The Raid

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 20 feet? Yeah. Probably about 20 feet. Lincoln is kind of looking down on us. His hand is extended. Got this black man on his knees in front of Lincoln. Maybe trying to stand up or rise. Still got a shackle around his arm. It looks like maybe the enslaved person might be shining Lincoln shoes or something. The statue is called the Friedman's Memorial. It's in Washington, D.C. put up in 1876. It's so much in the statue. I mean, the man, the freed man who may be rising. He's got a broken chain on his arm. But he's dressed like a, he's only got like a loincloth. Otherwise, he is, he's absolutely naked. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln is in a full 19th century dress coat. Pants, boots. Lincoln is still standing over to do it. And in a way, this doesn't really give any credit or represent the agency of black people and freeing themselves. Black people are trying to free themselves, rebel from slavery before the Civil War even starting. I hate the statue. I hate it too. I'm Jack Hitt. And I'm Chingerah Kumanika. This is Uncivil. Where we ransack America's history. And discovered that the past is never really past. This fall, we're going to 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 a survive. Betrayal. I feel like someone has put a dagger through my heart. Con artists. He produced $15 million worth of fake money and black people fighting back. They help free themselves, you know. The girl is bad. You think the Civil War is still relevant now? American society was built out of the Civil War. The story of slavery, the story of the Civil War, the story of the statue, the story of America. We're going to kick things off with the 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 Posh Ed. He was a short man. He was a dark-skinned man. I guess he had a little bit of a beard? This is Fallen Green, Posh Ed's great-great-granddaughter. She's a paralegal in Buford, South Carolina. Just a couple of miles from where our story takes place. Growing up, she'd heard a little about Posh Ed. 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 Posh Ed. So I was told that I should go to my Uncle Baby and try to find out a little bit more of the details. You said that Uncle Baby knew Posh Ed. Is he the first person to tell you about your great-great-grandfather? He's the first person to tell me the truth. And the light was a little, you know, not lit very well. And so 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 kind of like started to think back. He said, "Let me get it right." And he starts to tell me about the story. And it was just lightning. The story Uncle Baby Toll Fallon was at right at the beginning of the Civil War. Posh Ed was sold to a plantation in South Carolina called Hazel Farm. And when he gets the 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, Posh Ed 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 Posh Ed was enslaved. So on the fly, he came up with a plan to get over to the fort. And what they do is a fashion, a pine log. Basically, they cut down a tree to make a raft. And then they put it by the banks of the New Fort River. They cover it with brush. They come back at the dark 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 that pine log. And they floated, as it was said to me, floated to mainland Buford. That morning, Posh Ed and his brother made it to freedom. As it turned out, just a few weeks before they got there, new military leaders had arrived to 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 J-Hawkers. 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 Spirits. 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 pro-abitionist. 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 Posh Ed 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, grabs and guns. Let's go kill some people. These guys need to die. It's hard to know exactly how Montgomery's new black recruits felt about all this. Posh Ed 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 a bomb. And I'm going to 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 asked what your size is, what shoes size you have. You don't have shoes. You've never worn shoes. And 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 got to polish buttons that are your own buttons. Not some other person's buttons. You know, you got to learn how to march. You know, you've got to hack. You've got to 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 Pa shed were going to pick up guns and use them. It was just an ordinary thing he did, but just stumbled into this great moment in history and happened to be standing as 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 Pa shed 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 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. 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 Jane Lee. And I'm the great, great, great, grand niece of Harriet Tubman. Yeah, that Harriet Tubman, the conductor of the Underground Railroad. The government assigned her to Port Royal to work as a nursing 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 that's where Harriet Tubman kind of shives. That's Jeff Grig. 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 in nearby river, deep into heavily fortified Confederate territory, and raid eight separate plantations. They would recruit 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 scowler, 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'd like into, it's that she was not the James Bond, she was him. Who is more important? And James Bond, although a good figure for the movie, was expendable. M was not expendable. On June 1st, 1863, some 300 mostly black soldiers, including Pashaed, got on three gunboats led by Tubman and Montgomery, and steamed off into the harbor. Eventually, we'll get to the mouth of the Cumbi River and start going up to Cumbi River, where the raid really started. After the break, the second South Carolina regimen goes deep into Confederate territory. Jeff Grig took us out on the water, so we could see what Pashaed would have seen as the boats approached the Cumbi. The landscape kind of looks like an African savanna, except we're broken up by the dark waters of the St. Helena Sound. This