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.
General
Imprint: |
Oxford UniversityPress
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
May 2024 |
Authors: |
Edda L. Fields-Black
(Department of History)
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156mm (L x W) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
368 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-19-755279-7 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-19-755279-X |
Barcode: |
9780197552797 |
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