The Raid

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Stories about Civil War monuments have been in the news all summer. But the monument that bothers us the most doesn't feature Robert E. Lee or the Confederate flag. In fact, it features Abraham Lincoln. That's about how high is that? Maybe twenty feet? Yeah, probably about twenty feet. Lincoln is kind of looking down on us, his hand is extended. Got this black man kne on his knees in front of Lincoln.

maybe s trying to r stand up or rise. Still got a shackle around his arm. It it looks like maybe the the the enslaved person might be shining Lincoln's shoes or something. The statue is called the Friedman's Memorial. It's in Washington, DC, put up in eighteen seventy six. It's so much in the statue. I mean, the the man, the f the freed man who may be rising, uh he's got a broken chain on his arm, but he's dressed like a he's only got like a a loincloth.

He otherwise he is he is absolutely naked. Meanwhile Abraham Lincoln is in a full 19th century dress coat, pants, boots. Lincoln is still standing over the dude. And in a way, this doesn't really give any credit or represent the agency of black people in freeing themselves. Black people were trying to free themselves, rebel from slavery before the Civil War even started. I hate this statue. I hate it too. I'm Jack Hip. And I'm Chinjirai Kumanika. This is uncivil.

where we ransack America's history. And discover that the past is never really past. This fall we're gonna bring you stories of espionage. In that day and time you had to be a spy. There had to be a lot of spy in you to be black and to survive. Betrayal. I feel like someone has put a dagger through my heart. Con artists. He produced fifteen million dollars worth of fake money. And black people fighting back. They help free themselves.

You know, the girl was bad. Do you think the Civil War is still relevant now? American society is was built out of the Civil War. The story of slavery, the story of the Civil War, the story of the statue is the story of America. We're gonna kick things off with a story that was written out of the official history just weeks after it happened. It's about the most ambitious covert operation of the Civil War. And it's about black people who never thought they'd pick up a gun, but they did.

One of those people was named Shedrick Manigo. To his family, he was Pa Shed. He was a short man, but He was a dark skinned man. He had like a little bit I guess he had like a little bit of a beard. This is Fallon Green, Pashed's great great granddaughter. She's a paralegal in Beaufort, South Carolina, just a couple of miles from where our story takes place.

Growing up, she'd heard a little about Pashed. She knew that he'd built the church her family went to, but as she got older, she began digging deeper into her family history and started asking about him. And it turned out one of her living relatives, Uncle Baby, actually knew Pashed. So I was told that I should go to my Uncle Baby and try to find out a little bit more um of the details. You said that Uncle Baby knew Pashed.

Is he the first person to tell you about your great great grandfather? He's the first person to tell me the truth. And um the light was a little, you know It's not lit very well and so it's a little It was a little I wouldn't say magical. But anyway, the light kind of cascaded on him and he sat me. He didn't look me in the eye, he kinda like started to think back and he said, Let me get it right. And he starts to tell me, um, about the story and it was just lightning.

The story Uncle Baby told Fallon was that right at the beginning of the Civil War, Pashed was sold to a plantation in South Carolina called Hazel Farm. And when he gets to Hazel Farm, okay, he hates his overseer or whoever it is that's there. So he decides to run away. And he had an idea about how to do it. You gotta remember, Pashad was deep in the Confederate-controlled South. Maps now show the south is red, the north is blue. But there were patches of blue in the south.

One of them was a Union-controlled fort on an island in Port Royal Sound. And it happened to be not far from where Pashed was enslaved. So, on the fly, he came up with a plan to get over to the fort. And what they do is they fashion a pine log. Basically, they cut down a tree to make a raft. And then they put it by the banks of the Beaufort River. They cover it with brush. They come back at the dark of night and they, of course, uncover the pine log. Push it into the river and hop on.

And the visual that I'm given with the story is that they straddle. And they floated, as it was said to me, floated to mainland Beauford. That morning, Pashed and his brother made it to freedom.

As it turned out, just a few weeks before they got there, new military leaders had arrived at Port Royal. And among them was a radical abolitionist, Colonel James Montgomery. To really get a sense of this guy, you need to see a daguerreotype picture of him. He has that thousand mile stare of an underfed lunatic and bed hair that looks like he cut it himself with broken glass.

Montgomery wasn't trained at West Point. He learned guerrilla warfare, fighting against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. One time, after his farm was attacked, he tracked them in back to where they lived and burned down the entire town. In Kansas, people like Montgomery were called Jayhawkers. Nowadays, they'd call him a terrorist. I'm Brody James Montgomery. I am the third great grandson of Colonel James Montgomery. I am the owner and founder of Brody's Spirit.

