Jailbreak out of History



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a re-biography of Harriet Tubman


by Butch Lee

Table of Contents

The following text is chapter four of a work in progress
by Butch Lee, who can be contacted at:
mailto:bfishblues@hotmail.com

The first three chapters have been published under the title "The Military Strategy of Women and Children" - for more information click here

This text is available as an illustrated book
form for $5.75 from Kersplebedeb - check out
my Literature Rack for more details.

  1. Childhood and the Gathering Storm
  2. To Understand Harriet, We Must First Understand the War
  3. Black Women's Unique Situation
  4. And Children, Too...
  5. Harriet Steps Forward
  6. Increasing Violence and Will
  7. Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity
  8. The Largest Radical Conpsiracy in u.s. History
  9. "Moses" and "the General"
  10. A Revolutionary Politic
  11. To develop Armed Struggle
  12. This wasn't just about Race
  13. A New Afrikan Political-Military Leader
  14. A Nodal Point: Blowing Away the Whiteness
  15. A Multi-faceted Reality
  16. Warrior as Healer
  17. No civilians there
  18. A Four-Sided War
  19. The Inevitable Resolution
  20. The Exact Spot of Enemy's Imbalance
  21. Harriet is still too subversive




Jailbreak out of History is the fourth chapter in an ongoing work by Butch Lee exploring the key question of how can women make revolutionary change. The first three chapters were published in book form as The Military Strategy of Women and Children by Kersplebedeb in 2003 - for more information about this book click here .
The Military Strategy of Women and Children, by Butch Lee



Childhood & the Gathering Storm

Focus on Amazons. About why we deal with real women as myths. Girls who never really existed. Yet and again, are all around us & that we can’t bring ourselves to see. Cause seeing through white men’s eyes is about non-vision of ourselves. So let’s deal with a real Amazon.

Think about Harriet Tubman. Take six months. In fact, take a year & think. Break it on down. What does it mean to be the most famous New Afrikan woman in u.s. history? What does it mean to be stuck in that lie? What’s the meaning of being famous while being hidden and dis-figured and dissed? Let’s jailbreak Harriet Tubman out of white his-story and place her in Amazon and New Afrikan herstory. Her story, her peoples’ story.

Harriet Tubman’s life is a live weapon placed in our minds, showing us what it means to be an Amazon. Which is why the capitalist patriarchy has forbidden us to touch it for so long. In this, maybe for the first time, we can see Amazons as a future force in the clash of peoples & nations. Not as myths, but as players in the whole difficult course of world politics. We can also appreciate the bittersweet tang of reality, as the peeling away of layers of propaganda and disfigurement which have hidden Harriet from us exposes how much we assume and how little we’ve known.

Black women have already pointed out the significant pattern of Harriet’s exclusion. Cultural critic bell hooks said recently: “I mean if we could recover Ida B. Wells and Harriet Tubman to the extent that we have recovered, say, Zora Neale Hurston, I think that’s an important contrast because people want to bury that revolutionary black female history...”

Historian Deborah Gray White connects Harriet’s treatment to a larger pattern in mainstream history of slavery, in which Black women “were reduced to insignificance and largely ignored.” In examining the influential historian Stanley Elkins, she points out:

That Elkins seemed to omit women altogether was accentuated by his description of slaves whom he identified as part of an American ‘underground’, those who never succumbed to Samboism. Among those mentioned were Gabriel, who led the revolt of 1820, Denmark Vessey, leading spirit of the 1822 plot at Charleston, and Nat Turner — an omission, conspicuous by its absence, was Harriet Tubman... If Elkins had really been thinking of slaves of both sexes he would hardly have forgotten this woman, who became widely known as the Moses of her people.

Patriarchal capitalisms, which only want Amazons to be exotic myths from forgotten ages, have hidden Harriet Tubman in her own fame. They both trivialize and exceptionalize her. These are tools of oppressor culture. The stripped-down and censored version of her life is told in elementary schools all over the US empire. So much so that everyone thinks they know her story already, although they don’t. Harriet Tubman was born in slavery in Maryland around 1820. She escaped to the north when she was 29, but kept returning secretly to the South again & again to help other slaves escape. For this she became known as “Moses.” True statements. But by limiting her it becomes clever propaganda against her. And against her people.

Where patriarchy has been unable to deny that women do significant things, it denies the full meaning of what we do by trivializing them. Mary Daly, feminist philosopher, traces the enormity of what patriarchy has done to us. In ancient Greece the goddess Hecate (also known later as Artemis and Diana) was sometimes known as Trivia (and represented by a three-faced statue). That was also the name used for the intersection of three paths, which in many old cultures were the sites of mystical power. She writes in Gynecology:

In light of the cosmic significance of the term trivia as the crossing of the three roads and of the goddess who bears this name, contemporary meaning of the term in English should be examined. The English term, which, according to Merriam-Webster, is derived from the Latin trivium (crossroads), is defined as ‘common, ordinary, commonplace... of little worth or importance: insignificant, flimsy, minor, slight.’ Of course, according to patriarchal values, that which is ‘commonplace’ is of little worth, for in a competitive hierarchical society scarcity is intrinsic to ‘worth.’ Thus gold is more important than fresh air, and consequently we are forced to live in a world in which gold is easier to find than pure air.

So to trivialize Harriet Tubman the capitalist patriarchy pictures her as an idealized woman by their definition, who makes a life of helping others. Thus her deeds are squeezed into women’s assigned maternal role as nurturer, helper and rescuer of men (who then go on to do the important things). But Harriet wasn’t repping Mother Teresa. She wasn’t even any kind of civilian at all. She was a combatant, a guerrilla, a warrior carrying pistol and rifle, fighting in her people’s long war for freedom. A war that rocked the foundations of Amerikkkan society and that has never gone away.

Think about what it means to be called “Moses” (which was the code name other slaves gave her, and which became Harriet’s famous warrior name in the Anti-Slavery underground). When we check out the bible, we can see that Moses was a ruthless visionary, someone who forced the boldest changes and risks upon his people so that they could survive. Who led them out of slavery. To put it simply, Moses was a leader in a time of war. So, too, was Harriet Tubman.

What trivializing her as a “rescuer” also does is that it takes her out of her own politics. Harriet Tubman was a radical political figure, someone totally involved as a player in the great political ideas and military storms of her day. She was a guerrilla. Someone who lived and taught others to live by the communal and working class New Afrikan culture that her people had planted in this difficult ground, and a Black Feminist to the end.

In her own lifetime, white people were referring to her as “superhuman,” as “a woman who did what no man could do” (as if this were some exceptional standard). Thus, even then her white supporters needed to exceptionalize her, as something unique and singular. This made her less dangerous to them. Easier to handle. Less awesome. After all, picture a nation of Harriet Tubmans.

First of all, there was nothing mythical or superhuman about her. Harriet Tubman was one Afrikan slave woman among many. And her most striking qualities were qualities she had in common with many other Afrikan women and children, who like her came out of a culture of communal resistance and strength. So to insist on her supposed unique individuality as a compliment, is actually denying her real identity.

To understand Harriet,

We must first understand the war

If they think of it at all, people look back on the Underground Railroad in civilian terms, as a “movement” like Civil Rights. In fact, such comparisons are often made. But the Underground Railroad cannot be understood in civilian terms, because New Afrikans then were not civilians.

Here again, it’s easy to let ourselves be fooled by the dis-information of patriarchal capitalist history. It’s easy to not really understand the distinction between civilian and military.

The meaning of these distinctions is important to us, and yet we never think about it. Harriet wasn’t an Amazon because she was oppressed, or even because she dissented or rebelled. You’re only military if that’s what you are. Just because you’re oppressed doesn’t mean you’re at war. Just because you rebel or protest that doesn’t make you a soldier. New Afrikans today still are oppressed, but they certainly aren’t at war. That may have been true in the 1960s, the mass ghetto uprisings and the role of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, but it’s not true of the Black Nation today.

When Harriet and the other jail break leaders were referred to back then as “conductors,” when the chiefs of local Underground Railroad committees were always spoken of as “station masters” and “brakemen,” that was cover. Civilian-sounding words for illegal military activity. Harriet and the rest of the Underground Railroad had military goals, had military strategy and tactics. It wasn’t any accident that Harriet and many of the other guides (those front-line guerrillas who moved through Slaveowner territory) were armed. They were soldiers on a military mission, even though they may have been wearing work clothes and not have a patriarchal military hierarchy anywhere on them.

Remember, most white men back then in the South or on the frontier weren’t civilians exactly, either, even though they, too, may not have worn what we recognize as uniforms. Most white men there were armed, as a normal matter. Had to be, when you come to think of it. (Most nations of the capitalist metropolis have histories of strict personal gun control, like England and Japan. There the ruling class was afraid of class warfare. While in settler-colonialist societies — such as South Afrika, the u.s.a., and Israel — white men have always had armed and militarized mass cultures.)

In its origins as a white men’s invasion culture, Team USA itself may have looked civilian to us, but it was really military. The masses of armed settler men were their own military. Banding together in militias or Slave Patrols or Committees of Correspondence to commit genocide against Indians and prisonguard their Afrikan and women property.

