On the evening of June 1, 1863, three Union gunboats slipped quietly out of Beaufort Harbor in South Carolina and steamed northward through the dark waters toward the Combahee River. On board those ships were 300 Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a battery of artillery from the 3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, a colonel from Kansas named James Montgomery, and Harriet Tubman.
What unfolded over the next twenty-four hours would make history in ways that took over a century to be fully recognized. More than 750 enslaved people were freed in a single night. Seven Confederate plantations were destroyed. A pontoon bridge was demolished. The Confederate war effort in coastal South Carolina was dealt a psychological and logistical blow from which it never recovered.
And Harriet Tubman—a woman who had been born into slavery, escaped with nothing, and returned again and again to bring others to freedom—became the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid.
Harriet Tubman Before the Raid: From Enslaved Person to Union Spy
To understand the Combahee River Raid, you have to understand who Harriet Tubman was by June 1863 and what she had already accomplished.
She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, into slavery. She was beaten severely as a child and suffered a traumatic head injury when an overseer threw a two-pound lead weight at another enslaved person and struck her instead. That injury caused her to suffer sudden blackouts for the rest of her life.
In 1849, at approximately 27 years old, she escaped. She walked roughly 90 miles north to Pennsylvania, following the North Star and relying on the network of safe houses that would become known as the Underground Railroad. Once free, most people in her position would have stayed free. Tubman went back.
Between 1850 and 1860, she made approximately 13 return trips into slave territory and guided roughly 70 enslaved people to freedom, including several of her own brothers, sisters, and her elderly parents. She worked primarily through Maryland and Delaware, using the cover of darkness, trusting an expanding network of abolitionists and free Black communities.
She was called “Moses” by the people she freed, and the name stuck. Slaveholders put a bounty on her head that eventually reached $40,000 — roughly $1.3 million in today’s money. Frederick Douglass wrote to her: “I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.”
From Underground Railroad Conductor to Union Army Scout
When the Civil War began in April 1861, Tubman saw a new battlefield opening — and she moved to enter it.
At the request of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, Tubman traveled to Hilton Head, South Carolina, in the spring of 1862. Union forces had seized the South Carolina Sea Islands in late 1861 during the Battle of Port Royal, and the area was now under federal military control. Plantation owners had fled, leaving behind approximately 10,000 enslaved people who needed food, nursing, and help navigating a suddenly changed world.
Tubman arrived to work as a nurse and cook. But her real value to the Union Army was something far more dangerous.
She began building a network of scouts and spies across the South Carolina Lowcountry — men and women who moved through the landscape invisibly, gathering intelligence about Confederate positions, supply routes, river conditions, and plantation layouts. Her key advantage was something no West Point-trained officer could replicate: she understood how enslaved people thought, moved, communicated, and protected one another.
One of her key recruits was William Plowden, a free Black man from Pennsylvania who had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Plowden and eight men sailed up the Combahee River one night and returned with detailed intelligence about bridge locations, trestle construction, and the strength of Confederate guards at key crossings. Two river pilots, Charles Simmons and Samuel Hayward, knew every sandbar, current, and bend in the 40-mile river — including the locations of Confederate mines.
The Intelligence That Made the Raid Possible
The Confederate forces defending coastal South Carolina had planted torpedoes — early naval mines — throughout the Combahee River to prevent Union gunboats from reaching the plantation district inland. For Union commanders, those mines were a near-impassable barrier. Tubman’s network solved that problem.
Freedom seekers who had escaped to Union lines brought her information about the exact locations of the torpedoes. In May 1863, a man named Francis Izzard — a shoemaker and farrier who had escaped from a Colleton County plantation — reached Beaufort and provided detailed intelligence about Confederate mine placements and troop positions along the Combahee.
Other freedom seekers followed, each adding pieces to the intelligence picture. Tubman synthesized all of this, verified it through her own scouts, and delivered it to Union commanders in actionable form.
The Union command wanted to achieve several objectives at once: neutralize the torpedo threat, destroy the rice plantations feeding Confederate forces, recruit freed Black men into the Union Army, and liberate the enslaved people still toiling in those fields. Colonel James Montgomery, commanding the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, was chosen to lead the military operation. Tubman would guide the ships.
June 1–2, 1863: The Raid Begins in Darkness
On the evening of June 1, 1863, three vessels departed from Beaufort. The gunboat John Adams was the flagship. The Harriet A. Weed was the second gunboat. The Sentinel served as a troop transport. Aboard the ships were Colonel Montgomery, 300 soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry, artillerymen from Company C of the 3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery — and Harriet Tubman with her scouts and river pilots.
The Sentinel ran aground in St. Helena Sound shortly after departure, and its troops were transferred to the other two vessels. The operation continued.
At approximately 3:00 in the morning on June 2, the John Adams and the Harriet A. Weed reached the mouth of the Combahee River at Fields Point. A small detachment under Captain Thompson went ashore and drove off Confederate pickets—soldiers who fled so quickly that one newspaper reported they left “their blankets warm to our forces.” Corporal H.H. Newton of the 4th South Carolina Cavalry sent riders galloping toward the nearest garrison at Chisolmville, ten miles away. But the alarm came too late.
