 Good afternoon everyone. I am Dr. Edda Fields Black, an associate professor here at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And I'm the author of this new book, Cumbie Harriet Tubman, The Cumbie River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War. I'm so excited to be here talking with you today about my new book. I was supposed to be joined by my colleague, Dr. Kate Larson, who is Harriet Tubman's biographers and who has written about Harriet Tubman's life over several decades. Kate is based in Massachusetts and today we're having a Northeaster, so unfortunately she doesn't have internet and cannot join us. So I'm here by myself and the show must go on and so I'm very excited to talk with you about my book. First slide please. And this is just actually the cover of the book. So the title again is Cumbie Harriet Tubman, The Cumbie River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War. And it will be released on February 26th, so just a couple of days by Oxford University Press. Next slide please. So the book starts with the pension file of Harriet Tubman. And I, one of the most unique sources that I found to tell the story of the Cumbie River Raid was the pension files. These are files of Harriet Tubman's, the men, the spy scouts and pilots, which Tubman led, and I'll come back to that. The formerly enslaved men who joined the 2nd South Carolina volunteers and who fought in the raid, as well as the men who liberated themselves on the Cumbie, who joined the 2nd South Carolina volunteers the day after the raid. They are an exceedingly important source, historical source, which happened to be housed at the National Archives that historians haven't tapped into the way that I've tapped into them. And I'm going to come back to that. So, but the book opens with the pension file of Harriet Davis, who is Harriet Tubman. And on the one hand, many people do not know that Harriet Tubman remarried after the Civil War. And her husband, Nelson, or Charles Davis, was a Civil War veteran. So she applies for a pension as his widow. She also, after receiving a pension, attempts through Congress to be compensated in addition for her work as a nurse, as a spy and as a scout. She is eventually compensated for her work as a nurse, and she was never compensated for her work as a spy and a scout. And this particular page, this affidavit from her pension file, is one of the clearest senses that we have from Tubman herself of what her Civil War service was all about. And she says, quote, my claim against the US is for years service as a nurse in a cook and hospitals, and a commander of several men, eight or nine, during the late rebellion, during the late war of the rebellion. Those eight or nine men were spy scouts and pilots, okay, who Tubman commanded during the Civil War. I'm sorry. Next slide, please. So what I do with these pension files is I reconstruct the enslaved community on the Cumbie before the Cumbie River raid. And as I was thinking about this book, as I was thinking about the Cumbie River raid, this is before it was even a book. My question was, you know, Harriet Tubman's life has been written about and written artfully about and researched so thoroughly by people like Kate Larson for so many years. Is there anything new to say about Tubman? Is there anything new to say about the Cumbie River raid? And I found the pension files, and I found the pension files of the second South Carolina volunteers, the companies of men who enlisted the day after the raid, and in their files. And this I have to say is, is luck. It was sheer luck that I went up to the National Archives. I requested a handful of files. I took the files home. Several months later, I opened the files and read them. And in those first pulls that I did at the National Archives, I found veterans widows neighbors, testifying about the Cumbie River raid, testifying about what happened on June 2 of 1863. What I do with those files is then I go back in time, okay, because in the files, the enslaved people testify about their lives during slavery, they testify about their families. And there's one particular man who I like to say he's the supporting actor in this drama with Harriet Tubman. Well, he's the leading man, I'm sorry. There are lots of supporting actors, but Minus Hamilton is the leading man with Harriet Tubman. He says he was 88 at the time of the raid, and he testifies first person account about what happened to him and his family on June 2 of 1863. And what I do in the book is to take a group of freedom seekers whom I can document, and I trace their lives backwards, right? I document them in the pension files. I use the pension files and Friedman's Bank accounts and the census says after the war to document their family members. And then, because the formerly enslaved people also testify about where they were enslaved, who enslaved them, who was enslaved with them, you have members of their community who testify as well. And when they were sold or mortgaged, etc., in the pension files, I went back to the planters' records, okay? I went back to the planters' records. The wills, this is an estate inventory, marriage settlements, estate inventories, bills of sale, mortgages, what