The Night Harriet Tubman Came Up the Combahee
October 19, 2026
If you drive Highway 17 between Savannah and Charleston, you will cross a bridge over a slow, dark river in the South Carolina Lowcountry. The bridge carries Harriet Tubman's name. Below it runs the Combahee — black water, marsh grass as far as you can see, and fields that once grew some of the richest rice in America. I have stood on that bank more than once and tried to picture the night of June 1, 1863, when three Union steamers came up this river in the dark, and a woman who had escaped slavery stood on deck, guiding them in.
By the spring of 1863, the Union Army had held Beaufort and the Sea Islands for a year and a half. But just up the Combahee, the big rice plantations were still in Confederate hands, and hundreds of enslaved people still worked those fields. The planters felt safe behind the river. They had planted torpedoes — mines, we would call them now — in the channel, ready to blow a Union boat out of the water if one ever tried to come up.
What the planters did not count on was Harriet Tubman. She had been working out of Beaufort since 1862 — nurse, cook, scout, and spy. She built a small network of enslaved river men and boat hands who knew that water by heart, and they told her where the torpedoes lay. When Colonel James Montgomery, commanding Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, planned a raid up the Combahee, he asked Tubman to guide it. She knew the river, and she knew the people waiting on its banks.
The steamers went up on the night of June 1, 1863, with Tubman aboard and roughly three hundred soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina. Guided past the mines she had mapped, the boats reached the landings without a loss. Soldiers went ashore at plantation after plantation. They burned rice barns and mills, plantation houses, and stores of rice worth a fortune — the wealth of the river, built by enslaved hands, gone up in smoke in a single night. They burned the pontoon bridge at Combahee Ferry on their way back down.
But the burning was not the heart of it. When the word spread through the quarters and the boats blew their whistles, the people came. They came out of the fields and down the banks, men and women and children, carrying what little they owned. Tubman stood on deck and helped bring them aboard and keep order in the press of people, hundreds at a time. By the time the steamers turned back down the river on June 2, more than seven hundred people who had gone to sleep enslaved were riding toward Beaufort as free men and women. Many of the men later put on Union blue themselves.
That night made Harriet Tubman the first woman to lead an armed raid in the war. It also did something quieter and just as lasting. The Combahee raid proved, on a big stage, what the Sea Islands had been showing since 1861: that Black soldiers would fight, and that enslaved people, given half a chance, would free themselves.
This is the river my novels keep coming back to. When I wrote Sea Islands Freedom, the Combahee was the water I could not get out of my head — because this is where my part of the country stopped being one thing and started being another, in one night, in the dark, with Harriet Tubman standing on the deck.
You can still stand where it happened. Cross the bridge on Highway 17, pull off, and look at the water. It runs slow and quiet now. Nothing about it tells you that it once carried seven hundred people out of slavery in a single night. That is why somebody has to tell it.
If stories like this one pull at you, the novels that grew out of them live on the books page — come read the rest of this country's story there.