Harriet Tubman and the Second South Carolina Volunteers Bring Freedom to the Combahee River
In this excerpt from the groundbreaking, COMBEE, Edda Fields-Black tells the dramatic story of how Harriet Tubman led the 150 African American soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to rescue more than 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation.
While Confederate pickets were stationed in the southeast part of the lower Combahee River at Field’s Point and in the northwest portion at Combahee Ferry, the Third Military District’s main forces were stationed in the northeast point of the triangle at Green Pond, with a smaller contingent at Chisolmville. Yet the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers’ gunboats were unopposed as they penetrated a roughly twenty-mile stretch of the Combahee, virtually under the Confederates’ noses. The Confederate pickets were seemingly paralyzed by their commanders’ indecision.
Meanwhile, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers continued their work. Amid billowing columns of smoke, hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people ran for their lives. Tubman remembered, years after the Civil War ended, that when “Lincoln’s gunboats come to set them free,” displaying their flags and blowing what the New South and Frederick Douglass’s Douglass’ Monthly described as the “uninterrupted pipe of the steam whistle,” that somewhere around eight hundred freedom seekers ran for their lives and boarded the vessels. It was as if there was a “mysterious telegraphic communication existing among these simple people,” Tubman told Sarah Bradford, bringing people not just from Joshua Nicholls’s plantation, where the Harriet A. Weed landed, but from James L. Paul’s plantation in the southeast direction and plantations as far away as Combahee Ferry, several miles to the northwest.¹
Amid billowing columns of smoke, hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people ran for their lives.
Minus and Hagar Hamilton were among those who fled down to the Harriet A. Weed. Most freedom seekers toted their worldly possessions in large bundles on their heads. Captain Apthorp wrote in his journal that many of their bundles were so large they “completely overshadowed” the freedom seekers themselves.
Ole woman and I go down to de boat; dem dey say behind us, “Rebels comin’! Rebels comin’!” I hab notin’ on but my shirt and pantaloons; ole woman one single frock he hab on, and one handkerchief on he head; I leff all- two my blanket and run for de Rebel come, den dey did n’t come, did n’t truss for come.
The elderly couple left the rice fields with the clothes they had on their backs. Minus wore only his shirt and pantaloons; Hagar, the “old … woman” (whom Minus Hamilton referred to with the masculine pronoun “he,” which is a morphological feature of the Gullah dialect), wore a one-piece shift and a head-tie covering her hair. Hamilton may have regretted leaving his only possessions — two blankets — behind in the slave quarters when he ran before the Rebels came. But he did not regret escaping the land of bondage.²
The Hamiltons almost did not make it onto the Harriet A. Weed, because they were among the oldest of the Old Heads on the lower Combahee could not run to the boat like the Prime Hands, Boys and Wives, or Pikins. When Minus and Hagar Hamilton got down to the steamboat, freedom seekers running behind them told the couple that the Confederates were in pursuit. Hamilton remembered Hagar retorting that the Confederates could bring it on if they wanted to; let them challenge the Yankee gunboat head-on. Surprisingly, the Confederates did not challenge Lincoln’s gunboats or the “presumptious” Black soldiers. Hamilton surmised that this was because they did not think they could win the fight.
Ise eighty- eight year old, mas’r. My ole Mas’r Lowndes keep all de ages in a big book, and when we come to age ob sense we mark em down ebry year, so I know. Too ole for come? Mas’r joking. Neber too ole for leave de land of bondage. I old, but great good for chil’en, gib thousand tank ebry day. Young people can go through, force . . . , mas’r but de ole folk mus’ go slow.
