Historian Edda L. Fields-Black and Janell Hobson reflect on Harriet Tubman’s revolutionary Civil War raid and the power of preserving Black history in the face of political pushback.
Black Feminist in Public is a series of conversations between creative Black women and Janell Hobson, a Ms. scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of history, popular culture and representations of women of African descent.
June 2 marks the 162nd anniversary of the Combahee River Raid, which represents the first time a woman led a military raid in U.S. history. That woman was none other than the great Harriet Tubman, who helped to free more than 750 bondspeople from slavery in South Carolina during the height of the U.S. Civil War.
Documenting this powerful history is Ms. author and historian Edda L. Fields-Black, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for her detailed, meticulous book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.
This summer of 2025, the Black Feminist in Public series launches on the Combahee River Raid anniversary with a conversation between myself—Ms.’ contributing editor Janell Hobson—and Dr. Fields-Black to talk about Harriet Tubman and the significance of doing work on Black History in this current climate.
Hobson: First, I want to congratulate you on winning the Pulitzer Prize in history. What an accomplishment! I was honored to have featured the historical work you did for Combee in Ms.’ Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project. I kind of feel like we can claim it given we featured an early version of it.
Fields-Black: Yes, you can. You can. That was such a fun project. And it was an important step in me learning how to write for a general audience.
Hobson: The article you did for the Tubman 200 project was helpful in bringing Harriet Tubman’s history into this larger project. Because when you look at the history, it expands beyond just Harriet Tubman, and it’s this larger history of the people of Beaufort, S.C., or in that general region. Could you say more about how you made those connections between Harriet Tubman and that community?
Fields-Black: One of the first sources that I found as I was writing ‘Combee’ was the life story of Minus Hamilton, the 88-year-old man who tells his story a few weeks after the Combee River Raid. And from Minus Hamilton’s story, I wanted to tell not only Harriet Tubman’s story but the stories of the people she freed. And my goal was to tell the story of the Combee River Raid through their voices, through their eyes, through their perspectives. I ended up using the U.S. Civil War pension files. Here, the goal was to use them to reconstruct the community on the Combee before, during, and after the raid.
Hobson: What is fascinating about this story is how it expands Tubman’s work beyond the antebellum period of the Underground Railroad and really focuses on how she transferred her skills from that period to the war effort as a spy, scout and all-around soldier. Tubman is always larger-than-life in our national memory, but it seemed from the history that the enslaved community in South Carolina didn’t quite know who she was in terms of her heroic status.
Fields-Black: I must speculate here, and what I speculate is that the Union told the enslaved people who she was. And her presence facilitated the enslaved people in trusting the Union. We know, from some of the sources I’ve brought together in ‘Combee,’ that Harriet Tubman was on the ground in the raid, that she participated in the burning of buildings, and that she went to the slave cabins and coaxed the people there to come onto the boats and come to freedom. So how she convinced them to do that, we don’t know, but they did trust her, even if they didn’t know her entire backstory.
What makes me hopeful is that we are persevering. We are still doing the work. We are forming coalitions. And we have organizations that are supporting us and organizations that we’ve built.
Edda L. Fields-Black
Hobson: I think with the recent recognition Tubman’s been receiving from the CIA, the U.S. Army and other military honors—even giving her the title of Brigadier General posthumously—we’re just now getting to know her Civil War story. And thanks to your book, we’re getting a fuller picture of that story.
Fields-Black: I was inspired by literature, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, where Tubman is a character. She comes in almost as a deus ex machina, and then she’s out, and then she’s in again. Originally, that’s how I thought ‘Combee’ would be. But certainly, there are other main historical actors. Many of them are freedom seekers, some of them are northern abolitionists. So, this is more of an ensemble cast.
Hobson: I think people often forget that she’s acting in community.
Fields-Black: I do think people forget that, and I think we definitely see that in ‘Combee.‘
Hobson: What propelled you to write this history?
