Edda L. Fields-Black’s extraordinary Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War will not be for every reader. It is long and very detailed. Reading it is sometimes like watching the slow, painstaking process of an archaeological dig—but readers who stick with the book will come away satisfied by Fields-Black’s patient unearthing.
The event at the center of her excavation is the June 20, 1863, Combahee River Raid. During that pre-dawn attack, 300 Black Union soldiers torched seven South Carolina rice plantations along a 15-mile stretch of the river, causing millions of dollars of damage to crops and property and striking “fear into the heart of the rebellion.” Their guide was Harriet Tubman—today known around the world for her work in the Underground Railroad, but less so for her courageous military history. With Tubman acting as intermediary, 746 men, women and children fled to the river’s edge and boarded the Union boats to escape slavery. The raid served notice that Black men—both formerly enslaved and free—could become effective, disciplined Union soldiers.
These events have been narrated elsewhere, but never with such a passion for factual depth and precision. Combee is often revelatory. The author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, Fields-Black conveys that the South Carolina rice economy was essential to the Confederacy and involved remarkable feats of technology and engineering, much of them performed by enslaved people taken from rice growing regions of Africa. Fields-Black’s approach to the Combahee River Raid also provides insight into the remarkable abilities of Tubman to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers and to move stealthily through the South unnoticed.
Prior to this account, many of these freedom seekers had been lost to history. Most, like Tubman, were illiterate and did not record their experiences; plantation records were destroyed in the raid. Through herculean research and cross-referencing of land, bank, U.S. Army pension and slavery transaction records, Fields-Black is able to name names (including her great-great-great grandfather Hector Fields) and offer readers a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. Combee holds many additional revelatory threads and insights within its depths, but this act of resurrection alone makes the book profoundly important.
