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


Winner, 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History
Winner, 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Library Journal Starred Review
Booklist Top Ten History Books of 2024

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.

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.

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Published Feb 9, 2024

776 pages

Average rating: 4

1 RATING

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Community Reviews

spoko
Aug 16, 2025
4/10 stars
This book suffers from an identity crisis. It’s trying to be both the dense, detail-packed result of extense historical research and a readable, gripping narrative of some of the most heroic acts in our nation’s history. It fails at both. If it’s a document of historical reference, why does the author devote so much space and time to her own ancestors, who are otherwise entirely unremarkable? And if it’s a historical narrative—which is what I had hoped for, and I suspect most other readers had as well—then why on earth does it contain so many minute details from so many documents, illuminating precisely nothing about the narrative and characters we’re trying to care about? Why do we need to know every single name entered by every single slaveholder who filled out a form seeking some kind of compensation—even when those names refer to people about whom we (and the author) otherwise know exactly nothing? Numerous other such details are also included, in tedious, mind-numbing detail. (One of my favorite moments, for its sheer representativeness, is a point in Chapter 17 where she’s listing the various calamities suffered by military personnel we’ve never heard of, and she says “the list could go on.” After which, she goes on. And on. And on.) There could be a compelling narrative here—probably more than one. But you have to try to unweave them from the tapestry of mixed intentions, and it’s more work than I was willing to do. I ended up hearing a few interesting anecdotes—a few of which might surely have connected together well if they hadn’t been so thoroughly separated by dense patches of meaningless names & details that have no connection to anything else in the narrative. It’s not worth the time it takes to read, really. If there were an abridged version, that might be, but it would have to be pretty heavily abridged.

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