Fields-Black: Originally, I was drawn to it because of the rice element. The raid took place on seven rice plantations. It was squarely in the area where I was conducting research and thinking about a larger project on the history of the Gullah Geechee. I was thinking about how people who were enslaved on the rice fields became Gullah Geechee. And some of the early sources I was playing around with spoke directly to that. And those were, for example, Elizabeth Botume’s memoir. And Botume ran the school on Old Fort Plantation, which was the refugee camp where the Combee freedom seekers were resettled. I was assembling puzzle pieces, not sure how they fit together or if they fit together. And in the early days, I was not sure exactly how Tubman fit in.
Hobson: When we talk about Gullah Geechee culture, that was very new to someone like Harriet Tubman who is coming from the Eastern shore and then also from the North. What do you find fascinating about that culture? And how did it also shape and color that whole event?
Fields-Black: I think, through Tubman’s eyes, we see, for example, Gullah Geechee religion through the ring shout and the nighttime funeral she attends. She tells us clearly that she couldn’t understand folks down there and that it was a different dialect and it was a different culture. And they laughed when they heard her talk, and she couldn’t understand them no how. And yet, they spoke the language of freedom. She was welcomed and embraced at the ring shout and during the nighttime burial. She was embraced as a community member. So, they were able to find common ground in the pursuit of freedom.
Hobson: We’re now fleshing out this history, which used to exist as just sketches. It’s what Toni Morrison said in Beloved: We’re now “giving blood to the scraps.” We’re in this interesting moment of getting prestigious recognition for research into Black history, thanks to your Pulitzer Prize and your many other awards for this book. But we’re also getting backlash and political setbacks through the efforts of anti-DEI—in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion—and the threatened erasure of that history. How do you balance the cultural validation that such awards engender against that political noise?
Fields-Black: I think that the backlash that we have been experiencing, particularly for the last few months, but even for the last couple of years, has been ongoing. I think in the face of that backlash, the Pulitzer Prize, the Lincoln Prize, they all become even more important. I’m grateful for the recognition, and I’m hoping that it helps to cover my colleagues who are also doing the work. We’re all in the trenches together, and we’re trying to preserve this history, we’re trying to tell these stories. And when one of us gets recognition, or how many of us get recognition, I hope that it helps make space for the rest.
Hobson: As a historian, what do you find to be our biggest challenge at this moment?
Fields-Black: I think our biggest challenges are still institutional. And this also reflects the moment that we’re living in with cuts to various funding programs. I think that this kind of work takes time, archival work takes time, it takes resources. I was blessed to be able to put together a team of research assistants who could manage various parts of the project. There is no way that I could do all of this research. I would still be very much doing research if I didn’t have the resources to put together a team of very able people, researchers to help me on the ground, for me to ask the questions and them to go and look for those answers. Our resources and time are still very much our biggest challenges. And for some history, time is not on our side. I think about oral histories. I think about our living sources and the urgency of hearing their stories and telling their stories while they’re still with us.
Hobson: What makes you hopeful, despite all these challenges?
Fields-Black: What makes me hopeful is that we are persevering. We are still doing the work. We are forming coalitions. And we have organizations that are supporting us and organizations that we’ve built. So, it’s as if we now have an infrastructure that is holding and standing up against the backlash and the onslaught. It makes me hopeful that it will continue to hold and that we will find new ways to support ourselves and support each other.
Hobson: What is something that you hope readers will take away from Combee?
Fields-Black: One of the things about ‘Combee’ is that those pension files are so impactful. You have approximately 90,000 veterans who got pensions from their Civil War service. Many more applied and did not get pensions but may have pension files. Those 90,000 men currently have millions of descendants, which means that millions of African Americans can identify their enslaved ancestors. I hope that everyday people—not just historians, not just genealogists—everyday family members will look for their enslaved ancestors in these pension files.
I also hope, and this is already coming to fruition—and we’re dealing with some very rocky terrain right now—but I hope that Harriet Tubman’s legacy continues to be preserved, continues to be secured, and continues to flourish.