We make moonshine. Brody has proved that genetics is not always destiny. The colonel wasn't your standard frontier wild man. He was fiercely religious, and to his great-grandson's dismay, he was also a prohibitionist. He wasn't known to drink. Who doesn't drink? Montgomery came to Port Royal ready to fight, and he wanted to recruit freed black people like Pashed to fill out his regiment. But military leaders up north weren't into it. In fact, they specifically forbid arming black men.

Montgomery and his commanders did it anyway. And I can see him just going outside and going, All right, everybody, come on over, grab some guns, let's go kill some people. These guys need to It's hard to know exactly how Montgomery's new black recruits felt about all this. Paschette had just risked his life to gain his freedom.

But then he found out he only had one to enlist in the United States Army. I don't think he was like, Oh yeah, let me fight. Like I'm so excited. Maybe in that kind of Fervor of other men saying, you know, I'm taking up arms and I'm gonna fight for my freedom, you get this feeling of, wow, this is big. One summer morning.

Montgomery and the other officers lined up their new recruits. And then they ask what your size is, what shoe size you have. You don't have shoes. You've never worn shoes. And then they give you a uniform. They tell you you have to keep it clean. You put on the trousers. You've never really had trousers that went all the way down.

But now you do. You know, you've you've gotta polish buttons that are your own buttons, not some other person's buttons, you know. You gotta learn how to march. You know, you've got a hat. You've got a gun? Let's be clear about something. The history of slavery, 250 years of it, is a history of keeping guns out of the hands of black people. Even being found near a gun could get you hanged. Now, men like Pashed were gonna pick up guns and use them.

It was just an ordinary thing he did, but just tr stumbled into this great moment in history and happened to be standing next to Colonel James Montgomery.

Montgomery called this new unit the Second Regiment South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, African descent. And even though lots of slaves were escaping to Port Royal, Montgomery still needed more soldiers. So he and his commanders decided, why wait for men like Pashed to come to them? Why not go straight to the plantations? But he needed a plan. He needed good intel and a strategy. What he really needed was a spy. And the perfect person was already at Port Royal.

there's a youthful quality to her. I f I find her to be really handsome and some people don't necessarily think that's the best description of any woman but I mean I think she had incredible bone structure. She was shorter than I am. I'm five two. She was like five five feet. She's just, you know, a little tiny thing. But she did this massive job, right? That's Kimberly Cornish, a descendant of the spy.

And here's another descendant. I think that in that day and time you had to be a spy. There had to be a lot of spy in you to be black and to survive. She grew up on a slave plantation, so she knew what it was like to Maybe walk by a master and hear information, then tell another slave that information. She had a lot of experience being a spy and being under a lot of pressure by the time she met Montgomery.

My name is Jade Lee, and I am the great-great-great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman. Yeah, that Harriet Tubman, the conductor of the Underground Railroad. The government assigned her to Port Royal to work as a nurse and teacher. But she quickly took on a new role as well. Escaping slaves were debriefed by Harriet Tubman. So they would have had some intelligence and and that's where

Harriet Tubman kind of shines. That's Jeff Grigg. He runs a boat motor repair shop near Port Royal and spends many of his weekends researching this expedition. He wrote a book about it. It's the only book exclusively dedicated to Montgomery and Tubman's plan. What they came up with was audacious, bordering on reckless. They would take boats up a nearby river, deep into heavily fortified Confederate territory, and raided eight separate plantations.

all the black people enslaved along the shore, and somehow make it out alive. How would they pull it off? Harriet Tubman could help. The banks of these rivers were usually lined with cannons, but the Confederates had pulled them from several of these rivers. One of them was the cumbi.

Only a few riflemen remained. And while the river was filled with explosive mines, the men who laid them had escaped and told Tubman exactly where they were. She is not so much the the scout or the spy. She's the one who took the information, gathered it, put together, disseminated to the proper people, which made this raid possible. I think that's what the CIA would call a spy master, right? I liken it too is that she was not the James Bond, she was M. Who is more important?

A James Bond, although a good figure for the movie, was expendable. M was not expendable.

