High Tide

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It was 4 a.m. and the people were in the rice fields.
The people working in the rice fields on that day in 1863 were enslaved. They were working on one of several rice plantations on the Cumbie River in South Carolina.

One of the men working in the field, Minus Hamilton, later described that morning.

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 field, stood ankle deep in muck.

The official term is pluff mud, i.e. muck, and hoeing rice, you know, with their backs bent

at about a 45 degree angle with long handled hoes and hoeing rice, you know, with their backs bent at about a 45-degree angle, with long-handled hoes and hoeing rice for hours. Etta Alfields-Black is a historian and professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Minus Hamilton lived with his wife, Hager, and some of their adult children were enslaved on the same plantation. In 1863, Minus Hamilton told someone

that he was 88 years old. And that he knew he was 88 years old because he was born on Old Master Lowndes' 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.
He had grown up on another plantation in the area and came to this plantation with his wife and two adult children after they were sold. It was about a year before the start of the Civil War.

Minus Hamilton had been working on this plantation for a few years,

and on that June morning, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

People who were strong and young and able-bodied would end up helping elderly relatives and or children,

their own children, who after maybe 9 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. Again, you can't see your hands in front of your faces, and there are 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.
But then they heard a boat approaching on the water. The night before, right after sunset,

three boats had left the wharf of nearby Beaufort, South Carolina. They were headed for the Cumbie River.
It was high tide, so it was less likely for the three Union Army ships to run aground. But to get to the Cumbie River, they had to first sail through another river, the Kusa River.
This was risky. The Kusa River is notorious for its sandbars.
And it was, you know, they're navigating in the dark under the light of the full moon. But there were men aboard the boats who knew these rivers well.
Some of them were formerly enslaved men who had grown up in the area and had freed themselves. And they'd been recruited by a Union spy to help the Army navigate.
Her name was Harriet Tubman. She was on one of the boats going up the river.
The boats only had six hours before the low tide would make it very difficult to sail back. 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. 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.
When the people on the rice field saw the first boat, Minus Hamilton said that the plantation overseer started shouting at them. 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.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Harriet Tubman was born around 1822. She was born enslaved in Cambridge, Maryland, to a large and very close family.
Her parents were committed to one another, even though they were not allowed to legally marry. They had nine children.
From the time she was five years old, Harriet Tubman watched her younger siblings while their mother was forced to work. When she turned six, Harriet was sent to work for a neighboring family, and she had to live with them, leaving her own family.
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. Harriet Tubman later described how, as a child, she felt humiliated when she was forced to stand up in front of the White family in a special petticoat made for her.
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.
She was hired out to another family to take care of their baby. Harriet was so small that she couldn't hold the baby but had to sit on the floor with it in her lap.
If the baby cried, she had to stay up all night, and if the baby's mother woke up from the noise, she would whip Harriet. She was eventually sent to a farm to work as a field hand.
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.
She had to be carried back to the farm, but no one called a doctor. The next day, she was sent to the field to work, but was so injured that the man she worked for said she was, quote, not worth a sixpence.
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.
Throughout her life, Harriet Tubman suffered from seizures and could suddenly lose consciousness. She experienced visions, which she interpreted as prophecies.
She described how she would sometimes hear angels singing, or felt like she was floating above the earth. When she was a teenager, the slaveholder tried, but failed, to sell her.
And so Harriet offered to pay him every year if she could decide who she worked for and what she did. He agreed.
She started working in a store and in wheat and cornfields and gave most of her wages to the slaveholder. 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. She used part of her earnings to buy her own cattle, who helped make tasks like plowing easier.
She went to live with her father, and they spent a lot of time outdoors. 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.
Etta Fields Black writes that Harriet Tubman had a, quote, gift for reading the landscape. Her father taught her how to use the North Star as a guide.
She noticed the way moss grew on trees, and she knew the different kinds of plants in the forest. In her early 20s, she married John Tubman, who was a free black man.
But if they had children, they would be born into slavery because Harriet was enslaved. After their wedding, Harriet had visions of mothers and children being separated.
She worried this was a warning of what was to come. 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.
Both of her sisters had children. One of them was just a baby.
The children stayed behind when the two women were sold to a chain gang. And this is something that I think haunted Tubman in many, many ways.
She later said that after she saw what happened to her sisters, she was always afraid that she might get sold too,

and prayed several times a day that it wouldn't happen.

And then, when Harriet Tubman was in her 20s, she started suspecting that she and her brothers were going to be sold.

And so they decided to run away. We'll be right back.
Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right.
Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in three.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened.
So the full picture is starting to just come into view now. And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the internet.
What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research. He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party.
And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are... On Today Explained.
You'll have to go listen to them there. Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro.
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In 1849, Harriet Tubman and her brothers started planning their escape. The first attempt she made with her brothers, and her brothers became frightened and pressured her to return to the plantation.
But a few days later, Harriet Tubman tried again, alone. She couldn't tell any of her family members, or even her husband, what she was planning to do.
It was too risky. She walked off the plantation singing to herself, and kept walking for about a mile until she reached the home of a Quaker woman.
She hid in the backyard, waiting for the woman's husband to come home. 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.
She made two stops on the Underground Railroad, which was well-estab the 1840s. It's interesting, we often think of the Underground Railroad as being, the Quakers as being primarily white.
There were a lot of free black people who were hiding slaves as well and helping them get to freedom. And then Harriet Tubman kept walking.
She knew she needed to get to Pennsylvania, the nearest free state. She was the North Star as a guide, as her father had taught her.
And she followed the rivers, which she knew ran north. Eventually, she made it to Philadelphia.
But in Philadelphia, Harriet Tubman received a message that her niece was going to be sold, and Harriet decided to turn around to get her out. It worked.
The next year, she did the same thing for her youngest brother. The family decided to move to Canada together.
Philadelphia had become too dangerous after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, also called the Bloodhound Act. 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.