The ways of life, the culture created by the young Black Nation in this furnace, were centered on dangerous and illegal resistance of all kinds. Even their music and their personal lives were part of this resistance. Because without such guerrilla activity they would have had no space or human life at all. Those were the stakes. And the New Afrikan political struggle against this armed oppressor had definite characteristics; it was not only conspiratorial and communal, embracing all forms of resistance from illegal education and sly sabotage to violence, but its only goal — understood by all — was the total destruction of the enemy slave-owning society. That is, it was inescapably military in its full dimensions, just as its situation was military.

Being disarmed is not the same thing as being civilian. A distinction that patriarchal capitalism loves to mess over in our minds.

Black Women’s Unique Situation

For Black women slaves, as Deborah Gray White explains in Ar’nt I a Woman? Female Slaves In The Plantation South, their bondage had another dimension from men because of the threat of rape and the responsibilities for the children. Even escaping, which every slave naturally dreamt of, was something more difficult for most women, who almost always had children to care for.

William Still, Philadelphia “station master” of the Underground Railroad, said that because of the difficulties of fleeing with children “females undertook three times the risk of failure that males are liable to.” Deborah Gray White says her own studies of slave runaways in different areas & times consistently show that women were a minority. “In North Carolina from 1850 to 1860, only 19 percent of the runaway ads described women. In 1850, 31.7 percent of the runaways advertised for in New Orleans newspapers were women.”

Many of those women who did escape had to leave children behind. New Afrikan women also resisted violently, as White points out:

Some bondswomen were more direct in their resistance. Some murdered their masters, some were arsonists, and still others refused to be whipped. Overseers and masters learned which black women and men they could whip, and which would not be whipped. Sometimes they found out the hard way. Equipped with a whip and two healthy dogs, an Alabama overseer tied a woman named Crecie to a stump with intentions of beating her.

To his pain and embarrassment she jerked the stump out of the ground, grabbed the whip, and sent the overseer running. Women fought back despite severe consequences. An Arkansas overseer decided to make an example of a slave woman named Lucy ‘to show the slaves that he was impartial.’ Lucy, however, was not to be made an example of. According to her son, ‘she jumped on him and like to tore him up.’ Word got around that Lucy would not be beaten. She was sold, but she was never again whipped.

Their greatest resistance was not in these individual acts of anger and bravery, but in what lay beneath it. New Afrikan slave women created communal networks to sustain and guide each other.

“Slave women have often been characterized as self-reliant and self-sufficient,” Deborah Gray White reminds us. “Yet, not every Black woman was a Sojourner Truth or a Harriet Tubman. Strength had to be cultivated. It came no more naturally to them than to anyone, slave or free, male or female, black or white. If they functioned in groups...”

Women more than men were the long-time core of a plantation’s multi-generational population. The networks or women’s sub-culture they created with their own leaders and values was a communal survival instrument in the face of dehumanization.White adds:

Few women who knew the pain of childbirth or who understood the agony and depression that flowed from sexual harassment and exploitation survived without friends, without female company. Few lacked female companions to share escapades and courtship or older women to consult about the vicissitudes of life and marriage. Female slaves were sustained by their group activities. Treated by Southern whites as if they were anything but self-respecting women, many bonded females could forge their own independent definition to which they could relate on the basis of their own notions about what women should be and how they should act.

and Children, too

This was the culture that Harriet Tubman was born into. At age five her childhood as we think of it ended, and she was rented to a white woman to do full-time domestic labor. The white woman believed in torturing Afrikans every day, and the small Harriet was lashed with a leather whip four times across her face and neck as an introduction before breakfast that first day. Harriet’s first escape attempt (i.e., attempted prison break) came when she was seven years old. Caught by the latest white woman she had been rented out to, while trying to steal a piece of sugar (forbidden to Afrikan children), Harriet outran the white woman and her rawhide whip:

By and by when I was almost tuckered out, I came to a great big pig-pen. There was an old sow there, and perhaps eight or ten little pigs. I was too little to climb into it, but I tumbled over the high part and fell in on the ground; I was so beaten out that I could not stir.

And I stayed from Friday until the next Tuesday, fighting with those little pigs for the potato peelings and the other scraps that came down in the trough. The old sow would push me away when I tried to get her children’s food, and I was awfully afraid of her. By Tuesday I was so starved I knew I had to go back to my mistress. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, even though I knew what was coming.

Because attempting to escape was the second-most serious crime, Harriet was whipped senseless by the white man of the house. So, Harriet Tubman had become a full-time productive worker, had become familiar with daily violence and utmost danger, had committed crimes and stolen from white settlers, and had tried to escape (prison break) — all by age seven. And this was not exceptional in any way, but common, a story shared by millions of New Afrikans.

Harriet’s childhood can’t be understood easily by us. Certainly not without uprooting the capitalist myth of children, which is implanted like a barb in our minds. A smarmy romanticized ideology that children are “precious,” “cute,” naturally “helpless” — who for their own good must be safely isolated and governed within the nuclear family (just like women). Powerlessness and being property is masked by a cloying sentimentality (just as the southern slavemasters always talked on how much they “loved” their supposedly loyal slaves). Instinctively, children know this.

If Harriet had died at age seven, when she made her first prison break and before she had become a leader, we probably would never have heard about her—but she would have been none the lesser. As a person who was self-supporting, who had integrity, courage, and who fought back against oppressors, Harriet at age seven no less than at age seventy, was all that people should be. You can’t be more than that. If her example makes you or me remember how often we’ve backed down, how much we’ve lost, that’s on us.

Harriet steps forward

By age fifteen or sixteen, when she had long since become a field hand, an act of open resistance in support of another New Afrikan almost led to her death. One Fall at harvest time she and other slaves were working in the fields. One of farmer Barnett’s slaves spaced and slid off to the village store. The slave overseer saw this and ran after him. As did Harriet.

When the slave was found, the overseer swore that he should be whipped, and called on Harriet, among others, to tie him. She refused, and as the man ran away, she placed herself in the door to stop pursuit. The overseer caught up a two pound weight from the counter, and threw it at the fugitive, but it fell short and struck Harriet a stunning blow on the head.

In fact, Harriet’s skull had been fractured, and she would bear a concave depression where her skull-bone had been crushed in for the rest of her life. Unconscious, she was brought home to her parents’ shack. In a deep coma at first, Harriet was thought near death and was bedridden for much of that Fall and early Winter. Only gradually did she regain some strength, helping her mother with work for awhile before returning to the pile of dirty rags on the ground that was her bed. Her injury had also brought on narcolepsy, and Harriet would fall into a deep sleep at unpredictable times, even when standing up or walking.

Her act of open resistance had placed her, of course, in added danger. Her owner tried to sell away this rebellious slave who was also damaged goods. But when he brought prospective buyers to the shack, Harriet would be lying on the ground seemingly barely able to stand. And her silence toward the slavemaster, together with her visible head injury and narcolepsy, convinced the white settlers that she was now mentally defective, too. (Actually, she was thinking sharper than she ever had). Unable to sell her at any price, Harriet’s owner gave up and she was mostly left alone to recover.

Using deception “to fool ole Massa” was another military tool in the captive arsenal. However skillful Harriet became at it under life-or-death pressure, it was simply part of the daily survival tactics used by all New Afrikan slaves (remember that the most macho capitalistic celebrities of today have never ever in their lives functioned under the kind of pressure that Harriet dealt with calmly every day).

Harriet’s act in stopping the white overseer from catching a rebellious slave was her true coming out, her joining the liberation struggle that had been rising all around her. That night other New Afrikan slaves had also been there, had also been ordered by the overseer to restrain their brother. Like Harriet, they too refused. Again, she was not unique, but one of a people on the move. Harriet Tubman’s coming of age cannot really be understood in isolation.

Increasing Violence and Will

We have to step back a moment and take in the whole sweep of the crisis, as the Black Nation, with increasing violence and will, slowly stood up against the limit of its chains. This was the national crisis that at first deformed — and then destroyed into the rubble of war — the old planter capitalism of the George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons. We pick up the larger story from the book Settlers* :

“The Northern States had slowly begun abolishing slavery as early as Vermont in 1777, in the hopes that the numbers of Afrikans could be kept down. It was also widely believed by settlers that in small numbers the ‘childlike’ ex-slaves could be kept docile and easily ruled. The explosive growth of the number of Afrikans held prisoner within the slave system, and the resultant eruptions of Afrikan struggles in all spheres of life, blew this settler illusion away.

“The Haitian Revolution of 1791 marked a decisive point in the politics of both settler and slave. The news from Santo Domingo that Afrikan prisoners had risen and successfully set up a new nation electrified the entire Western Hemisphere. When it became undeniably true that Afrikan peoples’ armies, under the leadership of a 50 year-old former field hand, had in protracted war outmaneuvered and outfought the professional armies of the Old European Powers, the relevancy of the lesson to Amerika was intense. Intense.

“The effect of Haiti’s great victory was felt immediately. Haitian slaves forcibly evacuated from that island with their French masters helped spread the word that Revolution and Independence were possible. The new Haitian Republic proudly offered citizenship to any Indians and Afrikans who wanted it, and thousands of free Afrikans emigrated. This great breakthrough stimulated rebellion and the vision of national liberation among the oppressed, while hardening the resolve of settler society to defend their hegemony with the most violent and naked terror.

