100 Objects #3: The Pension Files

Unearthing a remarkable slave rebellion through dusty Civil War paperwork.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love,

• 0:45Roman Mars?

  like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep stepping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 1:04Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel: that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. The year is 1863. It's June 2, and it's 4 o'clock in the morning.

• 1:49Roman Mars?

  Light is beginning to creep into the sky, but the full moon still hangs heavy, its reflection bright in the winding Combehe River. And it's by this light that an old man, rail thin, leaves his cabin, joining his wife and the other enslaved men and women heading out to work the South Carolina rice fields.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  The slave cabins are about a mile from the rice fields.

• 2:15Roman Mars?

  That's Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Dr. Etta Fields Black.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  They would have walked a mile through grass and moss infested with snakes in the dark. And then they would be standing in the rice fields, which were infested with alligators.

• 2:33Roman Mars?

  The old man, named Minus Hamilton, ignores the snakes and the alligators and begins to hoe. This morning is like any other. Birds call from reeds. Mosquitoes buzz. The horse carrying the overseer flicks its tail. But then, everything changes.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Minus Hamilton sees the US Army gunboats coming up the river.

• 2:59Roman Mars?

  US Army gunboats coming up his river and docking at the edge of the plantation. And Minus cannot believe who he sees coming out of the vessel.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Minus Hamilton sees young black men in uniform for the first time. And he's completely awestruck by this, to see these armed black men who have come to liberate him. And he identifies them as the Brack soldiers so presumptuous.

• 3:34Roman Mars?

  Presumptuous. Minus repeats this word to himself, shaking his head.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  He talks about their stature, how they hold their heads up. This is an 88-year-old man born in bondage, who likely thought he would die in bondage, and someone who has spent his life in a subservient position. And now he sees these young armed black men who hold their heads up. And they march onto the plantation and begin to burn down everything that the man who held them in bondage owned.

• 4:12Roman Mars?

  His old life is going up in flames and a new one awaits him. So when the overseer yells at Minus to follow him into the woods away from the soldiers, for the old man, there is no choice.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Minus Hamilton basically says, "Lord, I didn't care nothing at all. I was going to the boat."

• 4:35Roman Mars?

  When Etta Fields Black came upon Minus's story, she wasn't looking for it. She was researching an entirely different project. But it suddenly came to her what he was describing.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I realized that he's actually talking about the Colby Raid, the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history.

• 4:55Roman Mars?

  The Colby River Raid was a Union military operation during the Civil War, where three boats guided by none other than Harriet Tubman liberated more than 700 enslaved people in a single night, including Minus Hamilton. The story of the Colby Raid is not new, but Etta had never read anything from the perspective of someone who had been freed in it.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  And I found the voice of Minus Hamilton. It was so striking, and it wasn't the complete account, but it was enough to really tantalize me. This was a formerly enslaved man who was telling the story of his own liberation. So that was enough. I was hooked. I wanted to know more, and I dug.

• 5:43Roman Mars?

  She dug around for more accounts like this, but Minus's story was kind of a one-off. After the raid, a writer took a liking to him and wrote down his story. That was it. So she was kind of stuck. But through her digging, Etta came across a unique set of documents, mostly untapped by historians, that would unlock a whole world she didn't know was possible.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You could say it was an accident. You could say it was serendipity. It was probably all of the above. But I stumbled upon the pension files.

• 6:15Roman Mars?

  The pension files, meaning the records the government kept when people applied to receive a pension after serving in the Civil War. Dry bureaucratic documents, not exactly riveting material. But the ones Etta found contained something she wasn't expecting. Many of the men liberated in the Colby Raid would go on to serve in the Union Army, like their presumptuous liberators. And in their pension applications, their names, histories and stories are recorded for the first time.

• 6:50Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is the history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the US Army Pension Files and how they unlocked a whole new story of the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history.

• 7:18Roman Mars?

