Edda L. Fields-Black
Appearances
Criminal
High Tide
The Fugitive Slave Act basically said that Any enslaved person or person who was perceived to be enslaved could be re-enslaved and deputized, if you will, the federal government, even in free states. and made them responsible to return these people to slaveholders, people who claimed to own them.
Criminal
High Tide
And then she works her way back to Maryland, and she continues to rescue people and then send them to Canada, where they would be safe, and she would go back and rescue more people.
Criminal
High Tide
And hoeing rice, you know, with their backs bent at about a 45-degree angle. with long-handled hoes and hoeing rice for hours.
Criminal
High Tide
She knew how to read the environment. how to remain safe on it, how to navigate through it. And of course, not only herself, but a group of scared, desperate, frightened freedom seekers finding safe places to conceal them while she foraged for food.
Criminal
High Tide
It's during this time... that Tubman is sent by the governor of Massachusetts down to serve as a spy for the army.
Criminal
High Tide
They were looking, I think, for people who knew how to navigate safely within Confederate territory, people who could learn the land, people who were used to operating in disguise and in plain sight. These were all things that Tubman did on the Underground Railroad. I also think they were looking for a certain level of fearlessness She risks everything to come south.
Criminal
High Tide
I call it the belly of the beast, if you will, to South Carolina to, you know, participate in the liberation of people she doesn't even know.
Criminal
High Tide
And she interviewed people. She talked to the people who came from Confederate territory. These people had often seen all kinds of things. They knew where Confederate troops were stationed, what were their movements, what were their troop strengths, their armaments. And she would get that kind of information from them and give it to the U.S. Army commanders.
Criminal
High Tide
We know, for example, that Tubman's intelligence gathering, her espionage gathering, led to finding the people, the enslaved people, who were forced to mine the Cumbee River with torpedoes. And she led a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots, all men, Formerly enslaved, she and her men went to the Cumbee River and removed those torpedoes, and they opened the river to the U.S. Army.
Criminal
High Tide
They were planning to go up the river, liberate as many enslaved people as they could to help fill out the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers Regiment. and to cut the supply line. The Confederacy was using the rice grown in this region to feed its military and to feed its civilians. It was also selling the rice and exporting it to Europe.
Criminal
High Tide
And that he knew he was 88 years old because he was born on Old Master Lound's plantation. And when the slaves came to the age of sense, as he called it, when they caught sense, they would write their own ages down in the big book. So he says that's how he knows how old he was, that he was 88 years old.
Criminal
High Tide
Every person in the rice fields dropped their hose and everyone went straight to the boat. Hamilton tells us what he and his wife had on. He had on only a pair of pantaloons, and she had on a single frock with a handkerchief on her head. He regretted that he could not go back to the slave quarters and get the only things he had, which were two blankets. But he said he was going to the boat.
Criminal
High Tide
And he says that, you know, the people behind him are warning him and his wife, Hager, that the rebels are coming. They've got to hurry up. And then she says, tell them to come on. Tell them to come on. You know, we're going to the boat. We're not afraid of them.
Criminal
High Tide
I think that by June of 1863, people on these plantations would have known the difference between the Union and the Confederacy. And they knew that freedom was in Beaufort. When the soldiers actually arrive, first of all, the boats are carrying the U.S. flag. The soldiers are blowing horns and waving flags at the people.
Criminal
High Tide
She described people running for their lives and carrying anything they possibly could. And this included things like pots, It included pigs. It included their children. And that women just had children clinging to them from all sides, to their legs, to their skirts, to their backs. They had children on their shoulders. She spoke of one child who was riding on his mother's shoulders.
Criminal
High Tide
The mother had a steaming rice pot on her head. And so the child is eating rice in flight as they're running to freedom.
Criminal
High Tide
One can just imagine the sounds of the raid, of people shouting and running and calling out to family members. Tubman talks about, you know, pigs grunting and chickens squawking and children crying and, you know, just all of this confusion as people are trying to get their families together and get everyone down to the river and onto the boat.
Criminal
High Tide
You think about elderly people, disabled people, people who had different kinds of mobility challenges trying to get down to the boat as fast as they possibly could. and other people trying to help them. Harriet Tubman herself actually goes on to the plantations and in one account goes to slave quarters and coaxes people to come to freedom.
Criminal
High Tide
Tubman helped women carry things, particularly a poor, sick woman. She said the woman had two pigs, and so she's helping people carry things and run.
Criminal
High Tide
There are some very strong, prickly, I don't know, stalks in the rice fields. They kind of grow up out of the rice fields. And Tubman's long skirt gets caught on some of these. And she talks about, you know, just getting caught and stepping on her skirt and trying to get out. And basically her skirt gets nearly ripped off as she's trying to get out of the terrain.
Criminal
High Tide
people who were strong and young and able-bodied would end up helping elderly relatives and or children, their own children, who after maybe nine or 10 years old would have their own tasks to work. And I like to point out at 4 a.m. as people are standing in these rice fields, the children would have been in a task probably adjacent to their parents.
Criminal
High Tide
The slaveholders' house burned. all the buildings on his plantation, the rice that was stored in the barn, the rice that was growing in the fields, watching all of that be destroyed. And he says he didn't care anything at all about that. He was going to the boat.
Criminal
High Tide
There were people hanging on to the rowboats. You know, people are trying to prevent the rowboats from leaving without them.
Criminal
High Tide
Just mounds of things, whether they were clothes or pots or kettles, that were left behind on the riverbank after the boats took off.
Criminal
High Tide
They were speaking a dialect which becomes the Gullah language. And Harriet Tubman and people in the Maryland Eastern Shore would have been speaking a different Creole language, which is closer to standard English.
