Reviews

“In her groundbreaking book, 'Combee,' Edda Fields-Black tells the rousing story of the Union army’s Combahee river raid, which led to the liberation of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans in 1863...."

— Wall Street Journal (February 23, 2024) 

"Fields-Black’s deep research and breathtaking prose bring to life the 'nameless and faceless enslaved people' who, no less courageous than Harriet Tubman herself, participated in the Combahee River Raid, their heroic actions creating what Fields-Black identifies as 'a small fissure' in the wall around the institution of slavery."

— Boston Globe (February 22, 2024)

"Edda Fields-Black has created a monumental work. Her incredibly dense research...shines a light on every corner of this place and time, through the eyes of the people who made it home....“COMBEE” is a ring-shout of a book. It is clear evidence of the strength and ingenuity Black folks exalted in...all they had to learn and work through during their fight to gain and sustain freedom."

— Pittsburgh Post Gazette (March 31, 2024)

"Combee is a transcendent, once-in-a-generation historical exploration of a world mostly veiled in the river damp that rises from the lower Combahee—the long submerged rice plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry.  It tells the story of backbreaking toil under a relentless summer sun; of personal courage and fortitude by numberless, heretofore nameless enslaved men, women, and children.  Read closely and one can almost hear the sound of three Yankee gunboats chugging through a humid June dawn carrying 300 Black men outfitted in blue tunics, shiny brass buttons, toting muskets with gleaming steel bayonets, led by an indefatigable Black woman known as “Moses.”

— Civil War Monitor (March 27, 2024) https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/fields-black-combee-2024/.

"...It is the task of Edda L. Fields-Black’s remarkable new history, Combee, to recover part of this ignored slave revolution. Her focus is not on the entire war, only its most significant battle: the Combahee River Raid..."

— The New Republic (February 23, 2024) https://newrepublic.com/article/178157/harriet-tubman-important-understudied-battle-civil-war

“On June 2, 1863, Union forces largely comprised of formerly enslaved Black soldiers led by veteran white officers followed Harriet Tubman and her ring of scouts, spies, and river pilots up the Combahee River in Low Country South Carolina to raid rice plantations and liberate the enslaved workers. Who were these freed people? And how did they come to form the unique Gullah Geechee culture of the region? Historian Fields-Black, whose great-great-great grandfather fought in the raid, dug deep into the federal government’s Civil War–era pension files and other primary sources to find out and to construct a comprehensive tour de force of historical discovery. This invaluable chronicle of an extraordinary journey of service, sacrifice, and courage gets to the core of what freedom really means. Fields-Black puts her heart into vividly documenting the lives and society of enslaved people, using every means possible, including the letters and records of the planters who held them in bondage. She notes just how rare and dangerous it was for those who escaped slavery to return to liberate friends and loved ones, which is why Harriet Tubman gets top billing in this epic story. With an extensive cast of characters, dramatic action, and findings of great significance, Combee is an exceptional work of American history.”

— STARRED REVIEW in Booklist, COMBEE named one of the "Top 10 History Books: 2024"! https://www.booklistonline.com/Top-10-History-Books-2024-Seaman-Donna/pid=9790706.

“Fields-Black’s (history, Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Deep Roots) work is an incredible and distinctive book about the Civil War and the role of a Black woman, long known for her work on the Underground Railroad. She uses a multiplicity of new sources to uncover and deftly relate the story of Harriet Tubman’s role as a Union Army hire. She led a group of men deep into the rivers of South Carolina and helped nearly 800 enslaved people of all ages escape enslavement from local rice plantations. No lives were lost in the process. Utilizing original documents and meticulous research, the book describes all that Tubman did in the large military Combahee Ferry Raid of 1863, which took place deep in the heart of the Confederacy. One of the participants of that raid is the author’s ancestors.

VERDICT A scholarly and remarkable work about enslavement and Civil War history that makes an excellent choice for reading groups and libraries. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of that era’s times and experiences, and Fields-Black’s connection to one of the participants makes it a personal work as well.”

— STARRED review in Library Journal! https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/combee-harriet-tubman-the-combahee-river-raid-and-black-freedom-during-the-civil-war-2212290

"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." 

— Bookpage, bookpage.com/?p=200396.

“Carnegie Mellon historian Fields-Black (Deep Roots) exhumes in this immersive study new information about the Combahee River Raid by Black Union troops and Harriet Tubman’s pivotal role escorting 756 enslaved people to freedom. Fields-Black, whose ancestors fought in the raid, exhaustively mines U.S. pension files, including Tubman’s, to profile many of the 300 Black soldiers who on June 2, 1863, were led by Union colonel James Montgomery into the “breadbasket of the Confederacy”—the rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina—where they destroyed $6 million in property and helped hundreds of enslaved people escape on Union gunboats. Fields-Black weaves into her narrative an impressive and varied array of topics, among them genealogies of the region’s plantation owners, an overview of the rice plantations’ brutal conditions, and Harriet Tubman’s early life and crucial wartime work for the U.S. Department of the South as an “indispensable spy and scout” who recruited other Black spies for the Union. As for the Combahee raid itself, Fields-Black mines the dramatic operation for enthralling detail. (When the rush of enslaved people to the shoreline became frantic, Montgomery shouted to Tubman “to sing to the freedom seekers to bring calm” and she did so to the abolitionist tune of “Uncle Sam’s Farm.”) Sprawling and kaleidoscopic, this is a marvel of deep research.”

— STARRED review in Publisher’s Weekly! https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780197552797

“Edda Fields-Black takes a legendary event and an iconic figure and with pathbreaking research and elegant prose gives us a striking, living, and breathing history of Black courage and freedom dreams at the dawn of emancipation.”

— Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the National Book Award

“Thanks to her careful reading of Civil War-era documents and historical sources, some never before utilized, Edda L. Fields-Back gives eloquent voice to South Carolina’s rice kingdom’s enslaved men and women, including her own ancestors, and offers new insights into the experience of more prominent figures, most notably Harriet Tubman.  COMBEE makes us think in new ways about the role of African Americans in the destruction of slavery, and the hopes, betrayals, and transformations that accompanied emancipation.”

— Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"In COMBEE, Edda Fields-Black gives an underappreciated episode in the history of Harriet Tubman, the Black freedom struggle, and the Civil War the careful and care-full treatment it deserves. More than that, this book brings to light whole worlds contained within a grain of time, lifting up the names and stories of freedom seekers whose voices still resonate powerfully today." 

— W. Caleb McDaniel, Author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“A stunning piece of historical reconstruction, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. COMBEE offers the story of some 750 people who freed themselves in the raid; they were illiterate and didn’t leave us letters,  diaries, or autobiographies, for the most part. That Edda Fields-Black has reconstructed these people's lives is truly extraordinary. This is an amazing story.”

— James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics and Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, both winners of the Lincoln Prize

“COMBEE sheds new light on an extraordinary chapter in Harriet Tubman’s storied life, and with breathtaking skill restores the long-silenced voices of those whose lives were changed by it. Magnificent!”

— Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

"These stories, these places, these events of Combahee are legendary. But these stories are not legends, and these actions of Harriet Tubman and her fellow freedom fighters are not mythology—these are true accountings of heroism, determination, and unparalleled commitment to freedom. This book demands that you feel the chills of the muddy water; burn with anger of suffered indignity; and immerse yourself in the adrenaline and courage of some of the bravest people our nation has ever known. In a time when truth seems malleable, books like COMBEE and historians like Dr. Edda Fields-Black are essential to preserving and propelling stories like this into the consciousness of the world. The story of the Combahee River Raid is one of the greatest American history stories of all time—and we should all know it."

— Dr. Tonya M. Matthews, President and CEO, International African American Museum

“Fields-Black brings Harriet Tubman back into the sun, shedding new light on her as a military leader and as a pivotal, transformational, liberatory figure in the transition from slavery to freedom despite the pull back to the unfreedoms of the slave past.”

— Paul Gardullo, Supervisory Curator, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery

“Edda Fields-Black has written a dazzling, soulful - and monumentally researched book - about freedom soldiers, runaway slaves, and Harriet Tubman. An epic project.”

— Wil Haygood, author of The Butler: A Witness to History

“This is absolutely an essential book for understanding not just the distant past, but it also offers context and insight into tragic events in our own times, in which the shadow of racism embedded in the Confederate cause still looms over Charleston, Charlottesville, and the nation.”

— Tera Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History, Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University

“Fields-Black’s deep archival research on the participants in the raid transforms our understanding of the event. Tubman doesn’t disappear, but now the stories of the other participants emerge. In so doing, they will actually reemphasize the heroism of Tubman herself, as an apotheosis of Black (and Black women’s) resistance traditions.”

— Edward Baptist, Professor, Cornell University

“There is a gripping and well-told story about Harriet Tubman and the Civil war at the center of COMBEE, but what stands are the details around the edges of the story, about the history and daily lives of enslaved and free people on the rice plantations.  I came away from the book with a realer, thicker understanding of the lives of the people of Combee.”

— Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University    

"Fields-Black vividly recounts one of the most dramatic events of the Civil War era, revealing Harriet Tubman and her revolutionary glory in exciting, original ways."

— Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh

“Despite boatloads of Civil War books, no one has dug more deeply into the 1863 Combahee River Raid than Edda Fields-Black. COMBEE brings that daring event alive and establishes its important place in the broader narratives of Harriet Tubman’s life and the war to end slavery. Poring over pension files, traipsing through Lowcountry marshes, and tracking down plantation descendants, Fields-Black has left no pluff mud unturned in pursuing this dramatic story, weaving together the lives of her central “freedom seekers”—including her own third great grandfather—with those of Northern commanders and liberated Black Carolinians.”

— Peter H. Wood, Professor Emeritus, Duke University

"Seven hundred fifty-six. That is the number of lives freed when Harriet Tubman led 300 Black Union soldiers on a raid into South Carolina's Combahee River plantations. In the process Tubman and the Federals destroyed millions in property belonging to the enslavers, and dealt a blow to the belief that the "Bread Basket of the Confederacy" was beyond the reach of Union power. That the attack was ledand carried out by Blacks added salt to the raw wound the raid cut into the heart of the Confederate war effort. In Fields-Black's new history, readers and historians are treated to perhaps the most comprehensive account of the raid and the people involved in it that has ever been written.

Fields-Black is descended from one of the men who accompanied the indomitable Tubman on the raid, and it is evident that her investment in the event goes beyond that of just a historian. At over 700 pages, the Carnegie Mellon historian has dug up more about the actual raid and the people on both sides of it, than anyone else who has written on the daring July, 1863 operation. This is more than just a chronicle of military history. Fields-Black combines the military aspect of Combahee with the histories of the people who owned the estates Tubman and her bluecoats destroyed, the operation of rice plantations and the lives of the enslaved people who tended the flooded fields of tender sprouts from planting through harvest, and the daring early exploits of the tiny woman with unstoppable determination when she risked her life to provide intelligence for Union commanders.

Expansive and in places poetic, Fields-Black's account of one of the seminal military operations of the Civil War deserves pride of place on any legitimate history bookshelf."

— Carolina Chronicles Magazine, February 2024