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HARRIET TUBMAN AND THE MOST IMPORTANT, UNDERSTUDIED BATTLE OF THE
CIVIL WAR  
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Eric Herschthal
February 23, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Edda L. Fields-Black sets out to restore the Combahee River Raid to
its proper place in Tubman’s life and in the war on slavery. _

Dorchester County Cambridge, MD Harriet Tubman Museum Chesapeake Bay
Program, The mural "Take My Hand," painted by Michael Rosato at the
Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center, Cambridge, Maryland

 

On June 2, 1863, not long after midnight, 300 recently escaped slaves,
all armed and with at least one woman among them, invaded a stretch of
rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. When the
armed Black rebels arrived, the slaveholders fled, but their enslaved
workers refused to follow them. Instead, at least 727 of them followed
the rebels to nearby boats, which ushered them to a military camp,
declared them free, and armed those able to fight. Meanwhile, as dawn
approached, the retreating Black rebels set fire to the abandoned
slave labor camps, depriving the slaveholders’ army of a vital
source of food, and delivering a major victory in the Black rebels’
larger war on slavery.

Given the scale of the invasion and the number of Black people
emancipated, this attack, known as the Combahee River Raid, could
plausibly be considered the largest slave rebellion in American
history. It might even be called the largest slave rebellion in what
was the largest slave revolution in modern world history. Not even the
Haitian Revolution—the first successful slave-led war to overthrow
slavery—liberated as many Black people as the one in which the
Combahee River Raid was only a part.

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

by Edda L. Fields-Black

Buy on Bookshop [[link removed]]

Oxford University Press, USA, 784 pp., $39.99

Accounts of the Combahee invasion have, somehow, been incapable of
imagining it as a slave rebellion, much less part of a larger slave
revolution. Yet the American slave revolution, which we have come to
call “the Civil War,” shares all the hallmarks of the Haitian
Revolution, on an even grander scale. Just as in Haiti, America’s
slave revolution came amid a larger white man’s war, which slaves
transformed to include their own revolutionary agenda: immediate
emancipation and full Black citizenship. Just as in Haiti, America’s
enslaved Black revolutionaries allied with white military forces to
achieve their goal of emancipation. America’s Black radicals even
convinced liberal white reformers, the core of the Republican Party,
to become momentary revolutionaries themselves: As the Jacobins did in
France, the Republicans in America formalized the freedom that slaves
won for themselves, in places like Combahee, by enshrining
emancipation in the United States Constitution.

In some ways, America’s slave revolution was even more radical than
Haiti’s. America’s Black revolutionaries did not force most of the
white people to leave, nor did they create an exclusively “Black”
republic. Instead, they persuaded their leaders, in large part on
account of their wartime activities, to enshrine the more
revolutionary principle of universal citizenship, regardless of class
or race. Nor, as Haitians and most other emancipated peoples were
forced to do, did America’s Black rebels compensate their former
enslavers for their lost “human property.” To be sure, Black
radicals hardly got everything they demanded. There would be no land
given to them, to say nothing of reparations. Nor would they receive
protection against the vicious white backlash that followed in their
revolution’s wake. But perhaps most troubling is that, even today,
few people see the war waged by enslaved Black Americans as a
veritable revolution. How did we miss it?

Even today, few people see the war waged by enslaved Black Americans
as a veritable revolution. How did we miss it?

It is the task of Edda L. Fields-Black’s remarkable new
history, _Combee_, to recover part of this ignored slave revolution.
Her focus is not on the entire war, only its most significant battle:
the Combahee River Raid. Though hardly unknown to historians (and
perhaps best remembered for the Black feminist collective
[[link removed]] that took
its name as inspiration), the raid is one of the least studied battles
in what we call the Civil War, and it features as only a bit chapter
in the revolutionary life of one of its main participants, Harriet
Tubman. Fields-Black, an accomplished historian of West Africa and the
slave South, as well as a descendant of one of the Combahee slave
rebels, has set out to restore this battle to its proper place in the
life of Harriet Tubman and the larger war on slavery, calling it
“the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history.”

To tell this story, Fields-Black relies on an underutilized archive.
The pension files of former Union soldiers, housed at the National
Archives, contain, Fields-Black tell us, thousands of pages of
testimony from the dependents of Black Civil War veterans, of which
there were 186,000, 75 percent of whom were formerly enslaved. Because
dependents had to collect a massive amount of evidence from formerly
enslaved friends, neighbors, and surviving veterans to receive a
pension, these files offer a trove of largely untapped information
about enslaved people in their own words. At a time when many
[[link removed]] scholars
[[link removed]] of slavery
[[link removed]] argue
[[link removed]] that
traditional sources only perpetuate the violence of slavery,
Fields-Black reminds historians how much is left to discover: she
“did not want to write another book about what we don’t and
can’t know about enslaved people, because of the gaps, silences, and
violence of the archival record.” Instead, she rolled up her
sleeves, dove into the archive, and has now produced what is
undoubtedly the most authoritative account of this unheralded slave
revolt.

