
The Combahee River Raid was a military operation during the American Civil War led by Harriet Tubman on June 1-2, 1863. Historian Edda L. Fields-Black—this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History—reflects on Tubman’s revolutionary Civil War raid and the power of preserving Black history in the face of political pushback.
“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 [my latest book] 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.”