This basically meant that any black person could be kidnapped, accused of being a runaway slave, and sold into slavery in the South. So Harriet Tubman left the country.
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. She developed her own roots and strategies that she would share with people.
She learned that Saturdays in winter were the best days for an escape. Enslaved people often had Sunday off, so slaveholders wouldn't know they were gone until Monday.
And the long winter nights gave them more time to walk in the dark.

She tried to get people out before the holidays.

Slaveholders often sold enslaved people at the end of the year to pay off debt.

Ettafield's Black writes that the Christmas holidays were known as the weeping time.

When she walked, Harriet Tubman would rub red onions on her feet so bloodhounds couldn't pick up her scent, and she carried a loaded gun. 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. One journalist later wrote that she, quote, possessed a miraculous geographical instinct, never forgetting any

detail of a route. She got her parents out of Maryland.
They were in their 70s and unable to walk the long distance. So Harriet built a type of horse-drawn carriage for them.
She tried four times to get her sister Rachel and Rachel's children out, but never succeeded. she became known as Moses

people didn't know her real identity. Many slaveholders assumed Moses was a white man.
And then the Civil War broke out. In South Carolina, the Union, or the U.S.
Army, occupied Buford and surrounding areas. Ettafield Black writes that Harriet Tubman would almost certainly have been following the news about what was happening.
It's during this time that Tubman is sent by the governor of Massachusetts down to serve as a spy for the Army. She was going to be spying on the Confederacy.
Why do you think that she was recruited as a spy? I mean, what were they looking for? 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.
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. Harriet Tubman gathered intelligence from people who'd escaped slavery and were now living in a type of refugee camp.
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, you know, armaments.
And she would get that kind of information from them and give it to the U.S.

Army commanders. 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 Combee River and removed those torpedoes,

and they opened the river to the U.S. Army.

And Harriet Tubman also recruited men who knew how to navigate a boat up the river. And so after sunset on June 1st, the three boats were ready to go, headed for the rice plantations.
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. As the boats got close to each of the seven plantations on the Cumbie River, rowboats were put in the water to transport people to the boats.
When Minas Hamilton saw the boat, he went straight for it.

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.
and he says that, you know, the people behind him are warning him and his wife Hagar

that the rebels are coming.

They've got to hurry up. and he says that, you know, the people behind him are warning him and his wife Hagar

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.

We'll be right back.

Plantation owners and their overseers tried to force, or convince, enslaved people to hide from the U.S. Army.

But Etta Fields Black says people watching the boats approaching knew why they had come. 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 Buford. When the soldiers actually arrive, they, first of all, the boats are carrying the U.S.
flag. The soldiers are blowing horns and waving flags at the people.

The soldiers on the boats were black men from the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers Regiment, and so some of the soldiers were familiar to people on the rice plantations. Harriet Tubman later described how she saw people running to the boats.
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. 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.
Hundreds of people rushed to the riverbanks to make it onto the boats. Harriet Tubman said it was like there was a, quote, mysterious telegraphic communication between people in the area telling them to run to the river.
Someone described how the crowds extended in every direction, as far as the eye could see.

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.

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.

Thank you. 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.

Tubman helped women carry things, particularly a'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. The soldiers started setting fire to the plantations.
Minus Hamilton later described watching everything burn. The slaveholder's house, 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.
But there is a problem. Since one of the three boats had run aground and never made it to the plantations, there wasn't enough room for everyone.
There were people hanging on to the rowboats. You know, people are trying to prevent the rowboats from leaving without them.
The crew in the rowboats had to hit people's hands with their oars to get them to let go. One person described the people left by the river as, quote, the saddest sight of the whole expedition.
But the sun was coming up, and they had to hurry. As the boats pulled away, the riverbanks were full of personal belongings that people hadn't been able to bring.
Just mounds of things, whether they're clothes or pots or kettles, that were left behind on the riverbank after the boats took off. On one of the boats, a white Union commander, Colonel Montgomery, asked Harriet Tubman to, quote, speak a word of consolation.

But Tubman and the newly freed people could barely understand each other.

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. Minus Hamilton and his wife Hager had made it onto the boat.
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. 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.
756 people got on the boats that morning. Ettafields Black calls it one of the most successful Union expeditions of the entire Civil War.
When people got on the boats and the boats went back to Buford overnight and arrived the next morning on June 3rd, there was a crowd. People turned out to see the Cumby Freedom Seekers on the morning after the raid.
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.
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. Army showed up and they got on the boats, they said, we're going to Buford and our husbands are going to war.
Etta L. Fields Black's book is Cumby, Harriet Tubman, The Cumby River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
While researching the book, Etta says she was surprised to find documents, soldiers' pension files, with new details about the men who fought in the raid and their families. And she found one of her ancestors in the records.

I learned that my third great-grandfather, Hector Fields,

fought in the Cumbie Raid.

Hector was probably on a plantation in the area.

He must have liberated himself

and then enlisted in the 2nd South Carolina. After the raid, Minas Hamilton told his story to a union commander.
After that, we don't know what happened to him. But we do know a little bit about his daughter, Bina.
She purchased land in downtown Beaufortord, and she opened a Friedman's Bank account. And it's really through her Friedman'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 Friedman's Bank account,

and that's the only record that we have of Minus Hamilton's death.

Harriet Tubman lived to be 91.

Do you think that it's possible that Harriet Tubman and Minus Hamilton might have met on the boat?

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. They may have walked down Bay Street together from the boat parked at the wharf in downtown Beaufort, minus Hamilton and Harriet Tubman.
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