Fields-Black begins this story with what occurred on the Combahee rice
plantations in the years leading up to the raid. Many of the slaves
who would flee to the invading Black army had recently watched their
enslavers sell away their family members. As Fields-Black notes, the
recent or imminent sale of family members was often the catalyst that
drove slaves to escape throughout the antebellum period. In this, the
Combahee River “freedom seekers,” as Fields-Black calls escaping
slaves, shared much with Tubman. On September 17, 1849, shortly after
her enslaver sold her niece, Tubman and her two brothers decided to
escape their Maryland plantation. Her brothers got cold feet, leaving
Tubman to escape on her own. But it was an agonizing choice: By
fleeing on her own, she left behind her husband, parents, siblings,
and the familiar Black community in which she was raised.

Fields-Black argues that what made Tubman so exceptional—and what
made the Black rebels that invaded the Combahee River plantations so
exceptional—was their decision to return to the site of slavery to
liberate other enslaved people. Very few Black people who escaped
slavery before the war—not Frederick Douglass, not Sojourner Truth,
hardly any of the famed Black abolitionists who were once
enslaved—risked returning to the slave South to emancipate other
Black people. Tubman, most famously, had taken this risk nine
times _before _the Combahee River Raid, as a prominent agent of the
Underground Railroad. Indeed, she is best remembered not for her
military service but for liberating 70 enslaved people, many of them
family members, before the war. Yet her work on the Underground
Railroad was only the start of her “revolutionary activities,”
Fields-Black writes.

What was equally remarkable was that Tubman did not know any of the
enslaved people she helped emancipate on the Combahee River Raid. One
of _Combee_’s many strengths is to show the vastness and diversity
of the antebellum South’s enslaved Black communities. Tubman,
Fields-Black reminds us, was born in Maryland on American soil, as
were her parents, both of whom were “relatively privileged,” if no
less brutalized. Her mother was a house slave and cook, her father an
enslaved inspector and foreman. Indeed, though Tubman insisted on
working in the fields alongside common enslaved laborers, she was
initially raised to be a house slave, just like her mother.

Tubman is best remembered for liberating 70 enslaved people before the
war. Yet her work on the Underground Railroad was only the start of
her revolutionary activities.

By contrast, most of the armed Black rebels and freedom seekers from
South Carolina’s Lowcountry were forced to do more field labor and
had a more African-influenced culture. Rice, the main crop along the
Combahee River, was extremely labor-intensive and required a large
enslaved workforce. Due to the number of laborers required, enslaved
rice laborers tended to live in dense camps far from white
settlements, unlike slaves in Maryland, many of whom lived on small
plantations and had greater interaction with whites. Because rice was
cultivated in malaria-infested swamps, rice plantations also had a
high death rate. This in turn meant that rice enslavers were
constantly purchasing new slaves from Africa to replenish their
workforce, up to and even after the United States banned the
transatlantic slave trade in 1807. On the eve of the war, many
Lowcountry Black people had either a parent from Africa, or lived
among aging African-born slaves. Lowcountry slaves thus had a distinct
language, practiced a strongly African-influenced religion, and, as
with many West African cultures, named their children after the day
they were born. Tubman later remembered that when she first met the
armed Black rebels and freedom seekers of South Carolina, “Dey
laughed when dey heard me talk. An’ I could not understand dem, no
how.”

In highlighting the differences between Tubman and Black people in the
Lowcountry, Fields-Black implicitly asks readers to question any
assumption they might have about Black people “naturally” coming
to each other’s rescue. Before the war, nearly all the Black people
Tubman liberated were either family members or people she knew from
her tight-knit Maryland community. So what changed? Why did Tubman go
beyond the rescue of familiars and into the rescue of strangers?

Not content to assume an innate racial solidarity, Fields-Black argues
that Tubman’s friendship with John Brown may have inspired her, at
least in part. Tubman met Brown, the militant white abolitionist, in
April 1858, when Brown came to Ontario to recruit Black freedom
seekers to join his interracial abolitionist militia. Tubman recruited
several Black men to his militia, although, lacking funds, they were
unable to travel to his training camp. Nonetheless, after Brown was
executed for his failed attack on Harper’s Ferry one year later,
Tubman developed a newfound willingness to die for Black people she
did not know—just like John Brown. “When I think about how he gave
up his life for our people, and how he never flinched,” Tubman said
after Brown was executed, “its clear to me it wasn’t mortal man,
it was God in him.”