  So let's get to Harriet Tubman. She is a key player in this story. Whether or not people know of the raid, they know about Harriet Tubman. And but I think it's worth pausing here to, you know, take a moment to talk about just the incredible things she did as a young woman. Could you just tell us a little bit about her?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Tubman is such an extraordinary, extraordinary figure. She liberated herself from bondage on the Maryland eastern shore in 1849. And from that point on, she made 13 trips back into the land of bondage, back to the same county and occasionally the same plantation where she had been held in bondage. These are enormous acts of selflessness. I liken it to putting one's hand in the mouth of an alligator. When she liberated herself,

• 8:17Speaker 01

  she had been able to take her hand out from the alligator's mouth.

• 8:22Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Most of us would just go in the opposite direction and leave the alligator alone.

• 8:30Roman Mars?

  It's fair to say.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  But Tubman, 13 more times. She puts it in, she takes it out. She puts it in, she takes it out. 13 more times.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I mean, who does that? She rescues about 70 people. Personally, rescues, brings out of slavery 70 people.

• 8:53Roman Mars?

  This is the Harriet Tubman that most of us know about. But our story begins where a lot of that history ends.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  So as the Civil War is nearing, and after she makes her last rescue mission, and is not able to rescue her sister and her sister's children, Tubman is being advised, really, to kind of cool it, right? This war is getting ready to happen. We don't know what's going to go on.

• 9:20Roman Mars?

  At this point, Tubman is living in New York and is a well-known part of abolitionist networks. And it is through these networks that she gets a new opportunity to help.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  And once the war gets started, the governor of Massachusetts makes the arrangements for her to serve as a spy for the US Army.

• 9:41Roman Mars?

  A spy recruited by the Army. So in May 1862, Harriet Tubman heads down to her first posting, a place called Beaufort, South Carolina, a town of old plantation houses, live oaks, and eerie hanging moss. It sits on Port Royal Island, one of a chain of so-called Sea Islands along the coast, and it has just been captured by the Union.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  In November 1861, the US Navy captured Beaufort, Port Royal, and the Sea Islands from the Confederacy. And the next day, the US Army occupied these territories. But before the US Navy's ships arrived, the plantation owners, slave owners, fled. And they left behind about 8,000 enslaved people. And the US Army decrees that it's not going to return "the property," in quotes, of the Confederates. "We're not enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act anymore."

• 10:45Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  "You have forfeited your property, and we're going to keep them," right? They become contrabands of war.

• 10:54Roman Mars?

  And eventually, the US Army frees all the people who were enslaved on Port Royal and the Sea Islands, creating a kind of free city.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So the US Army begins to employ people who were able to work and house and feed and take care of people who couldn't. So it's in this context that hundreds of northern abolitionists come down, opening schools, clinics, shops, churches.

• 11:25Roman Mars?

  And this is what's stunning to me is this is South Carolina. Like, this is a free community, deep in Confederate territory. Like, the fact that this is happening in South Carolina is really stunning.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I like to say it's the belly of the beast. It's sort of an oasis, but I'm sure it felt very tenuous, just because the proximity of the Confederacy. There's no buffer, there's no border, there's no barrier, it's right there.

• 12:00Roman Mars?

  So Beaufort and the wider Port Royal Island is becoming this experiment in what a post-slavery society might look like. But that's not the only radical experiment going on in the quintessentially southern town. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a famous writer and abolitionist, the one who later interviewed minus Hamilton, described it like this. "Five minutes' walk beyond the live oaks will bring you to something so unsouthern that the whole southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, the camp of a regiment of freed slaves." For the first time in US history, the Union Army is also building a company of black soldiers

• 12:42Roman Mars?

  in Port Royal, arming and training the formerly enslaved. It's a radical idea. Higginson, who actually led the first black company, wrote, "They had home and household and freedom to fight for, not just the abstraction of the Union."

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And Harriet Tubman comes down in this context. Technically, she's a northern volunteer, but she comes down to serve as a spy.

• 13:09Roman Mars?