else? Everything but the kitchen sink. That's about it. Those are the major categories of planter records that I went back to. And I found the enslaved people in these records. So this is the first time that Minas Hamilton and his family appear in the records. And when Minas Hamilton gave his first person account, and he gave it to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was the commander of the first South Carolina volunteers and an abolitionist from Massachusetts who wanted to document these freedom seekers. And there were many abolitionists in South Carolina at the time. And some of them were collecting songs, some of them were collecting proverbs, some of them were collecting live stories, and actually writing them down. Sometimes they were published, sometimes they didn't, weren't. So Higginson actually collects this story, a life story of Minas Hamilton. In that life story, Minas Hamilton says that he was enslaved by old master Lowndes. Now Lowndes, Charles T. Lowndes was one of the planters whose plantation was destroyed in the Cumbie River Raid. So I originally assumed that old master Lowndes was probably Charles T. Lowndes' father. And with my team of research assistants, we spent a lot of time looking for Charles T. Lowndes' father, looking in his records, looking through his papers to try to find Minas Hamilton. We actually eventually found him in Charles T. Lowndes' uncle, his father's brother's papers. So this is James Lowndes, who is the uncle of Charles T. Lowndes. And here is Minas Hamilton. It says Minas Carpenter worth, he's 45 years old, he's worth $1,500. His wife Hager is, I believe, 35 and she's worth $500. Siby, who I believe is a daughter, is two and she's worth $150. And then Bina, who I know was a daughter, was six years old and worth $200. So this is Minas Hamilton's family. This is the first time they show up in the archival record of the planner family that held them in bondage. And I know that these are Minas Hamilton family members because of his daughter's testimony, actually his daughter's Friedman's bank account, which I then correlated with her testimony in a pension file. Okay, next slide please. And this is an estate sale in which Minas Hamilton and his family were sold. So Edward Rutledge Lowndes was the son of James Lowndes. So he inherited Minas, Hager, Siby and Bina. And then they were sold. They were not auctioned by Alonzo Jake White. They were sold in a private sale. Okay. And the enslaved people who were left over and who were not sold privately were auctioned off. Next slide please. Okay. And finally, Minas Hamilton's family is sold again. And this is an 1859. They were purchased from Edward Rutledge Lowndes by the father of Arthur M. Lowndes. Arthur M. Lowndes inherited them and then sold his entire plantation and plantation enterprise including the people he held in bondage to James L. Paul and sold right before the Civil War in 1859. And if we're looking at this, we can see again, okay, maybe this is not the right one. Okay, I'm having difficulty with my eyes, seeing that far away. But this is this is the sale in which there were two sales actually on this plantation, Minas Hamilton and his family, it looks like we're in another sale. But there were two sales from the Parkers to two Parker brothers to James L. Paul of two years before the Civil War begins. But I think the slide also shows how what I'm doing is going through these bills of sale, going through these mortgages, identifying family groupings. And I've already established the family groupings of the enslaved people who escaped in the Cumbie River raid from sources, primarily after the Civil War, pension files, Freedmen's Bank accounts, censuses, sometimes death records, there really were not death records for black people in rural South Carolina, until the 20th century, right, well into the 20th century. But documents on which people are testifying or naming their family members, and then looking for these family groupings within the enslaved, the documents of the planners who held these folks in bondage. So this is just an example of a bill of sale, where I'm identifying additional families who escaped and liberated themselves in the Cumbie River raid. Next document please. So Harriet Tubman. We all know of Tubman as, you know, one of the best known conductors on the Underground Railroad, having liberated herself in 1849, and making approximately 13 trips back into what I call the prison house of bondage. And Fred, I'm taking that from Frederick Douglass to free members of her family members of her community, going back into the Maryland Eastern shore, including back to the very plantation, where she was held in bondage where her family members were still held in bondage. And we know a fair amount about Harriet Tubman's life before the Civil War, and then after the Civil War, you know, when she becomes, when she continues to fight for freedom when she continues to, to be a changemaker we would call her today when she's a suffragist, you know, all of those things. We know about those two parts of her life. The Civil War is really the least known part of her life. And historians knew the outline, right? The outline of Harriet Tubman's