Before Tubman arrived in South Carolina, the Union army had already
occupied Port Royal, on South Carolina’s southeastern coast. Though
Lincoln had not yet announced the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands
of Black freedom seekers had been escaping to Union camps around the
country for over a year. In doing so, they forced immediate
emancipation, and armed Black warfare, onto Lincoln’s agenda,
something he judiciously avoided in the war’s early years. But in
Port Royal, the Union’s white occupying leaders made an egregious
error. Rather than treat Lowcountry freedom seekers as equals, they
pressured them to work as low-paid wage laborers on abandoned cotton
plantations run by white Northerners. They hoped to “prove” to the
outside world that Black people were not lazy and would gladly work
for white landowners, if only paid a wage.

Of course, most Black people resented being forced to work for what
they derisively called “Yankee Buckra”—Northern whites—who
they felt were treating them no different from Southern “Buckra.”
Worse, several of the Northern white men hired to run the confiscated
cotton plantations began to whip Black workers who resisted their
exploitation. Meanwhile, the Union army began to conscript, against
their will, freedom seekers who escaped to Union lines. Increasingly,
Black freedom seekers felt they were being forced to fight in a white
man’s war, rather than for their own liberation.

Enter Harriet Tubman. In early 1862, Massachusetts’s abolitionist
governor recruited Tubman to help recruit Lowcountry freedom seekers
to the Union army. Because Black people in the Lowcountry increasingly
distrusted the Union forces, the governor felt Tubman, already famous
for her Underground Railroad exploits, could help.

Though it took Tubman time to win their trust, she had a talent for
forming bonds of solidarity with regular Black folk. Fields-Black
illustrates this beautifully with the contrast she paints between
Tubman and Charlotte Forten, a free-born Black abolitionist from
Philadelphia. Forten experienced no shortage of racism, but she was
light-skinned, highly educated, and born to one of the wealthiest
Black families in America. What she lacked was Tubman’s common
touch. Unlike Tubman, who elected to live in modest housing in South
Carolina, Forten chose to live in an abandoned enslaver’s mansion.
Forten found Black Southerners’ “ring shout”—an
African-influenced dance practiced during worship—“barbaric,” as
she wrote in _The Atlantic, _“destined to pass away under the
influence of Christian teachings.” By contrast, Tubman jumped in and
joined them.

In addition to Tubman’s ability to win Black southerners’ trust,
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863,
galvanized the Black recruitment effort. The proclamation made
official what had only been decreed locally, ambiguously, and often
inconsistently by individual Union officers in the field. Because
Lincoln’s proclamation, in practice, only emancipated people in
Confederate territory controlled by the Union army—which was not
much—its greater significance was that it allowed Black men to
enlist in the U.S. military. Rather suddenly, the white man’s war
converged with enslaved Black revolutionaries’ interests: the armed
overthrow of slavery.

Beyond collecting intelligence for the raid, Tubman was also
responsible for recruiting Black freedom seekers into a newly formed
Black unit that would lead the invasion.

Over the next six months, Tubman recruited a ring of Black freedom
seekers in the region to collect intelligence for what would become
the Combahee River Raid. The invasion’s goal was simple: Deprive the
nearby Confederate army of food by destroying the region’s rice
plantations, and free and arm as many enslaved people as possible.
Beyond collecting intelligence for the raid, Tubman was also
responsible for recruiting Black freedom seekers into a newly formed
Black unit that would lead the invasion: the Second South Carolina
Volunteers. One of those enlistees was Fields-Black’s ancestor,
Hector Fields. Together with Tubman, the unit’s white abolitionist
commander, James Montgomery, and a separate all-white unit from Rhode
Island, Hector Fields and the armed Black rebels of the Second South
Carolina Volunteers would foment one of the most brazen slave
uprisings in U.S. history.

The first company of the Black rebel unit invaded the Tar Bluff slave
labor camp in the darkest hours of the June 2 morning. Union gunboats
dropped off several more Black companies on nearby rice plantations in
the following hours. When plantation owners woke to the sound of armed
Black rebels invading their property, at least one understood what was
happening: a “repetition of San Domingo”—Haiti—he later
recalled. The rebels torched mansions, barns, warehouses, and flooded
rice fields. Though most slaveholders escaped, they failed to convince
their enslaved workers to follow them. Instead, they followed Tubman
and the other Black soldiers to the Union boats that carried them to
freedom. Hagar Mack, no older than five when the Black rebels
liberated her slave labor camp, remembered the day vividly. “A barn,
ten thousand bushels [of] rough rice, all in a blaze.” She went on:
“Didn’t care notin’ at all, _I was gwine to the boat_.”

