Review: 'Combee' delves into Harriet Tubman's work in SC and the Port Royal Experiment (2024)

COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. By Edda L. Fields-Black. Oxford University Press. 776 pages. $39.99.

In an important 1982 essay, Cornell University historian Robert Harris observed: “The web of Afro-American history radiates beyond the United States borders. It exists within the core of two intersecting circles, one this country and the other the African world.”

Today’s scholars of African American history routinely look beyond national borders to explore its international and African diasporic aspects. Carnegie Mellon history professor Edda L. Fields-Black, a transnational scholar of African rice culture and slavery, embodies this trend. Her first work, “Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora” examines West African rice culture and technology and linkages to South Carolina and Georgia. Her latest offering, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” shows how the famed abolitionist’s activities intersected with emancipation’s drama in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

The book’s first section provides a wide-ranging backdrop to the Civil War years. It surveys tidal rice culture, the planter class and its great wealth in enslaved labor. Fields-Black examines the social hierarchies within slave communities, where age conveyed status along with manual skill and literacy. She also sharply contrasts slavery in Maryland and coastal South Carolina. Rice plantations were more labor-intensive with larger work forces than those producing tobacco or cereals and the work was more physically debilitating, causing higher morbidity and mortality rates. The anecdotes provided on mortality would be strengthened immensely by even a limited statistical analysis.

Because the Atlantic slave trade to South Carolina lasted longer, its slave population was more highly Africanized. The vicissitudes of Maryland slavery forced Harriet Tubman to flee to Pennsylvania in 1849, and soon she began her life’s work rescuing family and friends from bondage. Fields-Black shows Tubman worked with Frederick Douglass, William Still and other abolitionist luminaries. Her reputation led John Brown to attempt to persuade her to join his attack on Harper’s Ferry. She declined but recruited supporters for his ill-fated assault.

Fields-Black’s admiration for Tubman’s willingness to return South on rescue missions sometimes leads to exaggerated praise, though. Referring to the antebellum era she writes: “We do not have evidence of anyone aside from Tubman … escaping enslavement and then returning to liberate others.” But there are examples. Henry Bibb of Kentucky escaped and attempted unsuccessfully to rescue his family twice in the 1830s before admitting defeat and becoming an abolitionist newspaper editor. Although not a perfect fit, Shields Green should be considered. Born free in Charleston, he fled the South in the1850s and returned as a compatriot of John Brown with whom he was executed in 1859.

Months after the war began, in November 1861 the Union naval fleet successfully invaded the Port Royal-Beaufort area. Planters scrambled for the interior, forcing some slaves there but most refused. In Part Two, “Combee” examines what followed.

Federal authorities deployed freed people harvesting crops under a wage labor regime and representatives of northern freedmen’s aid societies supplied their educational and religious needs. This Port Royal Experiment was to evaluate how well formerly enslaved people could function in a free society. Thus, according to Fields-Black, South Carolina became a destination where “multiple generations of abolitionists” continued their efforts. Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, a John Brown supporter, encouraged Harriet Tubman to go there; she arrived in Beaufort in early 1862.

One of the most interesting topics in this section is the cross-cultural encounters between diverse Black people who ventured to Beaufort-Port Royal, symbolized by their language. In the Lowcountry, Harriet Tubman had difficulty communicating with Gullah speakers and her language sounded strange to them. This was because Gullah was a more Africanized Creole language compared to its Chesapeake counterpart. It was Charlotte Forten though who represented the most dissimilar experience, as a formally educated abolitionist teacher from one of Philadelphia’s most elite Black families, who now taught on St. Helena Island!

Tubman worked in hospitals and eventually as a scout and spy collecting intelligence and recruiting local boatmen and pilots for the Union military. The 1st and 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteer Regiments were organized shortly after her arrival, commanded by two other John Brown supporters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Col. James Montgomery. “Combee” demonstrates that even before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, in South Carolina, in various capacities, self-liberating Black men and women already had joined the battle.

Part Three of the book focuses on the June 2, 1863, Union raid against seven plantations on the Lower Combahee River. This bold and daring attack was led by Col. Montgomery, commanding the 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers and a battery of Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, ably assisted by Harriet Tubman and her cadre of local pilots and scouts.

After navigating federal gunboats through shallow rivers to the Lower Combahee before dawn, a six-hour raid destroyed millions of dollars in property and transported 756 enslaved people to freedom. The unique perils confronting Black soldiers notwithstanding, Fields-Black notes many freedmen joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to liberate others. The author describes this episode as “the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history.”

While the book’s final part contains considerable military history, its creative gravitas resides elsewhere. Fields-Black details how the same forces of war that upended the planters’ world opened a new chapter in life for freed people. Building on the previous chapter, she shows that during the Combahee Raid, as freedom seekers boarded the Union gunboats, they were reuniting with friends and family members previously sold away.

During the war and afterwards, freed people often pooled their meager resources to acquire land. In Beaufort-Port Royal and the Union occupied sea islands, veterans or their widows acquired land early because they frequently had military pensions. They helped others secure land and often settled in communities together.

Finally, the author urges caution in applying the appellation Gullah-Geechee to sea island and other Black coastal residents in this era. She shows how typically these people had their own “highly localized identities” such as “Combee” which distinguished them from even nearby neighbors. Migration, military service, and the struggles to acquire and maintain land ownership began to transform this insular mindset by the end of the Civil War but the broader cultural consciousness only emerged in the early 20th century.

“Combee” is a work of prodigious scholarship, and those particularly interested in slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, and African American genealogy will find it especially rewarding.