Criminal
High Tide
He was in complete awe of the Black soldiers. You know, to see young Black men in uniform is likely something that he never thought he would live to see. Hamilton also tells us that, you know, the old folks like himself and his wife had to go slowly. But the young people could go by force.
Criminal
High Tide
And if you think about people like Minus Hamilton and his wife who couldn't run, you know, as he talks about how he thanks the young people who can go by force. I wonder if they weren't carried down to the river by some of these black soldiers for whom he had so much awe.
Criminal
High Tide
When people got on the boats and the boats went back to Beaufort overnight and arrived the next morning on June 3rd, there was a crowd. People turned out to see the Cumbie freedom seekers on the morning after the raid.
Criminal
High Tide
And from the wharf in downtown Beaufort, they marched down the main street in what one of the newspapers called the dirty gray field suits that they wore in the rice fields the morning before. And people cried to see these people who were fresh out of bondage, fresh off the plantations, who were skin and bones with all kinds of injuries and misfortunes, but they had their freedom.
Criminal
High Tide
And many of them were reunited with family members who were already free in Beaufort. The morning after the raid, about 150 men from the Cumbie enlisted in the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, which was the same regiment that brought them to liberation. We know that from their wives, primarily, that they knew their husbands were going to war. That when the U.S.
Criminal
High Tide
Again, you can't see your hands in front of your faces. and there were alligators in the rice fields. Even today, there are alligators in the rice fields. So you're standing among alligators and snakes that you can't really see, and you're hoeing rice at 4 a.m.
Criminal
High Tide
Army showed up and they got on the boats, they said, we're going to Beaufort and our husbands are going to war.
Criminal
High Tide
I learned that my third great-grandfather, Hector Fields, fought in the Cumbee Raid. Hector was probably on a plantation in the area. He must have liberated himself and then enlisted in the 2nd South Carolina.
Criminal
High Tide
She purchased land in downtown Beaufort, and she opened a Freedman's Bank account. And it's really through her Freedman's Bank account that I and my research team began to identify her as Minus Hamilton's daughter. She names her father as Minus. She says that he's dead by the time she opens that Freedman's Bank account. And that's the only record that we have of Minus Hamilton's death.
Criminal
High Tide
I love that. Yes, I think it's possible. I definitely think it's possible. Now, they would have been on separate boats, but they could have met in Beaufort. They certainly, they must have met at the church where the freedom seekers were taken the morning after the raid.
Criminal
High Tide
They may have walked down Bay Street together from the boat parked at the wharf in downtown Beaufort, minus Hamilton and Harriet Tubman.
Criminal
High Tide
The Coosaw River is notorious for its sandbars. And it was, you know, they're navigating in the dark under the light of the full moon.
Criminal
High Tide
But one of the three boats runs aground. They did not know that the Confederacy, you know, didn't have boats in the water and wasn't, you know, ready to pick them off. And so they left it behind. And with it, they left behind half of their carrying capacity. And they proceeded, the two boats proceeded up the river. They swing into the Cumbie River.
Criminal
High Tide
You know, now they're headed up to the Cumbie plantations, the rice plantations. The first plantation they would have encountered was where Minus Hamilton was enslaved. And one of the commanders says that he could see, quote, woolly heads at work in the rice fields. And we know that one of them was Minus Hamilton.
Criminal
High Tide
The overseer was in the rice field on horseback, and the overseer shouted to the people to run to the woods and hide. He said that the Yankees had come and would finally sell them to Cuba. They should run and hide. And everyone ignores him, and everyone went straight to the boat.
Criminal
High Tide
She was born enslaved in Cambridge County, Maryland, to a large and very close family. Her parents were committed to one another, even though they were not allowed to legally marry.
Criminal
High Tide
She was living in the house with them, and That is not what she wanted to do. And she expressed this in her own way. You could say that this was really her first act of resistance to not, you know, try to endear herself in any way to the slaveholder and the slave mistress of the plantation.
Criminal
High Tide
She did not want to be in that close proximity. And so she is then sent outdoors to do things like check muskrat traps, which she does in very bad weather, wet, cold, damp.
Criminal
High Tide
Another act of resistance is she was sent to the store, sort of the general store in Dorchester, Maryland. And another overseer was chasing and attempting to brutalize an enslaved boy who was in the store with Tubman. And Tubman kind of stood between them. And the overseer picked up an iron weight and hurled it at the boy. And it ended up hitting Tubman in the head and fracturing her skull.
Criminal
High Tide
So she was incapacitated for a long period of time and was sent back to be cared for by her mother. But this led to a very serious brain injury and something that plagued her really for the rest of her life.
Criminal
High Tide
As she got older and got stronger, she was sent to work primarily with her father and to work out of doors as a field hand. And often, even though she was quite a petite woman... often did the work of men outdoors in terms of chopping wood and driving steers and things like that.
Criminal
High Tide
She learned about really surviving in the outdoors, learning which plants to eat and which plants not to eat, which animals to hunt, you know, at certain times of the year, where certain edible roots and fruits could be found. Learning where to hide and conceal herself.
Criminal
High Tide
Something that I think really impacted her and her family for the rest of her life is that two of her older sisters were sold away from the family by the person who held them in bondage and sold to the Deep South, so possibly Alabama, Mississippi area, and they were never seen again.
Criminal
High Tide
And he says that from the slave cabins, they walked about a mile in the darkness when they could not see their hands in front of their faces. And there were plenty of copperheads and water moccasins, you know, that they could have stepped on into the rice fields, stood ankle-deep in muck. The official term is pluff mud, i.e. muck.
Criminal
High Tide
The first attempt she made with her brothers, and her brothers became frightened and pressured her to return to the plantation.
Criminal
High Tide
Anne pretended to be doing housework and yard work until her husband came and put her in the wagon and drove her to the next house.