Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
by Edda L. Fields-Black
Summary
Edda L. Fields-Black reconstructs the Combahee River Raid of June 1863, the Union operation Harriet Tubman helped plan and guide that freed more than seven hundred fifty enslaved people from rice plantations along the South Carolina coast. Fields-Black follows Colonel James Montgomery's force of three hundred Black soldiers from the Second South Carolina Infantry as they moved up the Combahee aboard Union gunboats, destroying Confederate supplies while enslaved men, women and children rushed to the riverbank, some carrying what possessions and livestock they could gather, to reach the boats before Confederate forces could respond.
Fields-Black centers the book on the freedom seekers themselves rather than treating them as a backdrop to Tubman's leadership, drawing on more than one hundred seventy five Civil War pension files, rice plantation records and Gullah Geechee oral tradition to recover names, families and individual decisions the historical record has usually left out. The approach carries a personal dimension: Fields-Black is descended from Gullah speakers in the South Carolina Lowcountry, including an ancestor who freed himself during the very raid the book reconstructs.
Fields-Black writes at the intersection of military history and community history, treating the raid's success as inseparable from the courage and local knowledge of the people who walked, ran and rowed toward freedom that day. Reading the book means encountering Tubman's Civil War service in far more operational detail than most accounts provide, and it suits a reader who wants the raid understood through the people it freed as much as through the woman who led it.
Historical Context & Significance
Combee shared the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History with Kathleen DuVal's Native Nations and also won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The 2025 Pulitzer finalist was Seth Rockman for Plantation Goods.
Oxford University Press published the book in 2024, and both the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker praised it, the New Yorker crediting Fields-Black with staging the raid in all its danger, grace and tragedy. Fields-Black, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, built the book on more than a decade of fieldwork in the South Carolina Lowcountry, work that let her document Tubman's actual military service in far more detail than the more familiar legend of it preserves, and recover the lives of the people the June 1863 raid carried out of slavery.