Edda Fields-Black

They couldn't sit there for three hours and be sitting ducks for whatever the Confederacy might have for them.

So they had to abandon it and continue with two boats.

And I suspect that that was really heartbreaking for Tubman, the second South Carolina volunteers, her scouts and pilots, all of these folks who are formerly enslaved.

It must have really been heartbreaking for them to think that now they're only going to be able to bring half as many people down from the Cumbie.

They fled.

They fled.

And there are some wonderful newspaper accounts that talk about them fleeing so quickly that they left their blankets warm.

The soldiers get on land, they went to the plantations and started burning things down.

You know, burning down stables, barns, and the barns contained the previous year's rice harvest.

They burned most of the houses, the manor houses where the plantation owner and his family lived.

They go to the rice fields and they open the gates

of the hydraulic irrigation system and let in all the salt water.

And they kill the rice crop that's growing in the fields.

Not only do they disembark soldiers, but they also send out rowboats.

And those rowboats bring the freedom seekers back to the boat.

They walked up and down waving flags, trying to attract the attention of the freedom seekers.

He describes the enslaved people being in the rice fields, hoeing rice, when they first saw the Union gunboats coming up the river.

And he talks about an overseer being in the rice fields with them on horseback.

And so the overseer is seeing exactly what the enslaved people see.

And he is shouting to them that the Yankees have come and are going to sell them to Cuba.