  Harriet Tubman's job would be to gather intelligence for the army from the Beaufort's growing population of people who had escaped slavery and made their way to the free oasis.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  This is what Harriet Tubman did. So we know that she was in downtown Beaufort, working in the refugee camps. So as the freedom seekers came from the Confederate plantation, she was there to talk to them and find out what they knew. And they had a lot of information that the Union wanted and that could be beneficial to the Union.

• 13:44Roman Mars?

  Before arriving in the refugee camps of Beaufort, many of the formerly enslaved had been made to work for the Confederate cause.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Whether it was building fortifications, moving and hauling armaments, serving Confederate troops. And individuals, especially officers, brought their slaves with them to camp. So they were in the camp, cooking everything, washing everything, fixing everything, building everything. And Tubman was there to debrief them, as one of the CIA commanders says. And then she passed this intelligence back to the US Army commanders.

• 14:24Roman Mars?

  Also, the Confederate Army had planted explosives along the river in case of a Union attack. Except, they didn't actually do the labor. They had the people held in bondage do that. People who are now flooding into Beaufort and could tell Tubman exactly where the mines were planted. And these freedom seekers also taught Tubman about the terrain, where the river bends, where the sandbars are. Because these plantations sit on a very different landscape than the one she grew up in.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  When Americans, if Americans, think about slavery, we think about cotton. So the rice plantations are, and I should say, the tidal rice plantations. They are located in the coastal wetlands.

• 15:07Roman Mars?

  The marshland where the rice grows is home to deadly cotton-mouthed snakes and silent, slithering alligators. But it's also home to a much smaller, but even more deadly, animal.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Mosquitoes breed in water, right? And so it creates this awful, deadly, disease environment.

• 15:25Roman Mars?

  The people working these plantations often lived with chronic malaria.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  What happens is that malaria shatters the immune system. And so having chronic malaria means that the immune system is then not able to fight off other things, right? Something as simple as upper respiratory ailments killed otherwise healthy people. It means that women gave birth to babies who did not thrive. So children, infants, are very vulnerable. Elderly people and people with compromised immune systems, very vulnerable. And so the death rates on these rice plantations are second only to sugar plantations in the

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Caribbean, right? Where the life expectancy was seven years. Rice plantations are second to that.

• 16:29Roman Mars?

  There's one time of year when the mosquitoes are particularly bad, so bad that the plantation calendar is organized around it.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  June is the sickly season. So this is when rice is growing in the rice fields in standing water. And that stagnant water's breeding malaria, is breeding mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes carry malaria. And so white plantation owners, slave owners, and overseers would leave the area by the middle of May.

• 17:02Roman Mars?

  Almost all the white people in the area would leave the plantations and the deadly disease environment, retreating to summer homes in Charleston, leaving just a few overseers and the enslaved to keep working the fields.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Even the Confederate Army had reassigned its troops. There were no troops stationed on the Combe River.

• 17:22Roman Mars?

  No army, except two lonely soldiers monitoring the river. No plantation owners, no troops. It's a pretty dang perfect time to carry out a daring raid. Can you give me a sense of what is happening in the war this time? Like, how is it going for the Union Army? What is, what is the vibe like?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not going so well. They hadn't had a win, like a real win, in a while. And people were not happy. Morale was low because the Union was on the defense and couldn't seem to get back on the offense. And I think South Carolina, in a lot of ways, was a sore spot for the Union. This is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

• 18:10Roman Mars?

  But a raid, now a raid might boost morale. It would be carried out by some of the new black troops that had been training in Beaufort. Their aim would be to liberate more enslaved people, some of whom would join them in the army, swell the Union ranks. Their other goal was simple: to burn everything in sight.

• 18:34Roman Mars?

  So let's talk about the raid. Everyone at Beaufort has been working towards this raid for months, gathering information. They finally arrived to the night in question. Bring me to that night.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  So on June 1st, at about 9:00 PM. So this is in the summertime. It's just getting pitch black dark. This is the time when the boats leave the docks in downtown Beaufort. And they are sailing under the light of the full moon.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  There are three boats, one gunboat and two transport steamers. And the transport steamers were brought along to bring the freedom seekers back in the raid.

• 19:26Roman Mars?