Civil War was there, the Civil War service, but the details were missing. In large part because number one, Tubman's Civil War service is not documented at all in the military record. What you have is military commanders like General David Hunter, like who is, you know, head of the Department of the South, like Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, like Colonel James Montgomery, who was the military commander of the 2nd South Carolina volunteers, who conducted the Cumbie River Raid. These military commanders write letters for Tubman, very brief, affirming though that she was a spy and a scout for the Union Army, that she was incredibly valuable to them. And these letters are part of her pension applications and then the applications that she makes subsequent to receiving a widow's pension as she is trying to be compensated from the US government for her service as a spy and a scout. But she's not in the military record. And the interesting thing is that the military record for the Cumbie River Raid is largely Confederate, right? These are largely, these are except for one paragraph that Colonel Montgomery wrote, which is not actually in the official military record. It's really the Confederate commanders who are trying to establish blame and trying to avoid blame about what happens. And so for these reasons, there's, we know very little about, we knew very little about what Tubman actually did. What I show from new research that I was able to uncover about Harriet Tubman's life, I show that the Cumbie River Raid was largely based on Harriet Tubman's intelligence. So Tubman comes down to Buford, South Carolina in May of 1862 towards the end of May. She 1862, this is sort of the height of what's called the Port Royal Experiment. After the Battle of Port Royal in November of 1861, when the US Navy drove its armada, the largest in history, up the very sleepy Port Royal Sound in the Buford area. And all of the planters flee and enslaved people who the planters were not able to force to go with them are left on the plantations. This becomes, you know, just an abolitionist dream. Abolitionists who in the North had been organizing and lecturing and just working for abolition. Now it's here because 8,000 black people are not legally free, but they are no longer enslaved. They have become contraband of war. And the US military is not going to return them to their Confederate slave holders, to the Confederates who held them in bondage. So the black people are in, they will be in a quasi free, but still sort of a liminal status until July of 1862. But abolitionists are coming, will begin to come down in droves beginning in March to volunteer to supervise labor to harvest the Sea Island cotton crop to open and teach in schools to provide literacy for the former formerly enslaved people and to act as missionaries. It's during this moment in time that Governor John Andrews sends Harriet Tubman down to act as a spy for the US Army, and you have to imagine Buford as being like a beacon of light. And on the one hand, the Confederate slave holders surrounding Buford knew that this was trouble that the US Army had occupied Buford, Port Royal and the Sea Islands. And so they're, you know, deciding what they're going to do. Some of them are also going to flee the planners on the come be doubled down they weren't going anywhere, because they were going to bring in their rice crops. However, the ins to the enslaved people they also knew. They also knew on the come be river that the US had occupied Buford that freedom was in Buford. And if they could get there by hook crook, you know by any means necessary, often and makeshift watercraft. If they could get there, they could no longer be enslaved. So you have even after the Battle of Port Royal in which 8,000 people are worth were liberated. You have more people, anybody who could make it anybody who, you know, took the risk. Coming into Buford coming into those US occupied waters. So they could be picked up by the US Navy. Which was blockading, right, which was conducting the blockade. And Tubman, who is then situated in what become refugee camps for these contraband and most historians will call them refugees and not contraband because they're not property, right, they're people. But people who are destitute people who have nothing people who need food clothing shelter, you know, you have men who are able to work you have mothers you have children you have elderly people. Some of some of all everybody in that category is able to work and some people aren't. And so there had to be these places where people destination where people could go and have their needs assessed. And we think of those today as refugee camps. So Tubman is working in those camps in the town. Okay, the schools, the sea island cotton plantations, those are all on the sea islands in the rural area. She's in town, which is where many people come first to get assessed and then they're sent off, you know, in several different directions. And when these people arrive, Tubman interviews them, right, she talks to them, she finds out what's going on in the Confederate territory, they just left. She's able to find out about Confederate troops in those