“The Virginia insurrection led by Gabriel some nine years later, in which thousands of Afrikans were involved, as well as that of Nat Turner in 1831, caused discussions within the Virginia legislature on ending slavery. The 1831 uprising, in which sixty settlers died, so terrified them that public rallies were held in Western Virginia to demand an all-white Virginia. Virginia’s Governor Floyd publicly endorsed the total removal of all Afrikans out of the state. If such proposals could be entertained in the heartland of the slave system, we can imagine how popular that must have been among settlers in the Northern States.

“The problem facing the settlers was not limited to potential uprisings on the plantations. Everywhere Afrikan prisoners were pressing beyond the colonial boundaries set for them. The situation became more acute as the developing capitalist economy created
t r e n d s o fur b a n i z a t i o n a n d industrialization. In the early 1800s the Afrikan population of many cities was rising faster than that of Euro-Amerikans. In 1820 Afrikans comprised at least 25% of the total population of Washington, Louisville, Baltimore, and St. Louis; at least 50% of the total population in New Orleans, Richmond Mobile, and Savannah. The percentage of whites owning slaves was higher in the cities than it was in the countryside. In cities such as Louisville, Charleston, and Richmond, some 65-75% of all Euro-Amerikan families owned Afrikan slaves. And the commerce and industry of these cities brought together and educated masses of Afrikan colonial proletarians-in the textile mills, mines, ironworks, docks, railroads, tobacco factories, and so on.

“In such concentrations, Afrikans bent and often broke the bars surrounding them. Increasingly, more and more slaves were no longer under tight control. Illegal grog shops (white-owned, of course) and informal clubs flourished on the back streets. Restrictions on even the daily movements of many slaves faltered in the urban crowds.

“Contemporary white travelers often wrote of how alarmed they were when visiting Southern cities at the large numbers of Afrikans on the streets. One historian writes of New Orleans: ‘It was not unusual for slaves to gather on street corners at night....’ Louisville newspaper editorial complained in 1835 that ‘Negroes scarcely realize the fact that they are slaves ... insolent, intractable...’

“It was natural in these urban concentrations that slave escapes (prison breaks) became increasingly common. The Afrikan communities in the cities were also human forests, partially opaque to the eye of the settler, in which escapees from the plantations quietly sought refuge. During one 16 month period in the 1850’s the New Orleans settler police arrested 982 “runaway slaves” — a number equal to approximately 7% of the city’s slave population. In 1837 the Baltimore settler police arrested almost 300 Afrikans as proven or suspected escapees—a number equal to over 9% of that city’s slave population.

“And, of course, these are just those who were caught. Many others evaded the settler law enforcement apparatus. Frederick Douglass, we remember, had been a carpenter and shipyard worker in Baltimore before escaping Northward to pursue his agitation. At least 100,000 slaves did escape to the North and Canada during these years.

Nor should it be forgotten that some of the largest armed insurrections and conspiracies of the period involved the urban proletariat. The Gabriel uprising of 1800 was based on the Richmond proletariat (Gabriel himself was a blacksmith, and most of his lieutenants were other skilled workers). So many Afrikans were involved in that planned uprising that one Southern newspaper declared that prosecutions had to be halted lest it bankrupt the Richmond capitalists by causing ‘the annihilation of the Blacks in this part of the country.’

“The Charleston Conspiracy of 1822, led by Denmark Vesey (a free carpenter), was an organization of urban proletarians — stevedores, millers, lumberyard workers, blacksmiths, etc. Similarly, the great conspiracy of 1856 was organized among coal mine, mill and factory workers across Kentucky and Tennessee. In its failure, some 65 Afrikans were killed at Senator Bell’s iron works alone. It was particularly alarming to the settlers that those Afrikans who had been given the advantages of urban living, and who had skilled positions, just used their relative mobility to strike at the colonial system all the more effectively.”

Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity”

Young Harriet was part of this rising, and aware, despite the prison culture she grew up in, of the larger events. As the explosive ripple of Nat Turner’s Uprising spread, for example, she and other slaves would illegally gather at night at the shacks of the few literate “free” New Afrikans. The latter were allowed to buy newspapers, and would read aloud to their sisters and brothers about the trials and the political storm that the Uprising had caused.

In 1849, Harriet heard that she and her brothers were about to be sold South. Harriet saw the life-threatening reality and freed herself to deal with it. She had already lost two sisters and their children, who had been sold South and who would never be found again. If she were to be taken on the chain gangs deeper into the South, into malarial rice plantations or harsh plantation lands being cleared in territory strange to her, her chances of escaping were much less.

Harriet was out of there. Time to jet! She joined the Underground Railroad and escaped. Harriet left behind her husband, who was a “free Negro” and who refused to go. It says it all, doesn’t it, that he — who was not in danger of being sold away — objected to Harriet’s escaping? John Tubman wasn’t willing to risk his privileged status just because his wife was in mortal danger. Hey, he wouldn’t go North, and you know he wasn’t going further South. You can always get another wife. And he did. Ironically, he should have been more principled, because right after the Civil War he was shot in the back and killed by a white man he had argued with.

Her two brothers tried to escape after hearing the rumors, taking Harriet with them. But that night, without supplies and not knowing where to hide, they decided that the danger of being captured was too great. Forcing Harriet to come along, they gave up and returned “home.”

Gathering food and deliberately not telling any of the men — her husband, father, or brothers — Harriet set out again to escape. Moving alone. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” She later said that her own thinking had broken through politically in an Amazon way in those few days. She had said to herself:

There’s two things I’ve got a right to and these are Death or Liberty. One or the other I mean to have. No one will take me back alive; I shall fight for my liberty, and when the time has come for us to go, the Lord will let them kill me.

In escaping, Harriet was re-defining herself. Not only in relation to Southern slavery and her owner, but in relationship to men & the patriarchal family. She was constructing herself, creating her new identity as an Amazon. Never again, from that moment on, would Harriet Tubman place herself under the command of men. In politics, war, or daily life. She loved her family — and would return as a guerrilla to rescue as many as she could — but she was also freeing herself from them.

The Largest Radical

Conspiracy in U.S. History

The Underground Railroad when Harriet found it had already been in existence over fifty years. Not only as the largest radical conspiracy in u.s. history, involving many thousands, but as a major front of the New Afrikan liberation war. Every war has its own character, its unique unfolding. Spontaneously, the mass revolutionary strategy of the New Afrikan slaves had first been to escape, by any means necessary. Stranded on a strange continent, these trickles and streams of escapees flowed together to create “free” communities of New Afrikans in the North, and in the Indian nations, to be seedbeds from which rebuilding offensives would grow. While at the same time robbing the Slave Power of expensive property and its already thin sense of security, weakening the pre-Confederate economy.

We are speaking here of a Peoples’ strategy, worked out in practice by masses of slaves and ex-slaves themselves, of mass movements breaking out of prison camps and across borders. During the settler slaveowners’ 1776-1783 War of Independence from the British Empire, there was a great tidal wave of New Afrikans escaping and allying themselves with the British. (It is an irony that today white Left organizations name themselves after the settler patriots’ organization, the “Committees of Correspondence” — for the original Committees of Correspondence organized night patrols of white men in the North to intercept and kill escaping Afrikans.) Again, the book Settlers gives us a true account of this suppressed story:

“The British, short of troops and laborers, decided to use both the Indian nations and the Afrikan slaves to help bring down the settler rebels. This was nothing unique; the French had extensively used Indian military alliances and the British extensively used Afrikan slave recruits in their 1756-63 war over North America (called ‘The French & Indian War’ in settler history books). But the Euro-Amerikan settlers, sitting on the dynamite of a restive, nationally oppressed Afrikan population, were terrified — and outraged.

“This was the final proof to many settlers of King George III’s evil tyranny. An English gentlewoman traveling in the Colonies wrote that popular settler indignation was so great that it stood to unite rebels and Tories again. Tom Paine, in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, raged against ‘...that barbarous and, hellish power which hath stirred up Indians and Negroes to destroy us.’ But oppressed peoples saw this war as a wonderful contradiction to be exploited in the ranks of the European capitalists.

“Lord Dunmore was Royal Governor of Virginia in name, but ruler over so little that he had to reside aboard a British warship anchored offshore. Urgently needing reinforcements for his outnumbered command, on Nov. 5, 1775 he issued a proclamation that any slaves enlisting in his forces would be freed. Sir Henry Clinton, commander of British forces in North America, later issued an even broader offer:

“‘I do most strictly forbid any Person to sell or claim Right over any Negroe, the property of a Rebel, who may claim refuge in any part of this Army; And I do promise to every Negroe who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.’

“Could any horn have called more clearly? By the thousands upon thousands, Afrikans struggled to reach British lines. One historian of the Exodus has said: ‘The British move was countered by the Americans, who exercised closer vigilance over their slaves, removed the able-bodied to interior places far from the scene of the war, and threatened with dire punishment all who sought to join the enemy. To Negroes attempting to flee to the British the alternatives “Liberty or Death” took on an almost literal meaning. Nevertheless, by land and sea they made their way to the British forces.’

“The war was a disruption to Slave Amerika, a chaotic gap in the European capitalist ranks to be hit hard. Afrikans seized the time — not by the tens or hundreds, but by the many thousands. Amerika shook with the tremors of their movement. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were bitter about their personal losses: Thomas Jefferson lost many of his slaves; Virginia’s Governor Benjamin Harrison lost thirty of ‘my finest slaves’; William Lee lost sixty-five slaves, and said two of his neighbors ‘lost every slave they had in the world’; South Carolina’s Arthur Middleton lost fifty slaves.

