In celebration of Black History Month, explore the history of the African American fight for freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods with historians Edda Fields-Black, author of Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, and James Oakes, author of Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. Thomas Donnelly, chief content officer at the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Edda Fields-Black is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in pre-colonial and West African history. She has written extensively about the history of West African rice farmers, and is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and the co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. Her new book is COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.
James Oakes is a distinguished professor emeritus of history, Africana studies, and American studies, at the Graduate Center for the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of slavery, antislavery, and emancipation, including The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics; Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States; and The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.
Thomas Donnelly is chief content officer at the National Constitution Center. Prior to joining the Center in 2016, he served as counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and as a law clerk for Judge Thomas Ambro on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Additional Resources
- Edda L. Fields-Black, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
- James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865
- James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
- UUSCT Pension Files
Excerpt from Interview: James Oakes discusses how his research on anti-slavery politics revealed the significant role of Congress in the move toward emancipation before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, emphasizing the importance of understanding the broader political context and the historical reluctance of northerners to return fugitive slaves.
James Oakes: As for Lincoln and the Republicans, my book in some ways compliments and, and touches on many of the issues that Combahee be raises. But I got interested when I wrote my book on Frederick Douglass, I got interested in the way he became interested in anti-slavery politics, and I started getting interested in anti-slavery politics. And one of the things I discovered was that Congress played a much bigger role in the move toward emancipation, then we think. And that it's not that the Emancipation Proclamation isn't a major turning point in the evolution of that policy, but the policy starts much earlier. And you need to know what the Republicans were doing with the First Confiscation Act, then the Second Confiscation Act, then the law making it a crime for anyone in the Union Army or Navy to return fugitives to their owners, things like that.
A whole series of laws that preceded the Emancipation Proclamation. And in fact, the Second Confiscation Act is what required an Emancipation Reformation, right? It gave the President 60 days, right? And a few days after he signed it, he comes to the cabinet with the first draft that says, on the basis of the First Confiscation Act. And then when he does issue it, 59 days after the law was signed, it says, "By the power vested in me by the Congress in the Second Confiscation Act, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." So I was trying to show the degree to which it's not Lincoln all the time. It's not Lincoln. There's too much denigration of Lincoln for being too slow, and there's too much adulation of Lincoln for and I tried to put it in a larger political context.
And one of those contexts that I think is crucial for understanding what's happening at Combahee is the degree to which from the late 18th century onward northerners didn't like returning fugitive slaves. They just didn't. And they were passing laws in the 1780s making it hard to get slaves back. And the secessionists complained that the fugitive slave law of 1850 is a dead letter of the 10,000 estimated slaves who escaped to the North in the 1850s, maybe 3 or 400 got returned, right? And so, going into the war, we have a long history of legal extralegal, Black communities, absolutely slave catchers would not dare go into a Black community to get a slave.
Northern Sheriffs wouldn't return them. State legislatures are passing laws making it hard. So you need to understand that when the Union passes these confiscation Acts in early, in July, as early as July of 1861, they're basing it on a long history of knowledge that slaves are going to run to Union lines. They've always tried to escape, and we've got to develop a policy that accommodates them. You read through Combahee and you see all of these amazing people. It's not just the stories of the enslaved that she tells, which is a remarkable reconstruction, but, but of the planters and the background of their family and the geography, but also of the Union Army people, right?
I knew most of those people, but I didn't know all of them. And then I see them, and they're doing what Congress has told them to do, which is, slaves come to your lines, you do not return them. You do not return them. And they do. The whole policy works because decades of experience taught them that enslaved people don't like being enslaved, then they will run for their freedom when they get the chance.
Excerpt from Interview: Edda Fields-Black discusses her research methodology, focusing on pension files to uncover the stories of freedom seekers from the Combahee raid revealing insights into their familial relationships and humanity.