areas, Confederate, you know, arms in those areas, etc. And she then gives this information to, to the US Army commanders. One of the finds of the book is that number one, there's there's multiple so there are people who are coming from the Cumbie into Buford before the raid. And I'm tracking those people, right, I've documented those people I know who they are. And I knew where their families are, because I've tracked them, I've sort of going backward in time to the period of enslavement to find out who was enslaved on the Cumbie before the Cumbie River raid and how they got there. So now when people start coming into Buford, I got them to, okay. Where was I going with that. So, oh, we know that there was a man who came in from one of the Cumbie plantations that was raided a few days before the raid, like a week at most, and he testifies to the torpedoes. He describes the torpedoes that were on the Cumbie River. Harriet Tubman also describes her men, her group of spy scouts and pilots, identifying the enslaved men who the Confederates used to place the torpedoes to having their torpedoes removed under her supervision, therefore opening up the Cumbie River to the US Army. There are other people in Buford, abolitionists, who also describe Tubman playing a central role in going on to the Cumbie plantations and getting the Cumbie people to get off and come to the boats. In a relatively short period of time, the whole raid happens within a six hour window. Okay, so we know more about Tubman Civil War service. We also know it from a letter by William Garrison's son, who was serving with the 54th Massachusetts. We know that he says that Tubman is interviewing these freedom seekers, and I'm paraphrasing, and she's getting more intelligence than anyone. We know from a letter by Frederick Douglass' son that Tubman's men, her spy scouts and pilots, piloted Colonel James Montgomery up the Cumbie River and on to the Cumbie plantations. So, more than we've known before about Harriet Tubman Civil War service. We also know that Tubman was very much thought of as a part of these rural communities. I write in the book about a scene where Harriet Tubman attends a ring shout, which is a religious ceremony that was conducted by black people in the Sea Island. So, people who are today within the Galagici Corridor, people who were in the Sea Islands, would conduct these ring shouts at praise houses primarily after prayer. And you had other abolitionists who were part of the Port Royal Experiment, who wrote about the ring shouts, and they wrote about them as observers. And that includes Charlotte Fortin, who was a black woman from Philadelphia. She was a fourth generation freed person. Her family had been freed for four generations. She's being the fourth. From a relatively wealthy and quite powerful black abolitionist family, she's one of the volunteers who come down when Tubman is in Buford. There are three free black women, Tubman, Fortin, and Susie King Taylor. And even Charlotte Fortin writes about being a part of an observer. She's observing the ring shout. Tubman is in the ring. Tubman is called to come into the ring. So, she's considered to be among her people, if you will, in the South Carolina Sea Islands. And she uses that familiarity that people, even though she speaks a different dialect, even though some of their cultural traditions are different, she has a kind of, her life has a kind of resonance with people who are enslaved or newly liberated that allows her to gather intelligence for the Union. Next slide, please. So, part of the Fort Royal experiment, in addition to opening schools, supervising the labor of formerly enslaved people to harvest and plant, et cetera, the Sea Island cotton crop, distributing rations, et cetera, the part post-emancipation proclamation officially of the battle of the Port Royal experiment is the enlistment of black troops. And the first South Carolina volunteers was the first regiment of black troops to be raised in South Carolina, and I mentioned Colonel Thomas Wentworth-Higginson was the commander. So, this is a photograph of the first South Carolina. Unfortunately, I have not found, and I don't think anyone else has found a photograph of the second South Carolina volunteers, the second South Carolina volunteers that conducted the Cumbie River Raid. Next slide, please. Okay, so I talked about our leading man, Minas Hamilton, who told Colonel Thomas Wentworth-Higginson of the first South Carolina volunteers after the Cumbie Raid, his life story. And I mentioned that Minas Hamilton said that he had been enslaved by Old Master Lowndes, who turned out to be James Lowndes. Okay. He then goes into the story of what happened to him and to his family when the Cumbie Raid took place, when the people, when the gun votes arrived and the people, when the enslaved people became aware of the gun votes, not only that they were there, but that they had come to take them to freedom. And what he says is that the enslaved people were already in the rice fields. And I remind you that it was four in the morning, right? The gun votes left, and there were three of them that left on June 1st, around 9 p.m. from the wharf in downtown Buford. So they go up