Colonel Higginson had asked Minus Hamilton if he had thought he was too old to run to the US Army gunboats. It was an odd question for a determined abolitionist to ask; perhaps he simply wanted to draw the story out of the old man. Hamilton was grateful for the young people; he said a thousand thank-you’s every day. He was grateful for the young Black people who were ready to fight for their freedom, because young people could go forcefully. The old people, like him and Hagar, had to go slowly.³
Joshua Nicholls later wrote in his letter to the editor that he assumed that the freedom seekers had recognized among the Black soldiers a number of formerly enslaved men who had already liberated themselves. Though Nicholls was likely too far away in the forest to positively identify the soldiers’ faces or voices, he was correct. Friday Barrington was a member of Company D, which came ashore at Colonel Heyward’s Cypress Plantation, which, as we have seen, was where he, his parents, and his sister were held in bondage. Barrington may not have been the only Combahee freedom seeker to return during the raid.⁴
At any rate, while Nicholls ran off to the woods, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers came ashore from his boat landing and onto his plantation. From his hiding place he saw them come up to his country estate and set it ablaze. Nicholls also saw smoke rising from the direction of his stepson’s property next door and knew the soldiers had torched Rose Hill Plantation. The soldiers moved swiftly, their movements on different plantations seeming almost synchronized. Before Nicholls knew it, thick billows of smoke rose simultaneously from the north and west, coming from the steam-powered rice mill, overseer’s house, and stables at Oakland and Cypress Plantations.⁵
What Nicholls described was a chaotic scene of destruction and mayhem: The “roaring of flames” and “towering column of smoke from every quarter” as fire engulfed his and his neighbors’ property. The “barbarous howls of the negroes” as they reunited family members, retrieved belongings, and decided what they would do next. The “blowing of horns, the harsh steam whistle” signaling the enslaved population to hurry to the river and steal their freedom. Nicholls witnessed Blacks “carrying bags of rice upon their heads” from his own barn and running toward the steamboat. He thought the raid a “repetition of San Domingo,” when free people of color and Africans held in bondage on sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue (what is now Haiti) overthrew the planters and the colonial government, abolished enslavement, and created the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.⁶
Tears of joy ran down their faces as they scrambled to touch freedom with their own hands, clinging to the soldiers and officers’ hands, knees, clothing, weapons — anything they could grasp.
When the freedom seekers rushed to the safety of the Harriet Weed, they stopped to greet the soldiers before climbing aboard. They overwhelmed Captain Apthorp. He remembered them saying, “Lord bless you Massa,” “Good Morning massa Oh bless the good Lord,” and other utterances, all expressed with intense earnestness. Tears of joy ran down their faces as they scrambled to touch freedom with their own hands, clinging to the soldiers and officers’ hands, knees, clothing, weapons — anything they could grasp. Apthorp was touched by their inability to find words to express their relief, joy, and gratitude. Nicholls, on the other hand, was horrified. He wrote that the people he formerly had held in bondage “seemed utterly transformed, drunk with excitement, and capable of the wildest excesses.”⁷
[1] “The Expedition up the Combahee,” New South, Jun. 6, 1863; “A Raid Among the Rice Plantations”; “Miscellaneous Items,” Douglass’ Monthly, Aug. 1863; Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 40; Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 6; Bradford, Harriet Tubman, 100; Ewen, Days of the Steamboats, 9–10.
[2] Apthorp, “Montgomery’s Raids in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina,” 17; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 238; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed. Christopher Looby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 147; Salikoko Mufwene, “Gullah Morphology and Syntax,” in Handbook of Varieties of English, ed. Walt Wolfram, Bernd Kortmann, and Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 363; Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, 227–229.
[3] Looby, The Complete Civil War Journal, 167; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 238–239.
[4] “The Raid on Combahee,” The Mercury, June 19, 1863.
[5] “The Raid on Combahee”; “From South Carolina”; “A Raid among the Rice Plantations”; “Miscellaneous Items”; Frederic Denison, Shot and Shell: The Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Regiment in the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Providence: The Third R. I. H. Vet. Art. Association, 1879), 155–157; Davis, History of the 104th Pennsylvania Regiment, from August 22nd, 1861, to September 30th, 1864, 209–210.
[6] “The Enemy’s Raid on the Banks of the Combahee,” The Mercury, Jun. 4, 1864; “The Raid on Combahee”; “Miscellaneous Items.”
[7] “The Raid on Combahee”; “From South Carolina”; Apthorp, “Montgomery’s Raids in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina,” 16– 17; “Jeff W. Grigg, The Combahee River Raid: Harriet Tubman & Lowcountry Liberation (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 74; Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 23.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and has written extensively about the history of West African rice farmers, including in such works as Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Fields-Black has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture’s permanent exhibit, “Rice Fields of the Lowcountry.”