“Afrikans were writing their own ‘Declaration of Independence’ by escaping. Many settler patriots tried to appeal to the British forces to exercise European solidarity and expel the Rebel slaves. George Washington had to denounce his own brother for bringing food to the British troops, in a vain effort to coax them into returning the Washington family slaves. Yes, the settler patriots were definitely upset to see some real freedom get loosed upon the land.

“To this day no one really knows how many slaves freed themselves during the war. Georgia settlers were said to have lost over 10,000 slaves, while the number of Afrikan escaped prisoners in South Carolina and Virginia was thought to total well over 50,000. Many, in the disruption of war, passed themselves off as freemen and relocated in other territories, fled to British Florida and Canada, or took refuge in Maroon communities or with the Indian nations. It has been estimated that 100,000 Afrikan prisoners — some 20% of the slave population — freed themselves during the war.

“The thousands of rebellious Afrikans sustained the British war machinery. After all, if the price of refuge from the slavemaster was helping the British throw down the settlers, it was not such a distasteful task. Lord Dunmore had an ‘Ethiopian Regiment’ of ex-slaves (who went into battle with the motto ‘Liberty to Slaves’ sewn on their jackets) who helped the British capture and burn Norfolk, Va. on New Years Day, 1776. That must have been sweet, indeed. Everywhere, Afrikans appeared with the British units as soldiers, porters, road-builders, guides and intelligence agents. Washington declared that unless the slave escapes could be halted the British Army would inexorably grow ‘like a snowball in rolling.’

“What was primary for the Afrikan masses was a strategic relationship with the British Empire against settler Amerika. To use an Old European power against the Euro-Amerikan settlers — who were the nearest and most immediate enemy — was just common sense to many. 65,000 Afrikans joined the British forces — over ten for every one enlisted in the Continental U.S. ranks...

“Even in the ruins of British defeat, the soundness of this viewpoint was born out in practice. While the jubilant Patriots watched the defeated British army evacuate New York City in 1783, some 4,000 Afrikans swarmed aboard the departing ships to escape Amerika. Another 4,000 Afrikans escaped with the British from Savannah, 6,000 from Charleston, and 5,000 escaped aboard British ships prior to the surrender. Did these brothers and sisters ‘lose’ the war — compared to those still in chains on the plantations?

“Others chose neither to leave nor submit. All during the war Indian and Afrikan guerrillas struck at the settlers. In one case, three hundred Afrikan ex-slaves fought an extended guerrilla campaign against the planters in both Georgia and South Carolina. Originally allied to the British forces, they continued their independent campaign long after the British defeat. They were not overcome until 1786, when their secret fort at Bear Creek was discovered and overwhelmed. This was but one front in the true democratic struggle against Amerika.”


When Harriet Tubman reached the first “free” (non-Slavery) city of Philadelphia, she met with William Still, the New Afrikan leader of the Underground Railroad there. Hooked up now, and having a rear base area, Harriet became a self-sufficient “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. Working most of the year as a laborer, cleaning or doing laundry or cutting wood, to support herself and save money for raids in the South. Twice a year, usually in the Spring and Fall, Harriet Tubman would travel hundreds of miles (much of it on foot) infiltrating Slave territory to bring escapees out. She conducted nineteen guerrilla raids, even reaching deep into the Carolina plantation country.

While the Underground Railroad was famous in its own day, especially after being popularized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1852, it was very different than the images of daring white Quakers we are spoon-fed today. It was mainly composed of New Afrikans, not euro-americans. There were many white Abolitionists in the north, but relatively few were willing to risk themselves, or even contribute much money.

In the South, a handful of “free” Afrikans and Anti-Slavery whites played a key role, but the river of New Afrikan prisoners breaking out was, of course, the largest single part of the Underground Railroad. Most of the “station-masters” and “brakemen” (local Underground Railroad coordinators) were New Afrikan as well. And when it came to the over five hundred “conductors,” those frontline guerrillas who actually penetrated Slave territory to lead prison breaks, virtually all were New Afrikan. It was their war.

We’ve said it before, but we have to repeat it so that we really get it. The Underground Railroad that Harriet joined in 1849 and came to help lead, wasn’t civilian, but a military activity. In fact, it was the main Black military activity in their protracted war against the Slave System. It was a mass form of guerrilla warfare. This is the key that opens up an understanding about the nature of war by the oppressed. Which is a level of understanding long denied women, but that we Amazons must break into.

When the capitalist patriarchy praises the Underground Railroad with dusty words, it does so to mislead us. To turn us away from Harriet’s own tracks. In our school daze the Underground Railroad is always falsely praised for being about humanitarian rescue. For being about New Afrikans seeking safety in the white North. As though the Underground were only some Red Cross mission. As though the white North was safe for New Afrikan women. No, not even close to true when we really think about it.

For the Black guerrillas like Harriet the North served as the rear base area in their long war against the Slave System. Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerrillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries. The North as a rear base gave New Afrikans the space to rest, repair and rebuild themselves. This was a deeper process than we’ve thought about.

In real life, revolutionary guerrillas spend most of their time in rear base areas, not out on raids. In China, Mao Zedong even thought that only one battle every three months was the right spacing for full-time guerrillas units. Because it’s in the rear base areas that the process of mass change, of the oppressed changing themselves into new people educationally and politically and classwise and in identity, was centered. So rear base areas were and are not passive, not like highway rest stops. And escaping Northward for ex-slaves then wasn’t an end in itself, but only a beginning.

The war of liberation was at work just as hard in the Northern rear base area as in the Southern battle zone, although the shape of the activities was clearly different. It is true that relatively few escapees became guerrillas, as Harriet did. Most New Afrikans in the North as individuals were largely concerned in their daily lives about finding jobs, caring for children, and all the other difficult demands of survival in Babylon. But as a community what they had in common was the liberation war. Their collective efforts, the institutions they built so painfully from nothing in a hostile land, the new leaders they raised up, were all about making war against the Slave System.

Although the white North back then is sentimentally pictured for us as being “the land of freedom,” actually it was cold and barren and hostile for New Afrikans. Before the Civil War many towns and even entire states banned New Afrikans as residents, as did almost all skilled trades, professions, hospitals, schools, churches, and government services. To start a primary school for New Afrikan children in most Northern towns then was seen as a shocking crime, and often such small attempts were burned to the ground by angry white mobs. There was nothing Black, no progress or failure, that was not part of the liberation war.

If Harriet Tubman lived in the North, working as a laborer nine or ten months a year during her guerrilla years, this was not a “time-out.” If William Still wore a suit and tie and worked as a clerk in Philadelphia during those years, that didn’t make him a civilian (He was a major leader of the single largest Eastern station on the Underground Railroad). Every Black community association or institution back then was involved in the war. The first formal New Afrikan church — the African Methodist Episcopal Church in lower Manhattan — was formed in a split from a white church that wasn’t militant enough for them against slavery. For years it and sister churches throughout the North acted against the law as dissident political centers and as hideouts for fugitive New Afrikans.

Again, the rear base area in the North wasn’t a passive refuge but an area of possible advantage and also danger that had to be continually fought for, enlarged, and changed. Which Harriet Tubman was very busy doing all the time. Virtually none of this was recorded in men’s history, of course, since the actual fabric of women’s politics has always been judged too trivial for that. When Harriet took in poor children in a communal way, urging everyone to construct their households in similar communal fashion, this was a political statement so strong that few women here and now can even discuss it.

While there were already anti-capitalists in the u.s. at that time, Harriet’s working class politics weren’t expressed ideologically but in living her New Afrikan communalism. (Although she never hid her political view that it was wrong to have any personal wealth or advantage whatsoever.)

The constant struggle by Harriet and her comrades to build a New Afrikan culture in the Northern rear base area grew more visible after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Not only were “slavecatchers” and federal marshals (the forerunners of today’s f.b.i.) seizing escaped Afrikans, but in the shadows of this law white kidnapping of any Afrikans in the North for quick sale on the Southern auction blocks was taking place.

A movement of illegal but open mass resistance arose to the u.s. criminal justice system. A mass movement that rescued Black prisoners and fought the police and courts and federal marshals. Like all true mass struggles, it had many leaders and many brilliant local battles. One of the most famous then was the Battle of Troy, New York. Which was led by an illiterate working class woman who was herself a fugitive with a bounty on her head. None other than Harriet Tubman (for you see, in real life “America’s Most Wanted” was a Black woman).

On April 27, 1860, Harriet Tubman was traveling to Boston to attend a large Anti Slavery meeting. Stopping in Troy to visit a relative, she was immediately told that a fugitive New Afrikan, Charles Nalle, had been captured by the slavers. Federal marshals were holding him at the downtown courthouse, where his owner was applying to a u.s. commissioner for Nalle’s return in chains back to Virginia. (Those at the hearing were surprised, for the thirty-year-old Nalle and his owner looked strikingly alike, differing only in a shade of skin color. They were biologically two brothers with the same father, but one the slave and one the owner.) Downtown stores had closed, as everyone was going to the courthouse to see the Roman spectacle.

