Blown Up & Burned Down South Carolina Beach Home

[Rendville]

Best That All Remember Our South Carolina History.

Around 2:30 a.m. on June 2, the Federal Union Military Ships John Adams and the Harriet A. Weed split up along the river to conduct different raids. Harriet Tubman led 150 men on the John Adams toward the fugitives. Tubman, later commenting on the raid, said once the signal was given, she saw slaves running everywhere, with women carrying babies, crying children, squealing pigs, chickens and pots of rice. Confederate soldiers tried chasing down the slaves, firing their guns on them. One girl was reportedly killed.

As the escapees ran to the shore, Black troops in rowboats transported them to the ships, but chaos ensued in the process. Tubman, who didn’t speak the region’s Gullah dialect, reportedly went on deck and sang a popular song from the abolitionist movement that calmed the group down.

More than 700 escaped slavery and made it onto the gunboats. Troops also disembarked near Field’s Point, torching plantations, fields, mills, warehouses and mansions, causing a humiliating defeat for the Confederacy, including the loss of a pontoon bridge shot to pieces by the gunboats.

The ships docked in Beaufort, where a reporter from heard what had happened on the Combahee River.

He wrote a story without a byline about the “She-Moses” but never mentioned Tubman’s name. He wrote that Montgomery’s “gallant band of 300 soldiers under the guidance of 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 the rebeldom brought off bear 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.”

https://explorebeaufortsc.com/beaufort-history-harriet-tubman-and-the-combahee-ferry-raid/