area is filled with dolphin turtles. Even in summertime, we get madities come up into this area. The gunboats had set off under the cover of night. Three ships left Buford approximately 9 p.m. on the 1st of June. Once the soldiers entered the mouth of the river, they sat in silence all night. I could just see Pashaed there in that boat, wondering what's going to 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 up river 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 exception of the slave streets. Because if there was any that did not come, they wanted them to still have housings. But the main house is the barns, the rice mills, all that would have been burned. Anything to economically hurt the plantation owners. So if I'm part of one of the second volunteers under Montgomery, I'm still going to a place that was like hell for me. What would I have been thinking at that moment? You know, I would think that 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 the Hayward and to the Lounge plantations, that's across a mile wide marsh that was nothing but open rice fields. There's no trees. There's 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 troop, anytime and tomorrow. Now, imagine you're one of the plantation owners. You get up at five o'clock in the morning like you always do. Walk over to the window. And what do you see? Hundreds of uniform 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." 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 the 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 gunbows showed up, the power dynamic switched up so fast, Nichols can't catch up. He really thinks his slaves are going to 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 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 house, 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. Up and down the river, plantations burned. Hundreds of now free people climbed onto the soldier's boats. My posh head would have been on that boat looking out at the women coming. I see him there. When they got to the banks of that plantation, what do you think they saw? The world being right again. I think they saw their families. I think they knew each other and maybe had someone rescue over there. They may have been liberating their kids. When I look at who I would be if I was in that time, I think, "Wow, I think it's beautiful. I think it is something I never would have dreamed of." You know how you need something so much? And it just never happens and you just forget it and you don't ever 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 it and you're just overwhelmed. The boats headed back down to Cumbi River. At the last bin and rage 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 Cumbi raid, more than 700 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, 10% of the U.S. Army was African American. The success of the Cumbi raid was front page news in 1863, 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 Cumbi 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 an any standard history textbooks. The only official recognition is a tiny bridge down where the highway crosses the Cumbi. It's named after Harriet Tubman, but it took two years of political wrangling to get a small sign placed at the river. So, Chins, if you did make a big Gettysburg-like movie out of this, I mean, why haven't they made a movie out of this? Well, probably because it wouldn't have that typical Civil War ending, you know, the kind where everybody just dies and glory at the end, especially the black heroes. So, how would it end then? Well, you 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. So, he basically moves back to Kansas and just continues being a terrorist for good or something, you know. Yeah, and then you'd have to talk about Boschette. 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 your movie? For me, the last scene, we're in Buford, right? And you just see this log and the axe comes down on the log. And but this time, Boschette isn't making a raft to escape slavery. He's splitting the log to build his church, 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 were wearing, this is 2017. Wow. It's Boschette's church and this is his family. And then you hear the final voice over. My ancestor, Boschette, was the man who basically built the community where we live in now. Like in 1892, he donated the four acres that we have now for acres to build the church. It was his son, him and his sons who like split the pine logs to build so I can get some big church today. You back the church and it stands today and people still worship and go. My mom still goes. Hey y'all, if you liked 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 going to be an evening of tearing apart the Civil War myths we see online all the time now. Where did 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, we'll all stick around at the bar to celebrate the launch of the show. The event is tonight Wednesday, October 4th, 7pm at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. It's a free event, so bring everybody you know and spread the word on Twitter and Facebook. Formation into RSVP, visit uncivil.show/live Uncivil is produced by Chris Neary, Chiquita Paschal, and Said T. John Thomas. We had more help from Stevie Lane and Alvin Malayf. Our senior producer is Kimi Regler, editing by Pat Walters, Jorge Just, Caitlin Kenny, and Alex Bloomberg. Our show is mixed by Bobby Lorde. The music for Uncivil was composed by Bobby Lorde and Matthew Bowle in collaboration with Anne Caldwell and the Magnolia Singers, as well as Mountain Zion AMB Church on Gleab Street in Charleston, South Carolina. We'd like to thank everyone in the low country for a fantastic week of recording. Additional music features J.C. Brooks, Sun Little, Rockle Walker, Haley Shaw, and Said T. John Thomas. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our secret weapon is Christopher Peek. 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 Gimlett Media. Our website is Uncivil.show. We're on Twitter and Facebook at Uncivil.show. I'm Jack Hit. I'm Changer Rikumanika. On next week's episode of Uncivil, a 19th century promise and a 21st century betrayal. My siblings and I have been robbed. We'll see you next week.