The Hidden History of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War Service

Harriet Tubman is revered for guiding dozens of enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. But she played a key role in what historian Edda Fields-Black, GR’01, argues was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history: the Combahee River Raid. On June 3, 1863, Tubman led 300 Union soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Regiment—including, as it turned out, Fields-Black’s great-great-great grandfather—on a military operation that resulted in freedom for some 750 enslaved people working in rice fields along the Combahee River (called Combee by locals).

Stories of Tubman’s Civil War efforts appear in her autobiographies and in interviews she gave, but they were omitted from Civil War literature, and, as a result, are less celebrated achievements. Fields-Black, who earned her PhD from Penn’s Department of History and is today a professor at Carnegie Mellon, hoped to change that.

After years of research, parsing hundreds of pages and dozens of documents—Civil War pension files, letters from people who had seen or heard about Tubman in action—Fields-Black published COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Omnia spoke with Fields-Black about this lesser-known Harriet Tubman history, as well as about the time she spent earning her PhD at Penn and her discovery of the role her ancestor played in the Combahee Raid. 

What’s your Penn backstory?

I’m a student of [Professor Emeritus of History] Steven Feierman. I actually started my graduate work at the University of Florida because I wanted to study with him. Two years into my graduate program, Feierman accepted an offer to come to Penn, so I applied and joined the history department.

Though I’m formally trained as an Africanist, my time at Penn was really well-rounded. I’ve always had an interest in the African diaspora and the history of the Gullah Geechee—descendants of people enslaved in the low-country region from southern North Carolina to northern Florida. I wanted to understand the West African influences on the languages and culture and people of this region, and I got all the tools to be able to do that at Penn. I’m really grateful.

How did your Harriet Tubman research come about?

Harriet Tubman talked about her Civil War service and the Combee raid for the rest of her life. She remembered it. It was one of the stories she often told, and her biographers have written about it. But she’s not mentioned in the official military record, which is the holy grail for Civil War historians, so her recollections had largely been dismissed. This is a larger battle that needs to be fought—why we don’t believe women and marginalized people when they’re telling their stories—but for this project, I set out to find independent evidence for Tubman’s Civil War service and her role in the Combee raid. I’m not a Civil War historian; I’m a social historian, and as a social historian, it wasn’t unusual to me that she wasn’t in the official record. I just had to look other places.

Where did you look?

Tubman had been a vital part of abolitionist networks in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and upstate New York from the time she liberated herself in 1849 until the war. Some of the same people or their children who were close to Tubman came down to Port Royal [in South Carolina] and volunteered as teachers, missionaries, shopkeepers, doctors, labor organizers. They wrote letters home where they described meeting Tubman, or seeing Tubman, or hearing something about Tubman. So that’s where I found the independent evidence to corroborate what Harriet Tubman said she did during the Civil War.

You learned through your research that you had a personal connection to the Combee raid. Can you detail that?

Hector Fields was my great-great-great grandfather. He enlisted in the 2nd South Carolina Infantry Regiment in March of 1863, and he fought in the raid. Most people think I wrote the book because of Hector, but I didn’t know he was a U.S. colored troops veteran until I was well into my research.

My dad was born a mile or two from where the raid took place, and as I started thinking about this project, I wondered if I had ancestors who were freed in the raid. I found out there was a “Hector Fields” from Beaufort County who was a U.S. colored troops veteran, but I didn’t know if that was my ancestor. I went looking for his pension file, and though he does have one, it is very brief. I was disappointed, but I set it aside with the rest of the files.

My collaborator, the executive director of the African American Museum Center for Family History, must’ve read the Civil War pension file of everyone in the collection with the surname “Fields,” and she came up with Jonas Fields, who we then learned was Hector’s brother. In that same file, we found their sister, Phoebe, who testified about her two brothers. I learned where they were in bondage and who held them. I learned how they were separated during the war, and that after the war, Hector and Jonas went to Colleton County and settled where my dad’s father’s family lives today. All of this was from one pension file.

Were you surprised how much you could glean from records like the pension files?

When I started working on this, I realized I could spend the next two years reading these pension files and come up with nothing. Fellow historians would look at me sideways because this kind of work hadn’t been done before. But because I had identified two companies that had formed after the Combee raid, I thought, if I could get my hands on the pension files, I could reconstruct the Combee community. I could identify the people liberated in the raid.

Documentation for enslaved people just doesn’t exist. But in the pension files, people testified where they were held in bondage. They would go through their whole trajectory of how they got to Combee: They were bought, sold, mortgaged, passed down. I set out to document this. My goal was to tell the story of the raid through the people who were impacted by it, Tubman, her group of spies, scouts, and pilots, the 2nd South Carolina volunteers, and the Combee Freedom Seekers. These Civil War pension files just opened up these enslaved communities.

What happened after the raid?

There’s a main street in Beaufort—Bay Street—that’s still there today. The 750-plus people who had just been freed paraded down the street. Beaufort was a site of freedom, occupied by the U.S. Army in November 1861 after the Battle of Port Royal, where thousands of formerly enslaved people lived. All of them showed up to see the Combahee Freedom Seekers.

The people who had just been freed essentially came straight from the rice fields. They were emaciated. They were injured and in extremely poor physical conditions. But the newspaper accounts also say they were beaming with pride and happiness because now they had their freedom. Now they could reunite their families.

They went to Tabernacle Baptist Church, today the location of the Harriet Tubman monument. We know that there Colonel James Montgomery [the commander of the raid] and Harriet Tubman gave speeches to the Freedom Seekers, and that 150 men, aged 14 to 70, enlisted that same day. They joined the 2nd South Carolina volunteers, the regiment that had brought them liberation.