Guided by Tubman’s intelligence and her river pilots Simmons and Hayward, the gunboats moved up the Combahee in darkness, threading past every torpedo placement without incident. The Confederate mines that were supposed to protect these waters had been mapped in advance by people the Confederates had never imagined would be their enemies’ greatest asset: the enslaved people of the Combahee Valley.
Plantations Burn, and 750 People Run to Freedom
Two miles above Fields Point at Tar Bluff, Captain James M. Carver and Company E of the 2nd South Carolina disembarked to secure the road leading inland. The gunboats continued upriver to the Nichols Plantation, where soldiers went ashore and set fire to the plantation buildings, rice mills, cotton gins, and warehouses.
Then the enslaved people of the Combahee began to come.
The sound of the ships’ engines had traveled through the rice fields miles before the vessels arrived. When the plantation overseers fled at the approach of Union forces, the enslaved workers ran to the river. They came in groups, then in crowds, swimming and wading and running through the rice paddies toward the water’s edge. Some carried children. Some carried pigs and chickens. Some came with nothing but themselves.
The sudden rush of hundreds of people toward the boats created near chaos. Tubman went to the deck and sang a well-known abolitionist hymn to calm the crowd and organize the boarding. Her voice and her presence had the effect that no officer’s command could have achieved. People who didn’t know her recognized the authority in her voice and followed her direction.
Union soldiers in rowboats ferried people from the shore to the gunboats as the ships continued upriver to the Combahee River Ferry crossing. Soldiers there demolished the pontoon bridge — a key Confederate infrastructure link. Then the gunboats turned south toward Beaufort, carrying their human cargo to freedom.
The Results: 750 Freed, Seven Plantations Destroyed, Not One Soldier Lost
By the time the gunboats returned to Beaufort on June 2, 1863, the scale of the operation was staggering.
More than 750 enslaved people had been transported to freedom — all of them freed on paper by the Emancipation Proclamation five months earlier but still held in bondage until that night. Among them were men, women, children, and elderly people who had spent their lives in the rice fields of coastal South Carolina.
At least 100 of the freed men immediately enlisted in the Union Army, joining the ranks of the 2nd South Carolina and other Black regiments. They went from slavery to soldiers in a single night.
Seven of the wealthiest plantations in South Carolina were destroyed, including the vast holdings of William C. Heyward, C.T. Lowndes, and others. Between 8,000 and 10,000 bushels of rice were burned at the Nichols Plantation alone. A rare library of books valued at $10,000 burned in the same fire. The Confederate logistics network that had relied on those plantations for food and supplies was severely disrupted.
Not a single Union soldier was killed. Not one was wounded. A reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal described the result without naming Tubman: “A Black woman dashed into the enemies’ country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary store, cotton, and lordly dwellings, and striking terror to the heart of rebeldom—and brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.”
Tubman’s Name Is Hidden — Then Revealed
Despite the raid’s enormous success, the initial press coverage was anonymous. The reporter who covered the story called Tubman the “She-Moses” and referred to “a Black woman” guiding the mission—but never mentioned her name.
That changed in July 1863 when Franklin Sanborn, editor of Boston’s Commonwealth newspaper and a personal friend of Tubman’s, published a full account naming her as the raid’s guiding intelligence officer. Sanborn had been part of the Secret Six — the group of abolitionists who had funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 — and he understood exactly what she had accomplished.
The story spread, and Tubman’s reputation expanded beyond the Underground Railroad. She was now recognized as a military leader, a spy, a scout, and a liberator on a scale that even her earlier work had not achieved. The July 4, 1863 edition of Harper’s Weekly featured an illustration of enslaved people streaming toward Union gunboats as plantation buildings burned behind them — a scene that captured the moral power of what had happened on the Combahee.
Despite all of this, the United States government refused to pay Tubman for her wartime service for decades. She applied repeatedly for a pension as a Union Army veteran and was denied each time. It was not until 1899 — more than 35 years after the raid — that Congress granted her a pension, and only as the widow of her second husband, Nelson Davis, rather than in recognition of her own service.
The Combahee River Raid’s Lasting Place in History
The Combahee River Raid stands as one of the most remarkable military operations of the American Civil War — and one of the most consistently underrecognized.
It was the first and only time in American history that a woman led an armed military raid. Harriet Tubman did not simply participate in the operation. She conceived the intelligence architecture that made it possible, recruited and ran the network of scouts and informants who mapped the enemy’s positions, identified the mine locations that would have destroyed the Union ships, and personally guided the gunboats up a Confederate-controlled river in the middle of the night.
The raid’s legacy stretched far into the future. In the 1970s, a group of Black feminist activists in Boston named themselves the Combahee River Collective in Tubman’s honor — explicitly invoking her as a foremother of their political struggle.
Today, the bridge carrying U.S. Highway 17 over the Combahee River in Green Pond, South Carolina, is named the Harriet Tubman Memorial Bridge. At Tabernacle Baptist Church in downtown Beaufort, a monument to her stands near the grave of Robert Smalls — another Black Civil War hero who seized a Confederate ship and sailed it to Union forces.
Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913, in Auburn, New York, surrounded by friends and family. Her reported last words were: “I go to prepare a place for you.” She had been preparing places for other people her entire life — on the Underground Railroad, in the swamps of Maryland, and on the dark waters of the Combahee River on the night of June 1, 1863.
