Fields-Black Receives Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for ‘COMBEE’

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has awarded its 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize to Carnegie Mellon University Professor of History Edda Fields-Black.

Established in 1990 by Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, the prize is awarded annually for exceptional scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier or the American Civil War era. Fields-Black will receive the award for her book “COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War” (Oxford University Press) at a ceremony in New York City on Tuesday, April 8.

New Insights into the Civil War

Fields-Black spent several years researching Harriet Tubman’s role in the June 1863 Combahee River Raid, a rebellion that freed more than 700 enslaved people during the Civil War. She compiled her findings into the book, which recounts the story of the raid from the perspectives of Tubman and the previously enslaved people who liberated themselves.

“COMBEE” was one of six books recommended to the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize board as finalists by a three-person jury chaired by 2010 laureate Michael Burlingame, Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.

“This book 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,” the jury wrote in their report. “This richly detailed history offers impressive new insight into both the Civil War and the world of Civil War soldiers.”

An Extraordinary Scholar

Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, has followed Fields-Black’s innovative work and appointed her director of The Humanities Center at CMU in July 2024. 

“Edda is an extraordinary interdisciplinary scholar,” Scheines said, “Her work on African rice farming and how it came via slaves to the low country in the Carolinas in the 17th century is seminal, and this work on Harriet Tubman’s role in the Civil War beyond the Underground Railroad will change and deepen our understanding of one of the true heroes of the war.” 

Inspiring Future Research

Fields-Black hopes her work will be the starting point for additional research.

“I am thrilled to receive this award and honored to be the vehicle through which the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service and the Combahee River Raid are told,” Fields-Black said.

“I hope ‘COMBEE’ will inspire other historians to dig into the pension files of other USCT regiments to write the history of more enslaved communities’ quests for freedom and millions of descendants of USCT veterans, widows and their dependent children to use the pension files to identify our enslaved ancestors.”

Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast, and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center.