On June 1, 1863, some 300 mostly black soldiers, including Pashed, got on three gunboats led by Tubman and Montgomery and steamed off into the harbor. Eventually we'll get to the mouth of the Cumbee River and start going up the Cumbee River where the raid really started. After the break, the 2nd South Carolina Regiment goes deep into Confederate territory. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

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Jeff Grigg took us out on the water so we could see what Pashed would have seen as the boats approached the cumbi. The landscape kind of looks like a an African savannah. Except we're broken up by the the dark waters of the St. Helena Sound. This area is filled with dolphin, uh turtles. Um even in summertime we get manatees come up into this area.

The gunboats had set off under the cover of night. Three ships left uh Beefford at approximately nine PM on the uh first of of June. Once the soldiers entered the mouth of the river, they sat in silence all night. I could just see Pashed there. wondering, what's gonna happen when he gets up river to the plantations? He'd been enslaved there, and now he was going back. And if he got caught, he knew he'd be shot, or tortured, and sent back to slavery.

The trip upriver took all night. It was dawn when the boats pulled up to the first plantation. People were already working in the fields. The soldiers jumped off the boats and began marching up the levee. It didn't take long for the enslaved families to figure out what was happening and to start running to the landings. And then Montgomery gave his regiment another order. Burn it all down. When they went on these raids, they would

literally burn everything with the exception of the slave streets, because if there was any that did not come, they wanted them to still have housings. But the main houses, the barns, the rice mills, all that would have been burned. Anything to economically hurt the uh the plantation owners. So if I'm, you know, part of like one of the second volunteers under Montgomery, I'm still going to a place that was like hell for me. I mean what

What would I have been thinking at that moment? You know, I I would think that if if you had come from one of these plantations, you'd be glad to be going back to liberating your people. When they got to uh the Hayward and to the Lounge plantation. That's across a mile wide marsh

That was nothing but open rice fields. There's no trees. There is no cover. Absolutely open ground. They were ill trained. They had only been in existence for a few months. And not the first man turned around. Nobody shirked. And I think it's one of the greatest examples of bravery by any troops anytime in the war. Now, imagine you're one of the plantation owners.

You get up at 5 o'clock in the morning like you always do, walk over to the window, and what do you see? Hundreds of uniformed black soldiers heading straight towards you. We actually found a letter from one of these plantation owners. His name was Joshua Nichols, and he wrote to the local paper describing what happened. When he sees the soldiers, he panics and calls together all his faithful slaves. He actually used the word faithful. Yeah, let me read this part.

My house servants stood all around me, professing the utmost detachment and their perfect willingness to obey my commands. I ordered them to follow me and take to the woods. They all professed a willingness to do so, but not one made a sign of moving. So I was forced to fly to the woods for protection. So picture that scene. Nichols turns to his slaves and says, The union is coming. Let's go. And they're like, Yeah, you first.

It's like when those gumbows showed up, the power dynamic switched up so fast Nichols can't catch up. If he really thinks his slaves are gonna follow his ass, these folks are looking at those same black soldiers and what they see is freedom. And then Nichols sees something else. Here's what he says in the letter. I saw the enemy come up to my house.

And in a very short time, it was set on fire. Yeah. Now Nichols was really panicked. So here's how he puts it. The Negroes, men and women, were rushing to the boat with their children, now and then greeting someone whom they recognized. They were utterly

Transformed, drunk with excitement and capable of the wildest excesses. The roaring of the flames, the barbarous howls, the blowing of horns, the harsh steam whistle, and the towering columns of smoke made an impression on my mind which can never be effaced.

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Up and down the river. Hundreds of now free people climbed onto the soldiers' boat. My poshed would have been on that boat looking out, you know, at the women coming. I see him there. When they got to the banks of that plantation, I mean what what do you think they saw? Um the world being right again. I think they saw their families. I think they knew each other and maybe had someone rescue, you know, over there. You know, they maybe may have been liberating their kids. When I look at

Who I would be if I was in that time. I think, wow, you know, I think it's beautiful. I think it is something I never would have dreamed of. You know how like you need something so much and it just never happens and you just forget it and you you don't ever you know think about it because it's just a terrible thing to think about because it hurts. And then one day that one thing happens that you need and you

The boats headed back down the Cumbe River. At the last bend, enraged Confederates appeared with cannons, but Montgomery's troops fired first and slipped past with just enough time to chug out of range. On board were more than 700 newly freed people. Just to put that in context, if you look at Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad, most conservative estimates say that she helped free roughly 75 people over the course of 10 years.

