Edda Fields-Black, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History for her book “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” is herself a descendant of Combahee River Raid participant Hector Fields.
Pulitzer aside, she was also awarded the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and it’s for that award that she’ll be speaking on Oct. 15 at the American Civil War Center’s Annual Lincoln Lecture. An audience question-and-answer segment moderated by historian Dr. Ed Ayers will follow the reception and lecture.
Fields-Black’s research specialty has for years been the transnational history of West African rice, which isn’t native to the U.S. She’s written academic books and articles about the development of rice-growing technology by peasant farmers in West Africa, one of two places in the world where rice was domesticated, tying it to the transfer of rice seeds, agricultural technology, and skilled laborers to the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
It was through her work on rice that she came to the experiences of enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the Lowcountry and to the Combahee River Raid. As co-collaborator with classical music composer John Wineglass, who’d written a contemporary symphony titled “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” about rice and slavery, she’d written the libretto on which the score is based.
In working on the libretto, the Combahee River Raid was one of the dramatic scenes she found. At first, the raid was a section in the libretto and part of a book she wanted to write about the history of the Gullah Geechee. “While researching the raid for both projects, I found new primary sources which hadn’t been used previously by historians,” Fields-Black says. “Finding enough unique source material convinced me that the Combahee River Raid would be the subject of my next book.”
The Combahee River Raid wasn’t fought to prove anything. Colonel Montgomery articulated the following goals of the raid: to destroy the private property of Confederate citizens, burn a pontoon bridge over the Combahee River, and free enslaved workers still in bondage six months after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Says Fields-Black, “It accomplished all of these goals.”
The investigation that went into the making of “Combee” was varied and conducted at multiple locations. Research on identifying the Combahee freedom seekers was done at the International African American Center for Family History. “I strove to put the reader in the rice fields,” she says. “Research, including participant observation in the Combahee rice fields and on the Combahee River, was conducted on eight of the nine plantations destroyed in the raid.”
Harriet Tubman, best known for her extraordinary work as the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, is central to the story. She made approximately 13 rescue missions, liberating approximately 70 people. “She gave specific instructions to approximately 70 additional people, which they used to find their ways safely to freedom,” Fields-Black says. “So, she and the U.S. Army rescued more than ten times more enslaved people in six hours during the Combahee River Raid.”
When Fields-Black first began her research, she was convinced there couldn’t possibly be anything new to say about Tubman’s legendary life. But she was surprised to find the Civil War was the least known chapter of her life. Biographers wrote about Tubman’s Civil War service, but the details were missing. “That was in large part because Tubman’s Civil War service was not mentioned at all in the official military record,” she says. “That’s despite the fact that the Union relied on the intelligence from freedom seekers who came to U.S.-occupied territory from behind Confederate lines.”
In writing the book, Fields-Black wanted readers to hear and heed the voices of the freedom seekers, the overwhelming majority of whom were illiterate and unable to write their own stories. That included Harriet Tubman, her ring of spies, scouts, and pilots, the Second South Carolina Volunteers who fought in the raid, and the Combahee freedom seekers who were liberated in the raid.
It was the voices of the enslaved people who were liberated in the raid that was potentially the largest historical silence, because historians had only two primary sources: slave narratives and WPA interviews in which formerly enslaved people or their children told their stories of bondage.
Ultimately, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War” explains Tubman’ legacy beyond being the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. “She was a military/intelligence leader and a pivotal, transformational, liberatory figure in the transition from slavery to freedom,” Fields-Black says. “Tubman was both an exemplar and progenitor of a broader social movement engendered by Black people for freedom, liberty and revolution.”
2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Lecture with Dr. Edda Fields-Black will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. at the American Civil War Center, 480 Tredegar St. Tickets (includes signed book)