the Cumbie River through the Kusar River. They go up from Buford through the Kusar River up the Cumbie. And so they arrive on the first rice plantation where Minas Hamilton and his family were held in bondage. And Minas confirms that they were already in the rice fields at four latest 5 a.m. when it is pitch black dark, that they were already in the rice fields when the gun votes came. And that every enslaved person dropped their hoe and left the rice, and they are ready to run to the gun votes. He goes on that the overseer who was also in the rice fields. And I can't tell you how extraordinary it is that in June, there were white men, a handful of overseers and a handful of planters, Cumbie planters who were still on their plantations during the summer months. This was the sickly season because of malaria, which, you know, rice is grown in water and the standing water attracts mosquitoes. The mosquitoes bring disease. The diseases were still deadly to white people in the 1860s. And so there's this long standing practice by planters and overseers to go to higher land, healthier climbs by mid-May and stay there until November, after the first frost in November, which is right around Thanksgiving. So there is this, you know, many of these planters who are very wealthy have more than one residence, and they typically spent the winter months on the Cumbie, not the summer months. So the fact that this overseer is on James Paul's plantation is really extraordinary and goes to show that some of these Cumbie planters had doubled down and decided they weren't leaving, despite the fact that the Battle of Port Royal has happened a few miles away, despite the fact that the Confederate army has told them to leave because they cannot be protected to send their slaves to the interior. They're going to ignore all of that and they're going to try to harvest another crop of rice. So the overseer tells the enslaved people to run and hide, that the Yankees are coming, they will sell them to Cuba, and Minas Hamilton tells us that every man ran right by him straight to the boat. Okay. Next slide, please. And he goes on to talk about what happens next, right? And it's at this, he goes on to talk about what happens next when the Black soldiers actually touch land, when the Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina volunteers, these formerly enslaved men, some of them who were freed as early as 1861 after the Battle of Port Royal, some of them who were freed a few months before, what happens when they touch land? And he says the first thing he knew, the rice, they set fire to the rice, they set fire to the house, the country home, where the man who held him in bondage and his family lived. They set fire to the barn, which is where the rice is stored, but the barns, the stables, the cookhouses, they set fire to everything. On some plantations, they spared the slave quarters, but otherwise they set fire to everything. And I think that at this point, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson must have asked Minas Hamilton how he felt. You know, I think he was kind of prodding him to try to make the story more dramatic, because as an abolitionist, one would think that Colonel Higginson knew how he could imagine how Minas Hamilton felt. He cared that this was happening to the enslaver's house. And Minas Hamilton's response is, he didn't care at all. He didn't care anything about it, right? He didn't care nothing at all. He was going to the boat. Okay, and I'll add that Minas Hamilton continues his account. He talks about he and his wife trying to get to the boat. They're both elderly. Next, he was fascinated by seeing these young black men who had been enslaved like him, seeing them in this US Army uniform. And he talks about, he calls them Debrax soldiers, B-R-A-C-K. And that's Gullah, right? That L-R alternation is, is something that happens in what today we call the Gullah language, Gullah-Gechi language. He talks about seeing the black soldiers so presumptuous. And to him, they are so presumptuous, and that's how he pronounces it. Because they held their heads up, right? They were confident in this US Army uniform. They were confident in their freedom six months after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. And they went and they burned down the entire plantation enterprise of seven planters sparing one country estate because it was, you had to cross a swamp to get to it and sparing slave quarters on a few of the plantations. That's it. Everything else they raised to the ground. And we have to remember that in that they also burned the records of these plantations. So I had to, I had to find another way to tell the story, right? I did it through the pension files. I also did it through first person accounts like Minus Hamilton. And in those pension files, descriptions of what happened during the raid. And I also did it just telling the history of these plantations by finding documents that had been filed in Charleston versus Buford or Colleton counties where the raid took place because during the Civil War, the records for both Buford and Colleton counties were burned. Okay. The last thing next slide please. I mentioned that I'm able to make