  Harriet Tubman told the Union Army that she'd come on the raid if it was led by a man named Colonel James Montgomery. Montgomery is a well-known white abolitionist, a man with a history of freeing slaves during his raids. He's a man Harriet Tubman trusts. So that night, Tubman is up on the front boat with Montgomery. With her are eight or nine men under her command. These are her very best informants, a group of black men who would act as spies, scouts, and pilots during the raid. Then there are the soldiers, one battery of white soldiers, and then 300 black soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. It's hard to imagine what these black soldiers were feeling as the gunboats pulled out from the harbor.

• 20:11Roman Mars?

  Many of them had been enslaved on the very plantations they were returning to, plantations where they still had family members held in bondage.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  They were going to war against slavery, right? They were going to war to free other people who were still enslaved.

• 20:31Roman Mars?

  Together, under the light of the full moon, they begin to make their stealthy way up the tidal waters of the Columbia River. But very quickly, something goes wrong.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  One of the transport steamers ran aground, and it was about three hours until the next high tide, which could potentially have dislodged it. They couldn't sit there for three hours and be sitting ducks for, you know, whatever the Confederacy might have for them. So they had to abandon it and continue with two boats. And I suspect that that was really heartbreaking for Tubman, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, her scouts and pilots, all of these folks who were formerly enslaved. It must have really been heartbreaking for them to think that now they're only going to be able to bring half as many people down from the Columbia.

• 21:28Roman Mars?

  This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding followed by access to peaceful lounges. Onboard, savor menus created by renowned French chefs paired with wines and champagne selected by Smollet. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel MyBed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year.

• 22:13Roman Mars?

  The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots. Cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel. And walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an outsider. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day.

• 22:55Roman Mars?

  So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 23:13Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 23:47Roman Mars?

  The gunships are able to move up the river unseen until about 3 a.m. That's when the boat encounters the only two Confederate soldiers the army left behind in a lonely outpost on the river. The Confederates quickly realize that they are vastly outnumbered.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  They fled. They fled. And there are some wonderful newspaper accounts that talk about them fleeing so quickly that they left their blankets warm.

• 24:15Roman Mars?

  The Union soldiers on the raid knew that Confederate reinforcements would eventually arrive, so the clock was now ticking. And in the meantime, the two Union boats are right where they wanted to be. They've reached the rice plantations. They make a furtive stop at a first plantation and let some soldiers out, and then continue up the river and make another stop, letting more soldiers out.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  The soldiers get on land. They went to the plantations and started burning things down. You know, burning down stables, barns, and the barns contained the previous year's rice harvest. They burned most of the houses, the manor houses, where the plantation owner and his family lived. They go to the rice fields and they open the gates of the hydraulic irrigation system and let in all the salt water. And they kill the rice crop that's growing in the fields.

• 25:13Roman Mars?

  These rice plantations are considered the breadbasket of this part of the South. So as they destroy crops and burn food stores, they are dealing a massive blow to the Confederacy. But as all of this is happening, the other part of the operation begins.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Not only do they disembark soldiers, but they also send out rowboats. And those rowboats bring the freedom seekers back to the boats.

• 25:40Roman Mars?

  The black soldiers, fresh out of slavery themselves, begin to call out to the enslaved people working on the plantations.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  They walked up and down waving flags, trying to attract the attention of the freedom seekers.

• 25:57Roman Mars?

  And one of the people watching in utter amazement as this unfolds is 88-year-old Rail Finn Minus Hamilton.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  He describes the enslaved people being in the rice fields hoeing rice when they first saw the Union gunboats coming up the river.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  And he talks about an overseer being in the rice fields with them on horseback. And so the overseer is seeing exactly what the enslaved people see. And he is shouting to them that the Yankees have come and are going to sell them to Cuba. And they should follow him to the woods and hide. And Minus Hamilton basically says, everybody went the other way. I was going to the boat.

• 26:51Roman Mars?