The Combahee River Raid, however, is not an entirely triumphant story.
Not all freedom seekers who escaped made it in time, and others were
turned back when the Union boats became overcrowded. In the final
chapters of _Combee, _Fields-Black details the many other travails
faced by the Black unit, and those liberated by them, after the
invasion. The Black rebels only shot one white enslaver, after he
fired on them, but the scorched-earth policy—conceived and approved
by the unit’s white commander—played into the racist imaginations
of many white people, in the North and South. Many whites believed
that arming slaves would only lead to a vicious anti-white race war,
and all they needed were a few burnt rice plantations to prove it.
Worse, after the war, only 42 percent of Black veterans’ dependents
who applied for a pension received one. Even Tubman had to apply three
times, and wait 30 years, before Congress approved hers—which,
Fields-Black writes, amounted to “crumbs.”

But in its most fundamental sense, the Combahee River Raid was an
astonishing victory. Nearly 300 recently emancipated Black rebels had
liberated, in six hours, more than 700 enslaved people. Roughly 150 of
those emancipated at Combahee would themselves join the ranks of the
quickly growing all-Black revolutionary brigades. In the next two
years, tens of thousands of Black American revolutionaries would go on
to liberate even more slave labor camps throughout the South. Allying
with a Northern white military, they ultimately destroyed the largest
slaveholding empire in the nineteenth-century world—the United
States—emancipating four million enslaved Black Americans. Their
revolution also precipitated the downfall of the Western
hemisphere’s last two remaining slave societies, Cuba and Brazil. It
was no small accomplishment.

If there is a flaw in _Combee, _it is that Fields-Black does not
spell out this larger significance. She makes the right provocation,
defining the Combahee River Raid as “the largest slave rebellion in
US history.” But without a deeper justification for that claim,
other than the number of Black people liberated, readers may not grasp
the importance of what she is saying. Fields-Black is not the first to
conceive of Black-led invasions like the one at Combahee as “slave
rebellions.” Perhaps the first to do so was W.E.B. DuBois, who, in
the
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the Civil War’s collective slave escapes, work stoppages, and Black
military service the “largest and most successful slave revolt” in
American history. More
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the historian Steven Hahn made the strongest case, calling all the
actions of enslaved Black Southerners during the Civil War one massive
“slave rebellion.”

Fields-Black implicitly picks up on this lead, but she suggests that
the reason the Combahee River Raid is not remembered properly is
because so many of its participants, including Harriet Tubman, were
illiterate. They did not, in other words, leave enough of a paper
trail. While undoubtedly a factor, illiteracy is only a part of it. As
Hahn argued, the more fundamental reason most historians do not
consider the Combahee River Raid, and many more Black Civil War
actions like it, a “slave rebellion” is because they fail to see
enslaved Black people as legitimate political actors. At most, their
actions can “influence” or “shape” the broader contours of the
Civil War, but they do not fundamentally alter how they see it.

But there is more to it than that. Many imagine that a slave rebellion
must entail something like a bloody race war. That is the dominant
image of slave rebellions even to this day, whether we are talking
about Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, or Toussaint Louverture. Yet the fact
is that few enslaved Black rebellions, in America or elsewhere,
entailed gratuitous massacres of undifferentiated racial groups (for
the most part, only white people
[[link removed]] did
that). That the slave rebellions—I prefer the slave
revolution—that occurred amid the Civil War, that _was _the Civil
War, entailed even fewer instances of wanton white murder, in a
strange way, disappoints: Black revolutionaries are imagined as
blood-lusting primitives, not the strikingly restrained men—and even
women—in uniform they were.

Perhaps as troubling, many cannot conceive of an armed Black rebellion
including so many _white _people. Indeed, often overlooked is the
fact that even Haiti’s Black generals had allied, at various points
during their revolution, with the largely white militaries of Spain,
Britain, and republican France to gain their freedom. Had Napoleon not
overthrown the radical Jacobin government in France, voided their
emancipation decree, and tried to re-enslave Black Haitians, a
post-emancipation Haiti might well have remained a free Black colony
within a white French empire, rather than, by 1804, an independent
Black republic.

In other words, both the racist imaginings of the “savage
African,” and the racial-essentialist imaginings of Black
“self-liberation,” prevent us from seeing the radical nature of
these slave-led revolutions. Whether it was the Black revolution in
Haiti, or the Black revolution in Civil War America, enslaved Black
people fought alongside whites not because these white people were
antiracist—not many were—but because the two factions came to
share overlapping interests. Especially in the United States, where
Black people were always a decisive minority, Black revolutionaries
had no other option: They went to war with the army they had, as it
were, not the one they wanted.

The tragedy is that few have been able to see not only the immense
achievement of these enslaved Black American revolutionaries: Few even
can imagine they existed. Perhaps _Combee _will start to bring their
stories into view.

_ERIC HERSCHTHAL is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Utah and author of The Science of Abolition: How
Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress
[[link removed]]._

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