Harriet had helped quickly organize a conspiracy. With her face hidden in a large shawl, carrying a basket, Harriet bent over acting like an old woman. Two other Black women were by her side, pretending to support her by the arms. Tugging the guard by his coat, Harriet persuaded him to admit the “harmless” women to the courtroom. Where she sank down in the doorway.

Outside, a New Afrikan man named William Henry started speaking to the crowd, covertly warning some among them to get ready: “There’s a fugitive in that office. Pretty soon you will see him come forth...He’s going to be taken to the depot to go to Virginia on the first train.” Henry, who was an unknown laborer, is believed to be Harriet’s brother and the relative she was visiting in Troy.

When the u.s. commissioner ruled against Nalle, the prisoner suddenly leapt for the window and stepped out on the ledge. Cries of support came from below. But his hopes to jump down into the crowd were cut off when Federal agents grabbed him and dragged him back inside. As the local newspaper reported:

The crowd at this time numbered nearly a thousand persons. Many were black, and a good share were of the female sex. They blocked up State Street from First street to the alley, and kept surging to and from.

Nalle’s defense attorney, Martin Townsend, delayed the slavers by filing an emergency appeal right then and there. He won an order demanding Nalle’s appearance before a judge of the State Supreme Court. As the slavers and Federal agents convoyed the chained Nalle out, Harriet Tubman rose and threw off her disguise. Racing to the open window, she shouted to the Anti-Slavery fighters mixed in the crowd: “Here he comes! Take him!”

Harriet and her Underground group had arranged for a boat to be secretly waiting at the river outside town. She ran down the courthouse stairs, overtaking the Federal party and breaking into their circle. Locking her arms with Nalle’s Harriet began pulling him away from the u.s. marshals. “This man shall not go back to slavery!” she shouted. “Take him, friends! Drag him to the river!”

In the middle of a crowded downtown street, a small battle raged. Federal agents and police swung their clubs, and some drew their pistols and began firing. Black guerrillas and their white allies charged into them. Nalle himself fought desperately to get free, side by side with Harriet. Attorney Townsend witnessed it all:

In the melee she was repeatedly beaten over the head with policemen’s clubs, but she never for a moment released her hold, but cheered Nalle and his friends with her voice, and struggled with the officers until they were literally worn out with their exertions, and Nalle was separated from them.

They hurried Nalle down to the river, where a sympathetic ferryman rowed him to the other side. But no sooner had a bloodied and exhausted Nalle touched the shore again than he was recaptured. This time the u.s. marshals and police rushed him under heavy guard to Police Justice Stewart’s office, which they barricaded. Just in time, as Harriet had led a rush of four hundred Anti-Slavers on to the steam ferry boat and across the river.

When the u.s. marshals hiding inside started firing wildly at the surrounding force, someone rallied the attackers. “They can only kill a dozen of us — come on!” New Afrikan men charged up the stairs and forced open the door. The first of them was cut down by a hatchet swung by Deputy Sheriff Morrison. His body stuck in the doorway, though, so the door could not be slammed shut. The Anti-Slavery men broke in, but were overcome in hand-to-hand fighting one by one. Then, as Attorney Martin Townsend tells us, it was all on a squad of Black Amazons to win or lose the battle:

And when the men who led the assault upon the door of Judge Stewart’s office were stricken down, Harriet and a number of other colored women rushed over their bodies, brought Nalle out, and putting him into the first wagon passing, started him for the West.

After the battle u.s. marshals tried to hunt them down, but members of the underground hid them well. And an entire Black Nation protected Harriet. How shallow is today’s false image of Harriet as a lone, non-political do-gooder, when we glimpse her reality as an Amazon leader of an entire people at war. What was happening in the guerrilla war was that violent battles were taking place not only in the South but in the North as well. Thousands upon thousands of New Afrikans — women easily as much as men — created new battlegrounds, and endured the real costs and real casualties of bitter struggles. In that long, difficult, and successful process to develop the North as a vibrant Rear Base Area for their war, Black women and men stepped up to recreate themselves in dignity. Freedom is never given, but only won.

Underground Railroad leader William Still gave an example of the militancy of escaping New Afrikans. In 1855, six fugitives breaking out of Virginia complete with the owner’s horses and carriage, were stopped on the road by a posse of white patrollers:

“At this juncture, the fugitives verily believing that time had arrived for the practical use of their pistols and dirks, pulled them out of concealment — the young women as well as the young men — and declared they would not be taken! One of the white men raised his gun, pointing the muzzle directly towards one of the young women, with the threat that he would ‘shoot’, etc. ‘Shoot! shoot!! shoot!!!’ she exclaimed, with a double barrelled pistol in one hand and a long dirk knife in the other, utterly unterrified and fully ready for a death struggle. The male leader of the fugitives by this time had pulled back the hammers of his pistols, and was about to fire! Their adversaries seeing the weapons, and the unflinching determination on the part of the runaways to stand their ground, ‘spill blood, kill, or die,’ rather than be taken, very prudently ‘sidled over to the other side of the road’...”

Moses” and “The General”

All this is the larger context in which Harriet Tubman was a part. To blow away the individualistic fiction of Harriet as a lone rescuer or as a Black superwoman takes nothing that is hers away from her. Instead, it frees her in our understanding to be her true self, a New Afrikan woman who was part of the military and political leadership in her Peoples’ war. While her underground name was “Moses,” it was meaningful that both John Brown and Union Army commanders who knew her respectfully called Harriet “the General.”

Her second biographer, Earl Conrad, pinpointed the widespread lack of understanding of Harriet Tubman’s military role, and the real influence she had in the major events leading to the destruction of the Slave Power:

“It has often been said, ‘She made nineteen trips into the slave country,’ but the meaning of this enormous enterprise has been hidden in the lack of illustration. A trip into the slave territory and the “kidnapping” of a band of blacks was no less than a military campaign, a raid upon an entrenched and an armed enemy. If it was anything less than a military task then it would not have engaged the attention of such a martial figure as John Brown, as for many years it did. If conducting was not a military assignment then no men would have been hounded, harassed, jailed and wounded, and no lives would have been lost.

“The Underground Railroad era was one of prolonged, small-scale guerrilla warfare between the North and the South, a campaign that, for its activities, was often violent and always perilous. It was so much like guerrilla warfare that it influenced John Brown into the theory that a more extensive development of this type of conflict might be useful as a means of breaking the grip of the slaveholders upon the economy, the politics and the government of the nation; it was one of the longest campaigns of defiance in the nation’s history.

“When it is remembered that the Underground was an institution in American life for at least a half century, that by 1850 it was an issue so much at the core of the American problem that called forth an ignominious Fugitive Slave Law, and that it was one of the greatest forces which brought on the Civil War, and thus destroyed slavery, then alone is it possible to comprehend its significance. Harriet Tubman’s outstanding participation in the Underground in its last and most vigorous phase, from 1850 until the Civil War, must be approached in the light of such a far-reaching influence as that.”

We have to go more consciously into the question of Harriet’s politics. For when Amazons and fighting women appear — as we always will — Patriarchal Capitalism tries to contain us ideologically. We are marginalized in one way or another, even if they have to romanticize us as lone exotic super-women. You know, like the talking dog. It isn’t what she says that’s important, it’s that she talks at all that’s amazing.

So even when Amazons are supposedly being “honored” it is usually irritating, to say the least. If you saw that wretched television movie about Harriet Tubman, you can catch what I mean. There’s elegant Cecily Tyson playing Harriet as some kind of arrogant saint, having to pump up and push ahead the dumb, fearful slaves she was freeing. As if Harriet was the only New Afrikan there with any guts. As if Cecily Tyson has anything to do with Harriet. Again, to take women out of our political context trivializes us.

Harriet wasn’t leading the weak. No, that’s got it backwards. She was leading the strong . The great anti-slavery struggle was a movement of the best and the bravest, the most serious-minded folks of that day. And it was among these, the strong, that Harriet was a leader. She was an Amazon player in the political decisions that determined the ending of the slave system.

Harriet did this during the years when she was a wanted fugitive and doing political-military work underground. It wasn’t only in the South that her guerrilla activity violated the laws of the u.s. empire. No sooner had she liberated herself than congress passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which authorized the hunting of escaped New Afrikan prisoners and wanted revolutionaries in the North. The act paid a special fee to u.s. marshals for handing over accused Afrikans, while it denied the accused bail or trial in the North.

This unleashed a legion of Southern agents and bounty hunters throughout the country. Harriet and many others had to shift their base of operations. For seven years, Harriet and those of her family she had helped escape lived in exile in St. Catherine’s, Ontario in Canada. This then-frontier town was one of the first “free” New Afrikan settlements and was much looked to. While whites and Indians lived there as well, to New Afrikans, it was a temporary rear base area. The battle lines had shifted, the North was no longer safe for escaped prisoners, and Harriet used Canada as her rear base to rest up between raids, to take new fugitives to.