  Minus and his wife Hagar are both in the fields that day. Together, they make their way to the gunboat, carrying nothing with them.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  They really only had the clothing on their backs. He had a pair of pants and a shirt. And she only had just a single frock and a head tie. He laments that his two blankets, which are the only two things that he feels he can call his own, his two blankets are in the slave cabin and he has to leave them behind.

• 27:23Roman Mars?

  But there is no time to waste. The freedom boat is here.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  So as you can imagine, Minus Hamilton and his wife are elderly. Okay, he was likely one of the oldest people on these Combi rice plantations. So as they're moving to the boat, people are coming up behind them and telling them to hurry. People are telling them that the Confederates are coming.

• 27:50Roman Mars?

  To which Minus Hamilton's wife Hagar basically says, I'd like to see them try and stop us.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  She tells them to come on, right? Come on, come plenty on. We're going to the boat. We're not worried about the Confederates here.

• 28:07Roman Mars?

  The elderly couple are giddy. Minus looks back and sees the plantation where he was held in bondage burn. Union Colonel Higginson, who later interviewed Minus, asked him how that moment felt.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  And Minus Hamilton laughs and says, Lord master, I didn't care nothing at all. I was going to the boat, you know? I, and he's like, I'm not looking back. I don't care. I'm leaving this all behind and I am going to freedom.

• 28:37Roman Mars?

  But what Minus really remembered from that day were the black men in uniform. This is when he uses that very particular word, presumptuous, and repeats it three times.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  The Brack soldier is so presumptuous.

• 28:50Roman Mars?

  What do you, what do you make of that word presumptuous? It's so, it's such an interesting and cool word to use in this moment. How does it, what does it strike you?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  It strikes me as

• 29:06Speaker 01

  he's looking at them and looking at the fact that these young armed men in uniform don't have to lower their eyes. They don't have to lower their heads. They're not cowering to white people, right? Instead, they're here and they're like turning this whole world on fire, right? He likely saw them as destroying the institution of slavery. They're burning it down. And in burning it down, they are setting us free.

• 29:46Roman Mars?

  In the meantime, Harriet Tubman is, as ever, on the front lines.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  We know that Tubman got out on a rowboat and went to a plantation. And she went to the slave cabins. And I've said that there were enslaved people working in the rice fields. The able-bodied people, including 88-year-old Minus Hamilton and his wife, were working in the fields that early in the morning. So the people who were left in the cabins were Extremely even more elderly, but infirm, disabled children who were too young to work, women who had recently given birth or had very young nursing infants.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Those are the people who would have been left in the slave cabins. Tubman went to the cabins to get these most vulnerable people. And she remembers this wonderful image of running with the freedom seekers, running with them back to the boats. So she's helping women carry their children and she's helping carry these two pigs, which they named after Confederate officers and which were going to be given to the Union commanders, the Union generals back in Beaufort. And she talks about one woman who's running. She's got, you know, children in her arms and children holding on to her skirt and one

• 31:20Speaker 01

  child on her shoulders and she's got a rice pot on her head and the pot is smoking.

• 31:28Roman Mars?

  They just pulled it off the fire.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the child is eating in flight. It's a wonderful image. And Tubman runs through some of these like thorn bushes near the edge of the rice field and she tears her skirt. And so she laments the fact that she nearly tore her skirt off and writes a letter or has someone write a letter for her to the women of Boston, asking them to send her a pair of bloomers and telling them that she'll probably need them for another expedition.

• 32:09Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. She learned she just wasn't dressed for the job.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:14Roman Mars?

  She's going in there to rescue the babies. She needs pants on.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  She needs pants, yes, yes.

• 32:22Roman Mars?

  Plantations are burning. Freedom seekers are being rowed to the boats. But this is, after all, a secret raid, and the raiders only have so much time. On one plantation, the slave owners started to fight back.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  The overseer was able to get some of the Confederate soldiers to follow him back to the plantation, and they positioned themselves between the freedom seekers and the boat, which stopped many people from actually getting to freedom. And one enslaved girl ran for it, and she was shot and killed in cold blood.

• 32:58Roman Mars?