positive identifications for the people who escaped in the raid. 756 people were liberated. I argue that this was the largest slave rebellion in US history. And so the names of those people are in the pension files. I know the men who escaped because they joined the army. They identify their wives. They identify their children, the wives, the children, the neighbors, all of them testify. And some of them testify to what happened during the raid, who, where they got on the boat, who got on the boat with them, etc. There's another set of sources. So the Cumbie planters, three of them, after the raid, they filed for compensation from the Confederate government for their losses. And in those affidavits for compensation, they list the names of the people who they lost. Next slide please. This is one of those affidavits. This is a transcription, right, of the affidavit. This is actually for William C. Haber and you will see that he's listing men with their ages. He also lists their occupations, women as well. And, okay. The ones in red are ones that I've been able to identify. Next slide please. And this is the original. Again, it's hard to read. Last slide. Next slide. So when it comes to the children, they identify the children, their age and the name of their mother. So going back to what I said in the beginning of my remarks and thinking about the family groupings, establishing the family groupings, because I have those family groupings established. I can then go to these affidavits and make a positive ID of people who escaped in the raid. I have the testimony from pension files. I have the affidavits. And this is another source that has not been utilized by historians and that I use to reconstruct this enslaved community on the lower Cumbi before, during and after the Cumbi River raid. Next slide. Okay. So, I want to pause there. Do we have any questions? Okay. All righty. This is the visual representation that we have had of the Cumbi River raid, which in many ways is wrong. This is published in Harper's Weekly on July 4th of 1863. And what we see is in the sort of right mid middle of the image. Those are rice fields, which are very angular. We see the two gunboats because after the US Army started with three, and they're actually not gunboats, they are one gunboat and two transport steamers. However, the enslaved people call them gunboats and Yankee gunboats, Lincoln's gunboats. So I call them gunboats too, I tend to. But they lost one of the transport steamers. It ran aground on the mouth of the Kusar River, which is a river with many, many sandbars. And I have many sandbars and they took that as a shortcut to get up to the river quicker. So that was a risk. But it was a double-sided risk because on the one hand, had they gone the long way around St. Helena Sound, then that gave more time for the Confederates to regroup and possibly try to pick them off. But they went up this shortcut of a very difficult to navigate river and lost one of the boats that was going to transport people back to Buford. But they got there faster. Okay. And I have a whole theory about why they did it. One of Tubman's spy scouts and pilots was born and raised on the Cumbie River. And he was also, he also says that he was the illegitimate child of one of the Cumbie planters, who William C. Hayward, whose plantation I think was the target of the raid. Okay. So what we see in the right foreground are enslaved people who are running to and swimming to gunboats, which are not on the coast. They're not docked on the coast. We see a slave quarter, which is very close to the rice fields and to the river. And then we see rice sort of burning off on the right in the distance. It's not a good image of what actually happened and how things actually looked, but it's all we had for quite a while. Next slide please. So one of the things I did in the book is two things. Number one, I tried to learn as much about the Cumbie River as I could. And I tried to learn about the conditions of the river and getting to the river from seven plantations from the rice fields and seven plantations. This led me in a lot of directions. It led me to recreate the raid in a number of ways, whether by boat. So going up the Cumbie River by boat at night. The rate took place during the full moon. We went under the full moon. We didn't use any modern gadgets and trying to simulate what it had been like to navigate by the full moon. And the moon and the tides are a very important part of the story. I also did this by reenacting running through the rice fields. Right. And trying to get from the rice fields on various plantations. And get out of the rice fields to get up and out of the actual fields. And on to the bank to run to the river. So this is and I will say the last thing I did was to collaborate with a photographer. His name is Jay Henry Fair. He's an environmental and conservation photographer who's internationally known, and he has roots on the Cumbie. And so Henry took, Henry spent photographing the Cumbie for decades. And in addition to allowing me to use some of his photographs, he took additional photographs, aerial drone and terrestrial photographs of the river and of sites on these of Cumbie plantations