Eventually, the slaveowners would put bounties totaling $40,000 (in 1850’s dollars) on Harriet’s head. It wasn’t her guerrilla raids on their plantations alone that hurt the slaveocracy, but the growing effect of her example to others and her larger political role. Confederates would even point to her later with frustration as one of the causes of the rebellion. On June 1, 1860, for example, feminists gathered in Boston for the annual New England Anti-Slavery Society Conference staged their own “Drawing Room Convention” at Melodeon Hall to discuss women’s role in culture. Harriet Tubman was one of the speakers. A newspaper reported the appearance of the wanted Amazon: “A colored woman of the name of Moses, who [is] herself a fugitive, has eight times returned to the slave states for the purpose of rescuing others from bondage, and who has met with extraordinary success in her efforts, won much applause.”

The pro-slavery writer John Bell Robinson would single out that day as a special injury to white men’s power: “Now I ask all the candid men to look at the congregation of traitors a little, and see if the South had no reason not only to be insulted, but alarmed to the extreme, when they learned that enough such men and women at Melodeon Hall in Boston in 1860, to densely fill it, and would laugh and shout over such wickedness in a poor weak-minded Negro woman, in trampling upon the rights of the South with impunity. What could be more insulting after having lost over $50,000 worth of property by that deluded Negress, than for a large congregation of whites and well-educated people of Boston to endorse such an imposition on the constitutional rights of the slave states.”

Fun to laugh at that frustrated white supremacist, but home in on the fact that even 150 years later women have, in our own way, as much difficulty accepting Harriet as he did. That’s why the capitalist patriarchy has so easily dis-figured her. Harriet was a guerrilla not just in the obvious way, but on a deeper level. We have trouble seeing her as real because she totally disobeyed the patriarchal and hierarchical rules that we still live by; in which peoples’ lives are strictly bar-coded by dress and role, race and gender, and, above all, by class.

It’s a take on us that the capitalist patriarchy has so easily conned us into thinking that Harriet — the New Afrikan Amazon who was one of the most subversive players in u.s. history — was only a goody two-shoes. Check us out on that.

Frederick Douglass is considered the preeminent New Afrikan leader of the 19th century. A brilliant and persuasive public speaker and writer, Douglass was a towering public figure of that age. But Harriet was no less a leader of her people. As Douglass himself wrote to her: “I have wrought in the day — you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses to your devotion to freedom and your heroism. Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardship to serve an enslaved people than you have.”

While Douglass became a spokesman for the Anti-Slavery cause, Harriet for years concealed herself and her work as a guerrilla. What could Douglass’ speeches have been without the growth of the Underground Railroad and the mass resistance which Harriet played such a part in building? And in the underground, it was Douglass who was the supporter to Harriet, sheltering in his Rochester, New York, house the fugitives she was leading on the last leg to safety in Canada.

Just as Douglass fits our programmed image of a leader while Harriet does not, Harriet does not register with our patriarchal image of a soldier. Having no official rank or uniform or place in men’s hierarchy. Yet & again, she was the first woman to serve in the Union Army, and in retirement kept as her proudest possession the army rifle she had carried in action in the Civil War. While Dr. Martin Delany, the early Black nationalist, is recognized as a soldier for being the first New Afrikan commissioned as a Major in the u.s.army, Harriet had been conducting guerrilla raids on the plantations for over twelve years before there was a Civil War. Breaking the rules as an Amazon.

By the end of the 1850’s the irresistible progress of New Afrikan liberation had forced the end of the old u.s. and brought the crisis to a head. Where once slaves escaped by the ones and twos, now prison breaks were assuming a mass character. In one famous 1857 Maryland prison break, organized by Harriet herself, thirty-nine New Afrikans escaped heavily armed — Women and men — with stolen revolvers, sword-canes and butcher knives. Armed resistance was once so shocking when done by Nat Turner and his men in 1831, but was becoming universal.

Harriet herself, despite her secrecy, had become a legend. The slave masters’ hatred of her was expressed not only in bounties and wanted posters, but in public discussion of which torture devices would be used by the would-be captors on her before her slow death. Feeling that the general alarm for Harriet as the South’s “Most Wanted” made her capture certain, white abolitionists urged her to retire. With no success. A letter survives written by Colonel Thomas Higginson, the fighting Abolitionist minister who was a supporter of John Brown and who would command a Black regiment in the Civil War, after a visit from Harriet:

Dear Mother,

... We have the greatest heroine of the age here, Harriet Tubman... I have known her for some time and mentioned her in speeches once or twice—the slaves call her Moses. She has had a reward of twelve thousand dollars offered for her in Maryland and will probably be burned alive when she is caught, which she probably will be, first or last, as she is going again. She has been in the habit of working in hotels all summer and laying up money for the crusade in the winter. She is jet black and cannot read or write, only talk, beside acting....

Higginson emphasized “talk” because to those fighting slavery, Harriet’s quiet speeches, telling of operations in the South against the slaveowner, were electrifying. Harriet was an Amazon spearhead, leading by doing. The Canadian anti-slavery society would send funds for her to pick up at Frederick Douglass’ Paper in Rochester. So would the Irish Anti-Slavery Society. In Scotland, Elize Wigharn of the Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society and other Scots women raised support for her raids.

The greatest tribute to her work was the emergency convention of slave owners in 1857, on the Eastern shore of Maryland, where she had been so active. It was called out of panic, about all the prison breaks that Harriet and many other Black guerrillas were doing. It was the first of the slaveowner conventions that would soon lead the Slave States into secession, trying to stop the tide of prison breaks with even tighter slave laws and the reenslavement of “free” Afrikans (many of whom were known to be agents of the underground). Their self-destructive frenzy of repression was understood to be a signal that the end was nearing. The Antislavery Standard newspaper wrote happily:

The operation of the Underground Railroad on the Maryland border, within the last few years has been so extensive that in some neighborhoods nearly the whole slave population have made their escape, and the convention is a result of the general panic on the part of the owners...

A R evolutionary Politic

These special conventions begun in Maryland were important. Facing the death of their social order from internal bleeding, slaveowner-capitalists in the one Southern state after another held these assemblies to decide their next move. It was these state conventions that decided to leave the u.s.a. and form a new nation just of their own (which they named the Confederate States of America). So we can see a direct connection between the steady guerrilla war waged by the Underground Railroad and the determining political events of the day. Harriet herself directly helped precipitate the start of the Civil War. She was at the center of the whirlwind.

By 1857, her presence at key meetings began to be noted. She was usually introduced simply as “Moses” or with a fictitious name. On August 1, 1859, she addressed the New England Colored Citizens Convention opposing Colonization, the popular white plan to resolve their “African Problem” by deporting all Afrikans to an Afrikan colony. Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe were two of its main backers:

“Miss Harriet Garrison was introduced as one of the most successful conductors on the Underground Railroad. She denounced the Colonization movement, and told a story of a man who sowed onions and garlic on his land to increase his dairy production, but soon found the butter was strong, and would not sell, and so he concluded to sow clover instead. But he soon found the wind had blown the onions and garlic all over his field. Just so, she stated, the white people had got the Negroes here to do their drudgery, and now they were trying to root them out and ship them to Africa. ‘But,’ she said, ‘they can’t do it: we’re rooted here, and they can’t pull us up.’ She was much applauded.”

Portrayed by the Capitalist Patriarchy as a woman without politics, Harriet was the total opposite. She fought for and lived out the most radical politics of her age. For her to fight at mass New Afrikan meetings against Afrikan Colonization — which was the main white neocolonial plan then — was only typical. At a time when most settler Abolitionists expected New Afrikans to remain their inferiors and subordinates, even inside the movement, Harriet joined with Frederick Douglass and others to build New Afrikan-led organizations.

Now, armed New Afrikan resistance to the slaveocracy way back then in the 19th century has been made retroactively respectable. But it wasn’t back then, even in much of the Abolitionist movement. The most famous of the white Abolitionists writers and leaders, William Lloyd Garrison, and his American Anti-Slavery Society, held to the strict doctrine of Christian non-violence and battle by “Moral Suasion” only. The revival meeting speaker and Feminist, Sojourner Truth, crisscrossed the North arguing against those who advocated armed slave resistance (her verbal skirmishes with Frederick Douglass on the issue of violence were dramatic).

Harriet, who traveled armed with a concealed pistol and had sworn never to be taken alive, was on the most radical edge of freedom “by any means necessary.” Feminism was a concept even less acceptable to white society than Abolition back then, but Harriet, as a New Afrikan woman, was always an open Feminist. Not only as an associate of Susan B. Anthony, and one who participated in Feminist conferences into old age. But as an Amazon. She didn’t support the Warrior, she was the Warrior. In fact, never in Harriet’s life, once she freed herself, did she put herself under the command of men. A fact never discussed by men. Again, she led by actually living the most radical politics of her age.

It’s wrong to think of Harriet’s politics in civilian terms, because she wasn’t a civilian and that wasn’t her frame of reference. Her entire life she had been at war. Moreover, Harriet had grasped the main line that led into the future: that the Anti-Slavery struggle was inevitably growing towards all-out war, and only in such total conflict could the issue of her people’s slavery be finally resolved.

To develop Armed Struggle

As the settler political parties, including the new Anti-Slavery party, the Republicans, vacillated and tried to compromise to avoid secession, Harriet moved and moved others to develop armed struggle. “They may say ‘peace, peace!’ as much as they like: I know there’s going to be war!” Harriet said in one of her most famous statements. Her political-military work was like an arrow on a direct and one-way journey towards ever greater armed conflict. Each successively larger wave of the struggle saw her on the leading edge.

