While Confederate pickets were stationed in the southeast part of the lower Combahee River at Field’s Point and in the northwest portion at Combahee Ferry, the Third Military District’s main forces were stationed in the northeast point of the triangle at Green Pond, with a smaller contingent at Chisolmville. Yet the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers’ gunboats were unopposed as they penetrated a roughly twenty-mile stretch of the Combahee, virtually under the Confederates’ noses. The Confederate pickets were seemingly paralyzed by their commanders’ indecision.
Meanwhile, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers continued their work. Amid billowing columns of smoke, hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people ran for their lives. Tubman remembered, years after the Civil War ended, that when “Lincoln’s gunboats come to set them free,” displaying their flags and blowing what the New South and Frederick Douglass’s Douglass’ Monthly described as the “uninterrupted pipe of the steam whistle,” that somewhere around eight hundred freedom seekers ran for their lives and boarded the vessels. It was as if there was a “mysterious telegraphic communication existing among these simple people,” Tubman told Sarah Bradford, bringing people not just from Joshua Nicholls’s plantation, where the Harriet A. Weed landed, but from James L. Paul’s plantation in the southeast direction and plantations as far away as Combahee Ferry, several miles to the northwest.
Minus and Hagar Hamilton were among those who fled down to the Harriet A. Weed. Most freedom seekers toted their worldly possessions in large bundles on their heads. Captain Apthorp wrote in his journal that many of their bundles were so large they “completely overshadowed” the freedom seekers themselves.
Ole woman and I go down to de boat; dem dey say behind us, “Rebels comin’! Rebels comin’!” I hab notin’ on but my shirt and pantaloons; ole woman one single frock he hab on, and one handkerchief on he head; I leff all- two my blanket and run for de Rebel come, den dey did n’t come, did n’t truss for come.
The elderly couple left the rice fields with the clothes they had on their backs. Minus wore only his shirt and pantaloons; Hagar, the “old … woman” (whom Minus Hamilton referred to with the masculine pronoun “he,” which is a morphological feature of the Gullah dialect), wore a one-piece shift and a head-tie covering her hair. Hamilton may have regretted leaving his only possessions — two blankets — behind in the slave quarters when he ran before the Rebels came. But he did not regret escaping the land of bondage.