2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Laureate Announced

March 4, 2025 — On the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced that Edda L. Fields-Black, author of COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press), is the recipient of the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

COMBEE offers readers an untold story about the Civil War and Civil War soldiers. Most readers know Harriet Tubman as the abolitionist who worked tirelessly to liberate enslaved people. Yet Tubman’s work as a spy and scout for the Union Army during the Civil War has been little explored, including her role in the 1863 Combahee River Raid. The US 2nd South Carolina, a regiment of formerly enslaved men, destroyed the region’s rice plantations, while nearly 800 enslaved people boarded Union ships.

Dr. Fields-Black is a professor of history and director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. She 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. Fields-Black 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. She is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, and fought in the Combahee River Raid and of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC. 

Upon learning of the award, Fields-Black said, “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. I came to the history of the Combahee River Raid through my many years of work on rice-growing technology, rice fields, and rice laborers (free and enslaved) on both sides of the Atlantic and my passion for uncovering new sources and methods, which reveal the voices of Africans and people of African descent who did not author written sources. I aspired to tell the history of the Combahee River Raid from the perspectives of the people who participated in it, Harriet Tubman, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, and the Combahee freedom seekers who liberated themselves in the raid. This was no small feat since they were all formerly enslaved and the overwhelming majority were illiterate.

About her unique research, Fields-Black noted, “The US Civil War Pension files of the 150 Combahee men who enlisted in the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers on the morning after the Raid opened up a whole new world of heretofore nameless, faceless, and storyless people who told their stories to notary publics and Pension Bureau officers in the process of applying for their pensions. 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 will be recognized during an award ceremony to be held at the Harvard Club in New York City on April 8. The award includes a $50,000 prize and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s life-sized bust Lincoln the Man.

James G. Basker, president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, said, “Edda Fields-Black’s prize-winning book COMBEE tells an epic story about Harriet Tubman and the struggle for freedom in the Civil War. Her deeply researched and beautifully written book restores to view hundreds of Black lives that would otherwise have been lost forever, in a story that should be made into a blockbuster film. Everyone should know about these heroic people!”

Basker is one of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize board members who selected this year’s winner. In addition to Lewis E. Lehrman, a co-founder of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and co-creator of the Gilder Lehrman Collection with the late Richard Gilder, other board members include Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Trustees Thomas D. Lehrman, Stephen F. Mandel, Robert H. Niehaus, and Linda Pace, and Gettysburg College Trustee Larry D. Walker.

COMBEE was one of six books recommended to the 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. The other two jurors for the 2025 prize were 2016 laureate Martha Hodes, professor of history at New York University, and 2024 finalist John C. Rodrigue, Lawrence and Theresa Salameno Professor in the Department of History at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

In their report to the board, the jury said, “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 report continued, “This richly detailed history offers impressive new insight into both the Civil War and the world of Civil War soldiers.”

The five other finalists that the jury selected from seventy-one nominations are Robert K. D. Colby, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press); Lesley J. Gordon, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press); Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (Bloomsbury Publishing); Allen C. Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (Knopf); and Nigel Hamilton, Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents (Little, Brown and Company).

About the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize is awarded annually to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era. The $50,000 prize was established in 1990 by businessmen and philanthropists Lewis E. Lehrman and the late Richard Gilder, in partnership with Gettysburg College and Professor Gabor Boritt, director emeritus of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

About the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is the nation’s leading K–12 American history organization. The Institute’s mission is to promote the knowledge and understanding of American history through educational programs and interactive resources for teachers, students, and the general public. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is supported through the generosity of individuals, corporations, and foundations. The Institute’s programs have been recognized by awards from the White House, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Council of Independent Colleges, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Organization of American Historians, and the Web Excellence Awards.

PRESS CONTACTS
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Josh Landon, Director of Marketing and Communications 
landon@gilderlehrman.org 
(646) 366-9666, ext. 137

Daniela Muhling, Book Prize Manager
muhling@gilderlehrman.org
(646) 366-9666, ext. 144

###