In 1858, Harriet Tubman joined John Brown’s conspiracy to start a permanent guerrilla army inside the south. Her friend Frederick Douglass arranged for the Rev. J.W. Loguen, one of the leaders of the New Afrikan community in Syracuse, NY, and a well-known Abolitionist, to take Brown to meet with Harriet in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. Brown stayed on as Harriet’s guest in her house for some days, discussing the plan.

Harriet’s participation in this attempt brings us to the edge of a deeper understanding. If John Brown’s conspiracy was the brave but hopeless gamble by a small handful of zealots — as we are always told — then why was Harriet so eagerly involved? She was, after all, herself the veteran of ten years of guerrilla warfare. Someone who rarely in the war zone put her foot down wrong. Intensely practical.

The answer is that while Brown’s late decision to seize the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, W. Virginia, in order to publicize the campaign, was a poor decision and poorly executed, their overall strategy was both simple and practical. And it received serious discussion among many of the leading New Afrikan activists of the day. It was a logical next step.

Brown had envisioned a small guerrilla force, roaming up and down the length of the Allegheny mountains, sheltered in its terrain. (Harper’s Ferry, W.E.B. DuBois said, was a natural entry point to the Alleghenys, and thus to the mountains running further to the South.) Like a tapeworm growing within the slave states, this army would come down and raid the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas in lightning strikes, constantly growing by the recruiting of freed slaves while sending larger streams of escapees north via the Underground Railroad.

At a secret convention held May 8, 1858 in Chatham, Ontario — home to the largest Black community in Canada — a group of thirty-three New Afrikans and twelve euro-amerikans approved the guerrilla army and its constitution. There were New Afrikan men such as the Nationalist and physician, Dr. Martin Delany, the prominent
B a p t i s tm i n i s t e r ,

W.C. Monroe, the Underground Railroad leader G.J. Reynolds, the gunsmith (and Oberlin college graduate) James Jones, and James Harris, the future us. congressman from North Carolina.

Brown’s dangerous attempt received so much interest because it was an idea whose time had come. This was the next higher stage in the struggle — one that years of growing prison breaks and violent slave resistance had made inevitable. If the Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had never happened, the slave system would have been crushed nevertheless. The idea that New Afrikans would soon free themselves in a major war was one that was common at the time.

Wendell Phillips, Garrison’s brilliant associate in the American Anti-Slavery Society, publicly linked John Brown to this expectation of New Afrikan self determination. Before a crowd of thousands he praised “... the spirit, that looks upon the Negro as a Nation, with the right to take arms into its hands and summon its friends to its side, and that looks upon that gibbet of John Brown, not as a scaffold of a felon but as the cross of a martyr.” Brown’s plan had actually grown out of the experience of Harriet and other “conductors,” who used the Allegheny Mountains as a guerrilla highway. He saw the Underground Railroad as the other half to his small army, bringing supplies and communications from the North while it was an outer network of intelligence and propaganda ahead of his mobile force. Of course, Brown knew far less of the ground he proposed to fight on than Harriet.

So we can understand how important Harriet’s participation was to him. After meeting her he wrote to his son: “I am succeeding to all appearance, beyond my expectation. Harriet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He is the most man, naturally, that I ever met with...”

This wasn’t just about Race

Brown’s pen, in his fervor, suddenly had to jump-cross genders, as he had no words for women sufficient to express his admiration. Which opens the door for us. John Brown was, of course, a patriarch, in his own eyes even. Important affairs were manly affairs, to him. At the Chatham secret convention, a New Afrikan man proposed recruiting women to the conspiracy. Brown strongly opposed this, and according to one participant “warned the members not to intimate, even to their wives, what was done.”

So even back then it was necessary for men to exceptionalize Harriet. John Brown’s conspiracy and armed band were all male, by deliberate intention. Yet, perhaps the single most crucial person and guerrilla they needed was a New Afrikan woman, and Amazon. It’s easy to see how John Brown had to redefine Harriet as a “man” in his mind. And thought that his supreme compliment, too.

From women’s point of view, John Brown’s campaign and the secret men’s convention in Canada are like an x-ray into real politics. Weren’t we always taught subliminally that only white men had serious politics & serious political debates? Yet & again, the Anti-Slavery movement in Harriet’s time seethed with the contradictory visions of nationhood, race, and gender. Then, as right now, these were only the outward forms that deeper class politics took on.

When Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Delany, and John Brown came together in Canada that season, there was a life-or-death unity between them. There were also intense class differences moving just beneath the surface. John Brown had called his secret men’s convention to hammer out a “Provisional Constitution of the Oppressed People of the United States.” His conspiracy needed such a rule, because questions of national strategies and allegiances were in the air. This wasn’t just about race.

The Brown expedition was a Black guerrilla nation in its intention. Their goal was not to make raids or free some slaves, but to create a sovereign nation — just as in living memory some other men had started the u.s.a. This is why they needed a “provisional constitution.” The one they drafted — although written solely by men — guaranteed voting rights to Black women as well as men, and even encouraged all women to arm themselves.

This was at a time when new capitalist men’s nations were being created all over the world. Both in the decay of old pre-industrial empires and in new anti-colonial struggles. After all, the u.s.a. was a brand new settler nation itself. People could see that making nations or wiping out nations was just the ordinary work of politics. Same with us, sis.

Everyone then had heard of Toussaint L’Overture, who had come to be called the “Black Napoleon.” After he had led the 1791 Haitian Revolution, and set up the first self- governing Black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Just as Mexican landowners had ended Spanish colonial rule in 1821, creating a new Mexican nation. And in 1836 euro-amerikan “pioneers” led a war of secession against that new Mexican nation, founding their own, independent slaveowner nation of the Republic of Texas (which later joined the u.s.a. as a state). So leaving nations and constructing nations were much on peoples’ minds then.

If John Brown’s guerrilla army had been successful, it would have been like the Maroon colonies of fugitive Afrikans. These colonies and camps had sprung up not only in Jamaica and Brazil, in Central Amerika, but in Southern u.s. swamps and forests, too. By their very nature they were self-governing communities, outside of all colonialist laws & government. For that reason, John Brown felt it important to aim the rebellion’s ultimate loyalty to the new United States. They would have no goal other than to “Amend & Reform” the u.s. constitution. They would have no flag, he declared, other than the “Stars and Stripes” itself.

One New Afrikan immediately spoke up at the convention, saying that as an ex-slave he owed no allegiance to the flag of slavery. “The old flag is good enough for me,” Brown replied. “Under it, freedom was won from the tyrants of the old world, for white men. Now I intend to make it do duty for Black men.” Revealing words.

Dr. Martin Delany spoke up to support Brown, and to favorably move the question of his proposed constitution. But Delany did so with his own nationalist slant, stressing the political & social separatism of the future New Afrikan community: “The independent community that Captain Brown proposes to establish will be similar to the Cherokee Nation of Indians or the Mormons in Utah territory.”

See, there were a number of self-governing societies then on the fringes of the territory claimed by the u.s.settler empire. Years before, the adventuresome Delany had crossed the Slave South alone to the Texas frontier, looking for a land that New Afrikans might emigrate to away from settler society. With a horse lent him by the Choctaw, he had ridden through the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations as a guest. (What is now the state of Oklahoma was then named the Indian Territory, set aside by u.s. law for the indigenous nations expelled from the Southeast in the 1830s.)

Dr. Delany had been impressed that the Choctaw had still kept their own society even under euro-capitalist rule. Their nation still retained a semi-autonomous status. Not only did they have their own territory and economy, however poor it was, but their own schools and language, their own laws & court system. Their leaders were recognized in Washington as the diplomatic representatives of another sovereign people. In Dr. Delany’s eyes such a semi-autonomous status would be a big transitional step upward for four million New Afrikans, almost all of whom were still slaves.

Harriet and Dr. Martin Delany were a contrast. She had been captive for 29 years, born a slave, while he had been born a “free Negro” and come of age in the North. She was working class, and unable to even read the bible. He was a pioneering Black middle-class professional. One who through perseverance found white sponsors to learn medicine & even spend a year at Harvard med-
ical school. And while Harriet’s political work was in the South as a guerrilla, Dr. Delany’s political work was as an intellectual in the North.

Dr. Delany was one of the very first Pan-Afrikanist educators, and his imprint is still on the politics of the Black Nation. While working in Pittsburg as a cutter (a lay healer who bled blood from the ill, a much prescribed remedy back then) he started what was at the time the only Black Anti-Slavery newspaper in the country. Then, Frederick Douglass recruited him to help publish his famous newspaper, The North Star. Delany even tried doing popular fiction, writing the first Black radical novel, Blake. The story of an international slave conspiracy that finally seizes Cuba, Blake was the first New Afrikan book advocating revolution and denouncing whites as a race. And it ends with the angry words, “Woe be unto these devils of whites, I say.”

Dr. Delany was a forerunner, an early nationalist whose work helped inspire W.E.B. DuBois, the Nation of Islam, and other groups. He understood that New Afrikans were a colonized nation: “We are a nation within a nation — as the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria; the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch in the British dominions.”

Along with Rev. Henry Highland Garnett,the militant pastor, Delany was one of the first advocates of Afrikan nationalist migration. Although he agreed that Black people were u.s.citizens and should fight for all their rights here, Delany proudly argued that his people deserved an “even better” development of their own society and their own leadership. White society would never offer them justice in any case, he said.

