Thank you. So there is so very much in this book. I'm obviously not going to get to ask you about all of it. I want to encourage people to read it. Everybody shows up in this book. We've got Charlotte Forten, we've got Robert Smalls and Frederick Douglass. So how can people get a copy of this book? 

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  42:11  
Yes, well, you can go to bookshop.org, and type in the search "Combee." The pub date is on February 26, so I think we'll be airing on on the pub date, which is amazing. You can also get it on Amazon, you can get it on Barnes and Nobles. You can get it on Oxford University Press, which is the publisher. You can get it on Oxford's website. You can get it at your local bookstore. You know, I like to support independent bookstores. My favorite is Harriet's Bookshop in Philadelphia, which is named after Harriet Tubman.

Kelly  42:54  
Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  42:58  
Maybe I'll just say that Harriet Tubman's Civil War service is the least known and least studied chapter in her life. And so I feel honored to be able to shed light on that chapter, and to shed light on the lives of the freedom seekers. It's it's rare to learn the intimate lives of enslaved people. And I'm talking about their their marriages, you know, their weddings, the births of their children, their relationships, all kinds of family details, and to hear them. And the fact that they remember the names of their relatives going back several generations, right, to be able to reconstruct enslaved families. And that's the power of the pension files. I think that historians have, you know, our hands have been tied. And in many ways we have relied on plantation planters' sources, that are written by people who held our ancestors in bondage, and these sources deny the humanity of the enslaved. And I think that the pension files restore it, because you have enslaved people telling their stories about their families and themselves in their own words, and the Combahee River. So I'm hoping that "Combee" is an intimate, it paints an intimate portrait of this enslaved community and a triumphant portrait of freedom.

Kelly  44:52  
There is just incredible detail in this book. I'm so happy to have read it and it was an absolute pleasure to speak with you.

Dr. Edda Fields-Black  45:01  
Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you as well.

Teddy  45:30  
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