on, on the Cumbie River. So this is one of the plantations where the Cumbie raid took place, which is currently owned the rice fields are currently owned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Next slide please. This is the downtown wharf today, of course, from which the Cumbie River raid left. This is their, their embarkation point in downtown Buford. Next slide. This is a shot of the Cumbie River under the full moon. Right. And what's amazing about it is, and this is part of what I learned as I'm trying to, I'm not a voter. I didn't grow up on the river as did many of the people I, who helped me write to reenact the raid, but to see the raid to see to be on the water and to navigate from the light of the moon, and to realize that the water shimmers under the moonlight. And on each side, the rice fields or the marsh are totally black and totally shapeless, and just sort of blobs, but that they would have to navigate through that shimmery water to get up this very serpentine river is one of the most powerful things I learned, trying to recreate the raid, and to see what it would have been like for for the second South Carolina volunteer soldiers. Next slide. Okay. Lastly, this is today the Harriet Tubman Bridge in it's right as you're crossing the county line between Buford and Colleton County, let's say coming south from Charleston through Colleton right before you cross over into Buford. Excuse me. It's called the Harriet Tubman Bridge because this is the end point of the raid. This was Cumbie Ferry. And you can see it today and see the marker, the historic marker for Harriet Tubman. Next slide. And after the Cumbie River raid, the day after the enslaved people got on the boat, 756 people, and I argue that this was the largest slave revolt in US history, largest and most successful, second only to the Haitian Revolution, with the freedom, the creation of 756 people. They were taken back to downtown Buford. They were taken to a church. It's at that church that both Colonel James Montgomery and Harriet Tubman give speeches. It's at that church where the people's needs are assessed, and the men who were able bodied ages 14 to 60. They enlist in the second South Carolina volunteers. They will go on to fight for the freedom of others in Georgia and in Florida and in South Carolina. The other people, women, children, men who were disabled or too old, are taken to Old Fort Plantation. And there's a refugee camp set up there for the Cumbie people. And this is a picture of Elizabeth Boatum, who was one of the teachers at Old Fort, and she stayed at Old Fort into the 1890s. And what I'm able to do through her memoir, in which she names people who she knew and who are part of her community in Old Fort, I'm again tracing these people back into slavery through the Cumbie River Raid. So identifying people who didn't join the military or some of the older men, because I did say the oldest man was 60 and he really was 60. There are a lot of 50-year-old men in there, and there was one 60-year-old man, that these people were taken, either they were taken straight to Old Fort, the women, the children, the elderly men, the disabled men, or the older men, or the disabled men, and their disabilities were found out through military service, who were discharged early, were taken to Old Fort. So I'm pulling these freedom seekers through, from slavery, through the raid, into freedom, and telling the stories of their lives. Next slide, please. Finally, all the way to death, right? This is Buford National Cemetery in downtown Buford, where some of the Cumbie freedom seekers are buried. So I bring the story all the way through. You know, I talk about their efforts to buy land. I talk about how the Civil War is really a crucible, the Civil War period, in which people from the Sea Island cotton plantations, the rice plantations, people who had been on few remaining Indigo plantations from the urban areas, people who were in South Carolina, in Georgia, in coastal Florida, who were all brought together. And what brings them together is U.S. occupation, right? These people are now having these similar experiences as being some of the first African Americans freed during the Civil War. They become the first African Americans to be able to buy land during the Civil War. And a common experience of theirs is that they are also then struggling to retain, regain that land ownership, and that it is through this crucible of the Civil War and the Civil War experiences. And in the aftermath that we see the formation and the codification of what is called in the 20th century, the Galician language and culture. So the crystallization happens in the 20th century, but this Civil War period is a very important moment in its distillation. And so we go all the way up until the deaths and the burials of the Cumbie veterans, their widows, their neighbors in telling this story. Thank you very much. I'm sorry that Kate Larson was not able to join us, but I have enjoyed very much talking to you about my new book, Cumbie, Harriet Tubman, the Cumbie River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War. And I hope that you have enjoyed a little bit learning about the book as well. Thank you.