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Chapter 1: What does Minus Hamilton's story reveal about slavery in 1863?
The year is 1863. It's June 2nd, and it's four o'clock in the morning. Light is beginning to creep into the sky, but the full moon still hangs heavy, its reflection bright in the winding Combahee River. And it's by this light that an old man, rail thin, leaves his cabin, joining his wife and the other enslaved men and women heading out to work the South Carolina rice fields.
The slave cabins are about a mile from the rice fields.
That's Pulitzer Prize winning historian Dr. Etta Fields Black.
They would have walked a mile through grass and moss infested with snakes in the dark. And then they would be standing in the rice fields, which were infested with alligators.
The old man, named Minus Hamilton, ignores the snakes and the alligators and begins to hoe. This morning is like any other. Birds call from reeds, mosquitoes buzz. The horse carrying the overseer flicks its tail. But then, everything changes.
Minus Hamilton sees the U.S. Army gunboats coming up the river.
U.S. Army gunboats coming up his river and docking at the edge of the plantation. And Minus cannot believe who he sees coming out of the vessel.
Minus Hamilton sees young black men in uniform for the first time. And he's completely awestruck by this. To see these armed black men who have come to liberate him. And he identifies them as the BRAC soldiers, so presumptuous.
Presumptuous. Minas repeats this word to himself, shaking his head.
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Chapter 2: How did the Combahee River Raid change the lives of enslaved people?
And that stagnant water is breeding malaria, is breeding mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes carry malaria. And so white plantation owners, slave owners and overseers would leave the area by the middle of May.
Almost all the white people in the area would leave the plantations and the deadly disease environment, retreating to summer homes in Charleston, leaving just a few overseers and the enslaved to keep working the fields.
Even the Confederate Army had reassigned its troops. There were no troops stationed on the Cumbee River.
No army except two lonely soldiers monitoring the river. No plantation owners. No troops. It's a pretty dang perfect time to carry out a daring raid. Can you give me a sense of what is happening in the war at this time? Like, how is it going for the Union Army? What is the vibe like?
Yeah, it's not going so well. They hadn't had a win, like a real win in a while. And people were not happy. Morale was low because the union was on the defense and couldn't seem to get back on the offense. And I think South Carolina, in a lot of ways, was a sore spot for the union. This is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.
But a raid, now a raid, might boost morale. It would be carried out by some of the new black troops that had been training in Beaufort. Their aim would be to liberate more enslaved people, some of whom would join them in the army, swell the Union ranks. Their other goal was simple, to burn everything in sight. So let's talk about the raid.
Everyone at Beaufort has been working towards this raid for months, gathering information. They finally arrived to the night in question. Bring me to that night.
So on June 1st at about 9 p.m. So this is in the summertime. It's just getting pitch black dark. This is the time when the boats leave the docks in downtown Beaufort and they are sailing under the light of the full moon. There are three boats, one gunboat and two transport steamers. And the transport steamers were brought along to bring the freedom seekers back in the raid.
Harriet Tubman told the Union Army that she'd come on the raid if it was led by a man named Colonel James Montgomery. Montgomery is a well-known white abolitionist, a man with a history of freeing slaves during his raids. He is a man Harriet Tubman trusts. So that night, Tubman is up on the front boat with Montgomery. With her are eight or nine men under her command.
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Chapter 3: What role did Harriet Tubman play in the Civil War?
And on that morning that the Come Be Freedom Seekers arrived back in Beaufort, people came out. People came out to see them and line the streets. And many of these people had been free, you know, for a year, years, since November 1861. They had jobs, they had houses, they had food and clothing and their kids were in school. They had left slavery behind. And yet here were 756 people
People who were straight out of the rice fields, right? In the same dirty gray field clothes, as the newspapers describe them, that they wore to their forced labor at four o'clock in the morning. And the newspaper accounts talk about just... just their bodies, right? Skin and bones, lots of injuries. People just looked sick and emaciated and broken down and nearly naked, right?
They're in horrible shape, physical shape. But it also talks about how they're beaming with pride. As they parade down the main street in Beaufort, they are beaming with pride because they are finally free. And they are finally able to reunite their families.
Minus Hamilton is there, walking down the main street with his feisty wife Hagar. So is their grown-up daughter, Bina Mack. She made it onto the boat too, along with her husband Harry and their little daughter, also named Hagar. Tyra Brown Polite and Phoebe Frazier found one another among the freedom seekers.
The friends had been separated, sold to different plantations along the Combe, but both made it onto the boat that day. There's an elderly couple named November and Sarah Small Osborne, childhood sweethearts, who finally made it to freedom together.
There's a seven-year-old girl named Martha Singleton and Andrew and Diana Harris still grieving for their four small children who died back on the plantation. But they made it to Beaufort that day with their only surviving child, a little boy named Samuel.
I mean, how do you feel when you think about that scene?
It brings tears to my eyes. It does to me too. It really does. It really, really does. Think about what the come-be-freedom-seekers' lives were like in these ghastly death camps, labor-slash-death camps of these rice plantations. By the time they're parading down Beaufort, they finally made it. They're finally free.
That day, everyone gathers at a church in downtown Beaufort, including the leaders of the raid, Colonel James Montgomery and Harriet Tubman.
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