Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press) has won the $50,000 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, given to a book that "enhances the general public's understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era."
Organizers said that Combee offers "an untold story about the Civil War and Civil War soldiers. Most readers know Harriet Tubman as the abolitionist who worked tirelessly to liberate enslaved people. Yet Tubman's work as a spy and scout for the Union Army during the Civil War has been little explored, including her role in the 1863 Combahee River Raid. The US 2nd South Carolina, a regiment of formerly enslaved men, destroyed the region's rice plantations, while nearly 800 enslaved people boarded Union ships."
The jury said, in part, that Combee "is distinguished by extraordinary research, doubly remarkable because the records of Combahee River plantations were destroyed in the raid, and most of the Black participants (including Tubman) were illiterate. Fields-Black's genius ... is to mine the veterans' testimony in Civil War pension files, poring over the claims of 150 Black men who participated, then enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, along with the claims of wives, friends, and neighbors."