It all started with rice.
Dr. Edda Fields-Black likes to say she was just “minding her own business,” doing what historians do: tracing labor, land, and cultural memory across continents. Her research had taken her from the rice fields of West Africa to South Carolina’s ACE Basin. That’s where she first stumbled upon Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid.
“Seven rice plantations were destroyed in the raid,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper. But it wasn’t just Tubman’s military brilliance that caught her attention. It was the rare voices of those who were freed. “I found sources where the people liberated in the raid told their own stories,” she says. “That’s almost non-existent in the history of slavery.”
One voice she couldn’t let go of belonged to Minus Hamilton.
Hamilton said he was 88 years old when the raid happened. He and his wife were hoeing rice at four in the morning when they heard Union gunboats coming up the Combahee. Tubman had helped guide those boats. They dropped their tools and fled with only the clothes on their backs. He wore pantaloons. She had on a frock and a head wrap. Together, they left behind their only possessions: two blankets.
But what Hamilton remembered most was the sight of Black men in Union uniform. The Second South Carolina Volunteers. “He was in awe,” Fields-Black says. “They came in, heads up, backs straight, and burned everything the man who had enslaved him owned.”
Fields-Black needed to know more. She partnered with genealogists at the International African American Museum in Charleston and spent months combing through ledgers, pension files, and testimonies. At first, she thought Hamilton had been enslaved on one of the Lowndes plantations destroyed in the raid. Eventually, she discovered he had been sold multiple times and was on another plantation entirely.
“It was a lot of detective work,” she says. “But I wanted to know who these people were, before and after the raid.”
That research became Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, published in February 2024. A year later, it won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Fields-Black had not expected the call. When the Pulitzer committee reached out, she was stunned. “It’s an honor, not just for me, but for Carnegie Mellon. I’m the first faculty member to win a Pulitzer there. And for Pittsburgh, it’s meaningful.”
Being placed alongside names like David McCullough, Alex Haley, and August Wilson still feels surreal. “To be mentioned in the same breath as August Wilson? That’s mind-blowing,” she said.
Fields-Black grew up in Miami, the daughter of Gullah Geechee descendants who migrated north from Green Pond, South Carolina, just miles from the site of the raid. But she has lived in Pittsburgh longer than she lived in Miami. She’s easy to spot grabbing vegan lunch at Bae Bae’s Kitchen, rowing on the Allegheny with the Steel City Dragons, or catching an indie film at the Harris Theater. “Pittsburgh really is home now,” she said.
She wrote Combee during the pandemic while juggling family life and caretaking, at a time when protests were sweeping Pittsburgh. Her family could not safely join the marches, so her protest took the form of writing. “The way I raise my voice is through writing,” she said. “In a way, Pittsburgh feels like an extension of the Combahee River Raid. The fight for justice, for our humanity, is ongoing.”
In Combee, and in her life’s work, Dr. Edda Fields-Black shows that the struggle for freedom is not a single moment frozen in time but a living continuum. It stretches from the rice fields of the Combahee River in 1863 to the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh in 2025.
What follows is a deeper conversation with Dr. Fields-Black about her journey, the raid, and why Harriet Tubman’s greatest military triumph matters now more than ever. This interview has been lightly edited for length and style.
CP: Harriet Tubman is often remembered for her Underground Railroad work, yet her leadership in the raid highlights her as a military strategist. What do you think we gain, historically and culturally, by expanding our understanding of her as a leader of liberation?
Fields-Black: We knew Harriet Tubman was a leader of liberation. She risked her freedom to make 13 trips back to the Maryland Eastern Shore to rescue about 70 family and community members, and gave instructions to another 70 who freed themselves. In Combee, we see her risk not just her freedom, but her life, going into what I call the “Belly of the Beast” in South Carolina to rescue people she didn’t know, whose language and culture were different from hers. Her leadership, espionage, and military strategy led to the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history, second only to the Haitian Revolution in the New World. It shows us that enslaved people wanted to be free, and that freedom was never free. They understood that no one was truly free until everyone was free, and were willing to risk everything to make that happen.
In writing Combee, what voices or stories from the raid did you most want to bring to light, and what do you hope readers take away about Harriet Tubman as a strategist and leader?
I wanted readers to hear and heed the voices of the freedom seekers, the overwhelming majority of whom were illiterate and thus unable to write their own stories. This 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.
In researching Combee, what were the biggest historical silences you encountered?
I set out to fill the gap about Tubman’s Civil War military service by looking at other sources besides the official military record. After the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861, northern abolitionists came down to Beaufort, Port Royal, and the South Carolina Sea Islands to serve as teachers, missionaries, doctors, shop keepers, and labor managers. These were people Tubman knew from before the War when she was a part of abolitionist networks in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and New York.
The northern volunteers wrote letters home describing Tubman’s activities in the Beaufort area and providing independent evidence for Tubman’s memories. And, the voices of the enslaved people who were liberated in the raid was potentially the largest historical silence, because historians really had only two primary sources — slave narratives and WPA interviews — in which formerly enslaved people or their children told their stories of bondage.