Edda Fields-Black: So the stories of freedom seekers are found primarily in the pension files. So these are the files of the men who joined the Second South Carolina before the raid and fought in the raid. These are the stories of the men, the Combahee men who joined the Second South Carolina volunteers after the raid. I collected the files. I collaborated with the International African American Museum and their Center for Family Histories, USCT Pension File Project. And this is after I made the first discovery and decided I gotta get these pension files. I need as many as possible. I actually need files for both regiments that were formed after the raid companies G and H. That's really expensive. My research budget wouldn't handle it, so I had to make new friends.
So IAAM Center for Family History is collecting the pension files for the South Carolina Black Regiments. And I partnered with them, and I tried to read each and every file and not only read it, but transcribe it and then enter it into my database so that I could keyword search it. My method for getting the files was not at all alphabetical. I started with the first group of files. This was a side project, and I was looking for family members that I thought had escaped in the raid. And I chose a set of files. And in those files, I happened to get lucky and find more than one file in which people were testifying about the raid.
I made this decision pretty early on to transcribe the whole thing. Some were 30 pages, some were 300 pages. And to enter my transcriptions into a database, and as I read and transcribed the questions, were developing in my mind. So those were part of my database. And I would branch out so that then try to request the files and read the files of the people who testified in the previous file. So, as opposed to going in alphabetical order, I used more of a network approach. And that would lead me to more files. It would also add details to my database. My goal, by the time I finished reading a file, was to find out where somebody was enslaved. And there were many times I would read 200 pages of cursive and not come away with that prize.
And that was disappointing. But because I was building this database, because I would just, file, after file, after file, I would compile these details in a way that I could go back and retrieve them. And one of the things, for example, if a veteran and a widow married before the war and the name of the preacher who married them, but not the plantation where they were married with that name, I could search it and would often come up with other files who were married by other files of couples married by the same man. So capturing those details and being able to get to access them was really important. I discovered in this process that a substantial number of the people in my database were not born on the Combahee.
And that piqued my interest. And one of the early files I read, I talked about Johnny Savage talked about these people coming from the Ogeechee River, and I was like, "What?" There was another file where they talked about the man being born 15 miles away on the Ashley River, right? That's a Middleton plantation. That's Middleton place today in Charleston. So what I, what became clear pretty early on is that all of these Combahee people weren't from the Combahee, where, or they were not from the Combahee plantations from which they escaped. I wanted to know where they were from. They were all from rice plantations. This is where I guess I got the notion to try to trace the freedom seekers backwards into slavery and forward into freedom.
And the way that I did that was, I had my database, and I began to see the people who were testifying about the raid and the people who had, whose, whose pension files had a lot of detail. We then, with my research team tried to go forward in time and identify family members and people in the pension files testify about their families. Some going back multiple four generations in some cases. And I'm capturing that information also. But then, lo- creating another database of these people who I think I can track and trying to layer on top of that, Freeman's bank accounts, census documents, primarily from after the war with those in the pension files where people are naming their family members.
From that, we were able to identify family groupings; parents, children, spouses, siblings. And then I went backward in time and tried to find, just scouring the planter records, wills, estate records, marriage settlements, mortgages, bills of sale. I think that covers it. Where the planters were listing the enslaved people and often listing them in family groupings. So when I say that I know who Minus Hamilton escaped with in the raid, that's because I've tracked them backwards, right? I've tracked them back to, to an 1839 bill of sale, and then to an 1859 bill of sale, right?
And it's the same family grouping. Sometimes there are a couple family members, there's a daughter who's missing. And I was able to do this for each and every one of the main characters. So I wanted to know who they were, where they came from, with which family members did they get on the boat. And in this process, I'm also uncovering all kinds of stories about the humanity of the enslaved of their marriages, of their weddings the births of their children, the praise house, who went to the praise house with whom, just all of the ways that enslaved people formed relationships, I'm getting and mining from the pension files. And my goal then became to know who got on the boat, and with which family members, and went off to freedom in Beaufort.
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