“We Called Ourselves Combee”: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid

The Battle of Port Royal on November 7, 1861, brought freedom to thousands of Gullah Geechee people on the Sea Islands around Beaufort, South Carolina. But a few miles up the Combahee River, enslaved people still labored on rice plantations, building defenses and growing food for the Confederate army. In the Gullah language, the enslaved people along the river called themselves "Combee."

To cripple Confederate forces on the river and cut off their supplies, the U.S. Army planned to destroy the Combahee plantations and free the people enslaved there. The Combahee River Raid of June 1–2, 1863, was one of several freedom missions by the Army and the United States Colored Troops (USCT) in the Sea Islands.

The Combahee River raid, from Harper's Weekly, 1863. Library of Congress.

Gathering intelligence

The raid depended on the knowledge of free and enslaved Gullah boatmen, freedom seekers and Harriet Tubman.

• Gullah mariners moved goods and information along South Carolina's rivers and creeks. Enslaved Combee people knew where Confederates had planted "torpedoes" — naval mines — in the 40-mile river, and planters had forced enslaved workers to build barricades against Union boats.
• In May 1863, Francis Izzard, a freedom seeker from Colleton County, escaped to Beaufort and told the Army where the mines and Confederate positions were. Other escapees brought more intelligence on fortifications, guns and camps.
• Tubman, born enslaved in Maryland, had freed herself and become a famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She came to Beaufort to work as a nurse and cook for the Army's Department of the South, but her contacts with officers let her do the work she preferred: spying and scouting. She recruited men to help, among them Plowden, an African American from Pennsylvania who enlisted in the USCT as a scout, spy and pilot. He and eight men sailed up the Combahee one night and came back with reports on the bridges, trestle work and the strength of the Confederate guard at the crossing.

Harriet Tubman. Library of Congress.

The raid

More important than the destruction was the liberation. Hearing the boats miles away, overseers fled, while enslaved people in the rice fields ran and swam toward the gunboats. Tubman helped organize getting them aboard and spread word to nearby plantations that freedom had come. By the time the raiders turned back, more than 750 people had been freed.

Afterward

• Tubman helped recruit more than 150 of the freedom seekers into the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. Many refugees settled in camps around Beaufort, including Camp Saxton.
• After the war, Tubman returned home to Auburn, New York, where she fought for Black women's rights during Reconstruction and argued that her service on the Combahee entitled her to a pension.
• Many Combee people went back to growing rice along the river that had carried them to freedom.
• On June 1, 2024, the raid's 161st anniversary, Tabernacle Baptist Church on Craven Street in Beaufort dedicated a monument to Tubman, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers and the freedom seekers.

Sources

Based on "We Called Ourselves Combee: Freeing the Enslaved Along the Combahee River," National Park Service, which draws on Edda L. Fields-Black, Combee (2024), and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land (2009); a work of the United States government in the public domain.