  The raiders are out of time. And as freedom seekers realized this, some become desperate, trying to get on the last departing rowboats.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  There were descriptions of them holding on to the sides of the rowboats and trying to stop the rowboats from leaving without them. And at one point, Colonel Montgomery tells Harriet Tubman to sing to your people, right? To calm them, sing to them. And she does. And they become calm and kind of let go of the sides of the rowboat. And the boat takes off without them. So we can only imagine what happened to those people, that they were tortured. Some of them may have been killed for trying to escape. Some of them may have been sold for trying to escape.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So 756 people get onto the boats, and the boats sail all night and arrive early in the morning back in downtown Beaufort, back at the dock.

• 34:08Roman Mars?

  Beaufort, the oasis of freedom, now home to 10,000 formerly enslaved people, living free.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And on that morning, that the Comby freedom seekers arrived back in Beaufort.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  People came out. People came out to see them and line the streets. And many of these people had been free, you know,

• 34:32Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  for a year, years, since, since November 1861. They had jobs. They had houses. They had food and clothing and their kids were in school. They had left slavery behind. And yet here were 756 people who were straight out of the rice fields, right? In the same dirty gray field clothes as the newspapers described them, that they wore to their forced labor at four o'clock in the morning. And the newspaper accounts talk about just, just their bodies, right?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Skin and bones. Lots of injuries. People just looked sick and emaciated and broken down and nearly naked, right? They're in horrible shape, physical shape. But it also talks about how they're beaming with pride. As they parade down the main street in Beaufort, they are beaming with pride because they are finally free. And they are finally able to reunite their families.

• 35:58Roman Mars?

  Minas Hamilton is there, walking down the main street with his feisty wife Hagar. So is their grown up daughter, Bina Mac. She made it onto the boat too, along with her husband Harry and their little daughter, also named Hagar. Tyra Brown-Polite and Phoebe Fraser found one another among the freedom seekers. The friends had been separated, sold to different plantations along the Combe. But both made it onto the boat that day. There's an elderly couple named November and Sarah Small Osborn, childhood sweethearts, who finally made it to freedom together. There's a seven year old girl named Martha Singleton. And Andrew and Diana Harris, still grieving for their four small children who died back on the plantation. But they made it to Beaufort that day

• 36:43Roman Mars?

  with their only surviving child, a little boy named Samuel.

• 36:53Roman Mars?

  I mean, how do you feel when you think about that scene?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  It brings tears to my eyes.

• 37:02Roman Mars?

  It does me too.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  It really does. It really, really does.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Think about what the Come Be Freedom Seekers' lives were like in these ghastly death camps, labor/death camps of these rice plantations. By the time they're parading down Beaufort, they finally made it. They're finally free.

• 37:36Roman Mars?

  That day, everyone gathers at a church in downtown Beaufort, including the leaders of the raid, Colonel James Montgomery and Harriet Tubman.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Colonel James Montgomery gives a speech to the Freedom Seekers, and Harriet Tubman follows him. And we don't know what she said. There's no transcript. And it's not on YouTube, but...

• 38:00Roman Mars?

  Oh, if only.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  I know.

• 38:02Roman Mars?

  Your life would be so much easier.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  So much easier.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  I can't even imagine.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's after her speech that 150 men aged 14 to 70, there was one 70-year-old man who enlisted. The morning after they're liberated, they enlist in the Second South Carolina Volunteers. It was a very immediate kind of thing that they came and liberated us. We are going to liberate others.

• 38:39Roman Mars?

  And that brings us back to The Pension Files, where we began this story, our object that in many ways holds the stories of this raid.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  About 200,000 black men served during the Civil War. And after the war is over, those men, their widows, their dependent children, were entitled to military pensions, just like veterans today. And that application process was long and laborious, and it required a lot of paperwork.

• 39:11Roman Mars?

  It didn't matter if you were a black soldier or a white soldier. You had to provide proof that you were who you said you were and that you had served.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  But the difference is that the black veterans and the widows were born enslaved. So they didn't have any paperwork.