But in the cumby raid, more than seven hundred in a single trip. After they got to Port Royal, nearly all the freed men of fighting age immediately enlisted. And by the end of the war, ten percent of the US Army was African American. The success of the Cumbe Raid was front page news in eighteen sixty three, north and south, heading up a river, daringly making a strike behind enemy lines,

A month later, Robert E. Lee tried the exact same tactic at Gettysburg, a daring dash behind enemy lines. And we all know how that worked out. Major movies have been made about Lee's greatest disaster, But there's never been a movie about the success of the Cumby Raid. In fact, I only heard of it because it was the name of a feminist collective in the 1960s who took their name from Harriet Tubman's leadership in the raid.

It's not in any standard history textbooks. The only official recognition is a tiny bridge down where the highway crosses the Cumby. It's named after Harriet Tubman, but it took two years of political wrangling to get a small sign placed at the river. So Chin, if you did make a big Gettysburg like movie out of this, I mean wh why haven't they made a movie out of this? Well, I sh probably'cause

It wouldn't have like that typical Civil War ending, you know, the kind where everybody just dies in glory at the end, you know, especially the black heroes. So how would it end then? Well, you know, you'd have to talk about Harriet Tubman. So she buys a piece of land up in Auburn and then basically spends all kinds of time and energy trying to fight for her pension.

Then you'd have to talk about crazy ass Montgomery. You know, he he basically moves back to Kansas and just continues being a terrorist for good or something, you know. Yeah, but then you'd have to talk about Bosch Ed. I mean, what's his legacy? Well, number one, he lives. You know, he has a family, he becomes like this local leader. So what would be the last scene in in your movie? For me, the last scene, we're in Buford, right? And you just see this law.

And the axe comes down on the log, like BAM. You know? And but this time Pashed isn't making a raft to escape slavery. He's splitting the log to build his church. Mm-hmm. You know? And so then you see him take the pine logs and then maybe you have one of those sequences where we see them build the church.

And then the camera pulls back. Right. There's the church. It's like a beautiful southern day, blue sky clouds in the harbor, Spanish moss on the trees, and you see the crowd beginning to file in for the church service. And then you realize from the clothes they're wearing, this is two thousand and seventeen. Wow. It's Pashed's church and this is his family. And then you hear the final voiceover. My ancestor, Pasha, was the the man who um basically built the community where we live in now.

In eighteen ninety two he donated the four acres that was out four acres to build the church. It was his son, hit him and his sons who like split the pine to build second Gethsemane Church today, Baptist Church. And it stands today and people still worship and go. My mom still goes.

Hey y'all, if you like this first episode, we have a live show tonight. and we love to see you out there. We're teaming up with some incredible friends of the show, Nicole Hannah-Jones from the New York Times, Al Letson from the podcast Reveal, and Christy Coleman, the director of the American Civil War Museum. The first museum to tell the story of the Civil War from the African-American perspective.

It's gonna be an evening of tearing apart the Civil War myths we see online all the time now. Where do people even get the idea that the Civil War wasn't about slavery or that Robert E. Lee was a saint? We'll dig into these claims and talk about what happens when you try to fight them. And afterwards?

Afterwards, we'll all stick around at the bar to celebrate the launch of the show. The event is tonight, Wednesday, October 4th, 7 p.m. at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. It's a free event, so bring everybody you know and spread the word on Twitter and Facebook. Information into RSVP, visit uncivil dot show slash live. Uncivil is produced by Chris Neary, Shakita Pascal, and Saeed T. John Thomas. We had more help from Stevie Lane and Alvin Malaith.

Our senior producer is Kimmy Regler, editing by Pat Walters, Jorge Just, Caitlin Kenny, and Alex Bloomberg. Our show is mixed by Bobby Lord. The music for Uncivil was composed by Bobby Lord and Matthew Boll. In collaboration with Anne Caldwell and the Magnolia Singers, as well as Mount Zion AME Church on Glebe Street in Charleston, South Carolina. We'd like to thank everyone in the Low Country for a fantastic week of recording. Additional music features JC Brooks.

Son Little, Rocco Walker, Haley Shaw, and Saeed T. John Thomas. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our secret weapon is Christopher Peak. Special thanks to Captain Meg of Botany Bay Eco Tours in South Carolina, the Penn Center staff. Eric Bailey, Joan and John. Uncivil is a production of Gimlet Media. Our website is uncivil.show. We're on Twitter and Facebook at Uncivil Show. I'm Jack Hitt.

On next week's episode of Uncivil, a 19th century promise and a 21st century betrayal. I feel like someone has put a dagger through my heart. My siblings and I have been robbed. We'll see you next week.