COMBEE: Harriet Tubman,
the Combahee River Raid, and
Black Freedom during the Civil War
Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, leading more than 60 others out via the Underground Railroad, giving instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and fighting for change for the rest of her life. Yet the many books and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter, that she was sent by the governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War to Beaufort, South Carolina—the heart of slave territory—to live, work, and gather intelligence for the US Army Department of the South. And, she led a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack coastal South Carolina rice plantations, the Confederacy’s breadbasket.
In her new book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, out in February 2024, historian 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 played a central role in military expeditions behind Confederate lines, including the raid on June 2, 1863 which liberated 756 people. It was the largest slave rebellion in US history.
This in-depth narrative is:
First detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War, and the central part Harriet Tubman played in it
Presents new, never-before-seen documents that give significant new interpretation of Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy
Identifies the enslaved people who escaped enslavement on 7 rice plantations on the Combahee River Raid, tracing them backwards into enslavement and forward into freedom
Available February 26, 2024 from:
Read my New York Times Opinion Essay:
"Black Families Can Now Recover More of their Lost Histories"
Printed on Thursday, February 29
Read it here (requires NYT account)
Requiem for Rice
Dr. Fields-Black is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work and the first symphonic work about slavery on rice plantations. The symphonic work first places the listener below decks of a slave ship making the atrocious journey from West Africa to America. The strings and woodwinds’ rapid scalar runs, ascending into the upper register just to immediately fall again, paired with unstable harmonies in the brass, the foreboding thud of the bass drum, and the intermittent clash of the chimes, produce a chaotic effect, making one feel the turbulence of the waves, wind, and seasickness.
Deep Roots:
Rice Farmers in West Africa
and the African Diaspora
Fields-Black’s first monograph Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated.
Rice:
Global Networks
and New Histories
Rice is a first step toward a history of rice and its place in capitalism from global and comparative perspectives. Fields-Black is a co-author of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer), which was awarded the Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015.