Has the Civil War’s single largest emancipation event been hiding in plain sight?
In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Edda L. Fields-Black about her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (2024), co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book reconstructs a remarkable and underexamined chapter of the war: a Union gunboat raid up South Carolina’s Combahee River, led in part by Harriet Tubman acting as scout and spy, that liberated more than 700 enslaved people in a single night.
We discuss how the Lowcountry’s geography shaped both the institution of slavery and the possibilities for resistance, what it meant for some of the first Black soldiers in the Union Army to return in uniform to the communities they had escaped, and how Tubman’s role in the raid fits into the larger arc of her extraordinary life. We also talk about the craft behind this kind of history, how Fields-Black uses mountains of primary sources to reconstruct not just events but an entire world, and what it means to her personally to tell the story of an ancestor who was on one of those gunboats with Tubman the night of the raid.
Fields-Black brings formidable scholarly rigor to this story without ever losing her enthusiasm for it. The people she writes about are deeply alive for her, 160 years on, and she helps make them feel alive for us as well. I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation.
Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interlude by Zachary Solomon