• 39:27Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Right? They didn't have birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates. What the veterans had is they had people, people they grew up with. And the men they joined the military with and the women they married. Right? And these people came out and testified for each other.

• 39:50Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And it's through their testimony that they verify each other's identity, the sanctity of their marriages, the legitimacy of their children. Who held them in bondage and where? And how they were bought, mortgaged, given away, and passed down within families. And then they talk about their lives together, courting. They go through the veterans and the widows' entire dating history. Because they have to show that they're actually legally married to this person.

• 40:26Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Right? And they're not married to those other people. You see the whole life of people in the enslaved community in ways that we've never seen them before. Because now they're telling their story.

• 40:48Roman Mars?

  Once you know that these files exist and you see them and all the oral history that they create, what do you realize you can do with these files when it comes to the raid?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I realize that I can put the Cumbi enslaved community back together. I realize that I can identify the people who were liberated in the raid.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Those people who testified about the raid become the main characters of the story.

• 41:20Roman Mars?

  The pension files also helped Etta rebuild her own family tree. Because Etta's family hails from a county not far from Beaufort. But she didn't have much to go on, just a little research her cousin had done.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  When I started looking for the Fields family, I went back to the notes my cousin gave me. And I saw that he had searched through the census and identified our earliest known ancestor in the 1870 census as Hector Fields. But then he was stuck.

• 41:54Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  That's as far back as he could go.

• 41:58Roman Mars?

  So the census said that Etta had a great, great, great grandfather named Hector. But that was kind of it. It's a dead end that people frequently hit when looking for ancestors who were enslaved. The 1870 census was the first government document that listed formerly enslaved people by first and last name, which makes it really hard to trace anyone further back than that. In fact, people call it the 1870 brick wall, a brick wall that Etta herself was facing.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  So how do you find Hector Fields? I was working with the International African American Museum Center for Family History. They identified Hector Fields as a veteran in Beaufort. So I took these little lists and I went down to the National Archives and I pulled these pension files. And Hector's file was a bust. There was no family information. It was like 30 pages long. I put it on the shelf. You know, and I looked at the other pension files. The beauty came when we discovered the pension file of Hector's brother Jonas Fields.

• 43:04Roman Mars?

  This pension file, the file from Hector's brother, was more than 250 pages long. And it contained precious details about the Fields family, details that Etta never would have learned otherwise.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  The name of his siblings, the names of their parents. How they got separated during the war. My aunt was given away as a wedding gift. The slaveholder gave her to his daughter when she got married. So the whole, it just opened up so many doors for our family history.

• 43:35Roman Mars?

  Etta followed one document to another, one pension file to the next, until she learned something that no one in her family had known before. That Hector Fields, her great, great, great grandfather, was one of the soldiers on the Colby raid. That he took part in freeing 756 people from bondage. Her own ancestor was among those presumptuous black soldiers who set the world on fire.

• 44:04Roman Mars?

  Of all the remarkable things that Etta was able to do with these pension files, there's one that stands apart. Not because it's the most complex, but because it may be the most basic. She was able to restore people's real names. The names of the soldiers and the freedom seekers who took part in the raid. Not the names of their slaveholders, but the names they gave themselves.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Jack Akin, Sunday Briscoe, Robert and Phoebe Frazier, Captain Brown, Edward and Peggy Brown. My goal was to tell the story of the notable and the nameless, right? The people we know and the people we don't know. The people whose names we know and the people whose names we've never heard before. And their names have never been recorded before. Cuffy and Sophia Bowles, Sampson Drayton, Thomas and Bella Drayton.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  And so how do we identify their names and tell their stories? And then write their names in the annals of history? That's what I wanted to do. Carolina, Flora and Stephanie Grant, Jackson and Jane Grant, Jeffrey and Phoebe Gray.

• 45:37Roman Mars?

  Dr. Etta Fields Black, thank you so much for talking with me. I really enjoyed it.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

• 45:56Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Brenna Daldorf. Our other producers are Priscilla Alavie and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork

• 46:39Roman Mars?

  by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].