How did Tubman’s leadership challenge traditional gender roles during the Civil War, and what does that reveal about the agency of enslaved people?
Harriet Tubman was the first woman to lead men in a military operation. She recruited, trained, and commanded a group of spies, scouts, and pilots, many of whom were formerly enslaved in the adjacent Sea Islands who worked as boatmen in Beaufort. She had defied gender roles for much of her adult life, liberating herself, leading scores of desperate freedom seekers to freedom on dangerous rescue missions even before she arrived in Beaufort, S.C.
John Brown called Tubman “General Tubman” in recognition of her leadership. He thought she had more guts and heart than the male abolitionists who were too fearful to openly support his plans to raid Harper’s Ferry and incite a slave rebellion. Tubman’s defiance of gender roles shines light on the women who resisted enslavement and rebelled against enslavers. We need to know their names and more about their stories.
Did you ever come across a detail so unexpected you had to double-check it, like, “Wait, did that really happen?”
Since Combee is nonfiction, everything had to be verified and cited. But one detail that really made me pause was the story of Minus Hamilton. After finding his first-person account of the raid, I wanted to trace his life. He said he was born on “Ole Mas’r Lowndes’” plantation, which was destroyed in the raid. We searched the Lowndes family papers for months but found nothing.
Then we discovered a Freedmen’s Bank record from Binah Mack, who listed her father as Minus. She was already in my pension file database connected to the Combahee men. That helped us locate the family on Lowndes’ uncle’s plantation. A descendant of the Lowndes family confirmed the link, and we later found estate records showing Minus and his family were passed down and sold twice before the raid.
How did you balance the military strategy with the human stories — especially of the freedom seekers — while writing this book?
I had two main goals: to document Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service and to tell the story of the Combahee River Raid through the voices and experiences of the people who were freed. My mission is recovering the lives of Africans and people of African descent who didn’t leave written records, so writing about the enslaved community — and uncovering new sources — was in my wheelhouse.
I’m not a Civil War historian, and, like many African Americans, I’ve long disdained the war and the “Lost Cause” fantasies of some white Southerners. But I had to dive into the battles, the boats, the guns — make new friends among Civil War experts in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, listen to their skepticism about Tubman, and figure it out. Striking that balance took work, but it was worth it.
In what ways can local communities learn from the Combahee story about collective action and freedom seeking and how can those lessons help shape Pittsburgh’s understanding of who belongs and who’s left behind?
Only a handful of enslaved people were liberated from James S. Paul’s plantation, where Minus Hamilton and his family were sold months before the raid. The folks from Paul’s plantation who got on the rowboat and made it to the US Army boat had at some point been sold and/or mortgaged with people on one of the other five plantations from which the majority of the enslaved population escaped bondage. Those folks would not leave their childhood friends behind when the US Army boats came.
The Combahee River Raid can exemplify for local communities the benefits of finding common ground (freedom), forming alliances with people whose language and culture might be different, and taking collective action without leaving anyone behind, even if it means some folks who have just a little comfort and security have to sacrifice for people who don’t have any. Too often today, communities don’t — won’t — find common ground, take collective action which benefits all, and lift the most vulnerable members of our families and communities. Instead, the most vulnerable get sacrificed for the good of the uber-wealthy, benefitting none of us.
In the aftermath of your Pulitzer win, have you noticed any shifts in how Pittsburgh’s academic or cultural institutions are engaging with your work and the broader history of Black resistance?
It’s funny. As a historian, I’m used to working in the shadows with few resources, little support, and almost no recognition, so winning the Pulitzer for Combee, my labor of love, is indescribable. The outpouring of support from Pittsburgh has been deeply heartwarming. Pittsburgh should take many bows. I’ve been shaped by this city, by Miami where I grew up, and by the South Carolina Lowcountry, my fatherland, which inspires my work.
I hope this recognition — earned through archival research, fieldwork, and collaboration with artists, scientists, and museums — encourages Pittsburgh’s institutions to engage more deeply with history and the humanities. I also hope it helps break down some of the silos I’ve had to push past by finding allies and building bridges.
If you could sit down with Harriet Tubman and share a cup of tea, what would you most want to say to her, and what do you think she might say back to you?
What a dream that would be! If I could have a cup of tea with Harriet Tubman, maybe at her cookshop in downtown Beaufort, I would ask her what we should be doing right now in the current political climate after our ancestors fought, bled, and died for freedom and the right to vote; we are still struggling for equality; and, our children have fewer and fewer rights than their forbearers? And, when I say “we” and “our,” I mean marginalized people, Black, disabled, and LGBTQIA folks, people of color, and women.
Tubman knew when to work underground, how to form alliances with like-minded people, even when they didn’t agree on everything, and when to drive three “gunboats” into the heart of an enemy country. What should we be doing now to secure — and, in some cases reclaim — our rights? I think she would say we need to do all three.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2025.