He advocated initial Afrikan settlements in Central America and the Caribbean, to learn from, before migration back to Afrika. In his pioneering expedition to Nigeria he gathered examples of Afrikan products and signed a commercial treaty with an Afrikan chief. Wearing Afrikan robes, Dr. Delany toured the North after his return, telling fascinated Black audiences hungry for news from Afrika about the societies and economic potential he had seen.

There’s no question that Dr. Delany made significant contributions to radical Black self-assertion. We need to explore these gender and class differences not to diminish anyone, but to illuminate the meaning of the choices people made. Because Dr. Martin Delany is used to dis Harriet. Men have come to imply and assume — as a recent, much-acclaimed “history of African-American literature,” Dr. Eric J. Sunquist’s To Wake the Nations, published by Harvard in 1993, explicitly states — that Dr. Martin Delany was one of the great founders of the Black “revolutionary” viewpoint, while Harriet Tubman was dismissed as “less militant.” Outside of the obvious, that it’s just like men to decide that the most brilliant guerrilla leader this side of Geronimo was “less militant” than her male compatriots, there’s a poisoned idea implanted here. Dr. Delany is implied to be the more political one, the mover, while once again women are implied to be only supporters and doers of tasks (although in Harriet’s case the task was destroying the Confederacy).

The unexplored political difference between Harriet and Dr. Martin Delany was a gender difference. Which is a class difference. They represented and tried to give leadership to different classes in the Black Nation. They had different ideas on what the Black community should become, with Harriet’s ideas being the more radical & the more Afrikan.

It was no coincidence that Dr. Martin Delany was inside the Chatham convention reaching agreements with John Brown — while Harriet & all other Black women were out in the cold. Just cause and effect, girl. Just the inescapable gravitational pull of gender & class. Stick with us here, we have to detour some through these men’s politics. Because they are the background to see Harriet’s own course.

John Brown’s politics there carried the internal contradictions of u.s. anti-racism. Contradictions still alive right now. If successful, the conspirators would have created a guerrilla liberated zone in the Southern mountains, one in which New Afrikans would be a self- governing people totally outside u.s. control. Yet & again, Brown was an amerikkkan patriot, a small businessman who believed in the sacred cause of the u.s.a. as a god-given land for white men & their Black brothers. The unity containing these violent opposites was an unconscious neo-colonialism. His “Provisional Constitution of the Oppressed People...” committed New Afrikan rebels to not even overthrow any Southern state governments, but only to “Amend & Reform” the u.s. constitution to end chattel slavery. John Brown, who so willingly gave his own life and his sons’ lives for justice, also simply assumed as natural a patriarchal capitalist hierarchy to life. That’s why he was “Commander-In-Chief” over Black men, and Black women not even allowed in the room when political decisions were being made.

To Brown and Delany, women were still the led, the governed. That Dr. Martin Delany himself envisioned a male ruling class is clear. As he said in his famous slogan: “Africa for the African people, and Black men to rule them.”

Gradually, we have drawn Harriet and Martin together in our story, side by side, so that we can catch the meaning that existed in their relationship. From different origins their lives came to cross each others’ — and then to separate. Both lived in log cabins in the hard Canadian exile communities in the 1850s. They were even neighbors, in nearby towns, who knew of each other as comrades in their rising freedom struggle.

Yet and again, Harriet and Martin were also profoundly alien to each other, the working class Amazon and the entrepreneurial patriarchal nationalist. Magnetic polar opposites in the developing gender-class contradictions. For Harriet and Martin stood on opposite sides of a rapidly growing divide in the world, engulfed in the explosive onrush of a world class struggle.

For the Black Nation, you see, was not apart from world politics, not apart from world history. So often patriarchal capitalism gives us a post-surgical kind of Black history that seems to be just about itself. That pretends to exist in a little history bubble, separate from the rest of the human race’s story.

But Harriet and Martin’s time was also time when the world was first welded together under an industrial euro-capitalist rule. While they were building their Canadian rear base area, Commodore Perry’s u.s. navy “black fleet” was bombarding Japan and forcing the shoguns to accept u.s. trade. A time when predatory industrial ecology and white settlerism were removing the Indian Nations ever Westward, on ever shrinking patches of ground, until the survivors of u.s. genocide became small communities of prisoners. A time when Black Afrika was being investigated and mapped for european colonial armies arriving and soon to come. A time when in numerous indigenous societies of Asia, Afrika and the Western hemisphere, women, as a people unto ourselves with our own economic power, our own self-rule, our own mystery, were broken by colonialism into isolated individual pieces and assigned to the nuclear family of man.

It was no accident that Dr. Delany was being applauded at a gathering of the Royal Society of London, signing commercial treaties in Nigeria, and publishing books — while Harriet was a fugitive conducting protracted, long-range guerrilla raids on the plantation prisons to free New Afrikan prisoners. They were both caught up in what we can now see was a global class struggle, of the malignantly expanding euro- capitalism on one side against indigenous communalistic cultures on the other. A gender-class divide that would razor through the heart of the Black Nation.

Dr. Martin Delany’s dreams were male dreams, of Black capitalistic men rising to join their European brothers in building new commercial empires and nations. He had an honest vision, of the elite of Black men mobilizing themselves to be a proud part of a “man’s world.” Hand in hand with their white partners, Delany’s vision saw the most ambitious New Afrikan men becoming indispensable equals with the european powers in exploiting the great mineral wealth, labor, and trade of Black Afrika. Not enemies at all for Martin, but male partners.

So while men have pointed to Dr. Martin Delany as a revolutionary model of anti-white defiance, his actual politics were much more complex. His vision of Black independence had a closely constructed capitalism of class and gender. In his most famous writing, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Martin called for “an Expedition of Adventure to the Eastern Coast of Africa.” The large funding necessary to in effect take over East Afrika, and establish a ruling nation of Western-educated Black emigrants from the u.s., he amazingly believed would be given to them by the British and French empires:

...To England and France, we should look for sustenance, and the people of those two nations — as they would have everything to gain from such an adventure and eventual settlement on the EASTERN COAST OF AFRICA — the opening of an immense trade being the consequence. The whole Continent is rich in minerals, and the most precious metals...with a settlement of enlightened freemen, who with the immense facilities, must soon grow into a powerful nation.

What was most chilling to me about his words was the unconscious implication that East Afrika then was empty, wide open territory for any band of capitalist men who decided to settle there and start their own nation. Isn’t this so achingly familiar? Like the “empty” North Amerika that euro-capitalism gave itself the right to move into, settle, fill up, cleanse. Weren’t there existing Afrikan societies already there, then? Existing masses of women, children, and men? What rights or role would those native societies have had? Or would they have unintentionally been the equivalent to Indians in the final working out of Martin’s capitalistic vision?

This guy-think is really typical for all patriarchal capitalism. Even the Black separatism of that day. The seductive illusion that there can be a benign, “good” capitalism if done by the formerly oppressed, is just that. Martin’s nationalistic colleague, the Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, and his African Civilization Society, argued for emigration back to Afrika on a program of defeating the South with Black capitalism.

Challenged by Garnett to debate emigration, Frederick Douglass repeated their program with dry sarcasm:

The African Civilization Society says to us, go to Africa, raise cotton, civilize the natives, become planters, merchants, compete with the Slave States in the Liverpool cotton market, and thus break down American slavery.

Left unspoken was the obvious question of how anyone could undercut the price of Southern cotton produced by unpaid slave labor. That’s even if introducing the capitalism of cotton plantations, planters and all, to Afrika would have been anything less than a eurocentric home invasion. Even if, or especially if, it were done by some Black men themselves. Dr. Martin Delany’s own Black migration strategy was a plan for the rise of a small New Afrikan bourgeois male class. Logistically not even all the clipper ships in the world could have moved four million New Afrikans back to Afrika faster than their population increase. To say nothing of where million of Black laborers in a place they’d never been might obtain huge tracts of farmland, tools, supplies. No, Dr. Delany’s actual plans were for the small migration of Black businessmen, who would become Afrika’s Western educated merchants, plantation owners & entrepreneurs. The middlemen selling Afrika’s handicrafts, agricultural products, and minerals to the world.

The reality about such well-intentioned male nationalist dreams was that underneath the surface layer of seeming practicality, of self-assured guy-talk about the man’s world of power economics and power politics, their plans were really naive and impractical. Brilliant and serious as Martin was, he wasn’t even close to the ball park. Dr. Delany and Rev. Henry Highland Garnett and their associates inwardly assumed the basic neutrality of capitalism. That men would always want to play ball with men. In real life, of course, capitalism doesn’t play. After the Civil War, the Black men’s trading venture with Afrika that Dr. Delany started went bankrupt after their hired sea captain defrauded them in order to pick their ship up cheaply for himself at bankruptcy auction.

While in the bigger picture, world capitalism was entering its stage of high imperialism and colonial empire monopolies. Britain and France didn’t need Martin at all to enrich themselves on Afrika. His plans at best were an anachronism from earlier centuries. The european colonial powers threw themselves into “the scramble for Africa,” which ended with Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Italy invading and almost completely dividing up the Afrikan continent, its ecology and peoples, among themselves by 1895. Millions of Afrikans were slaves and semi slaves in the new capitalist mines, plantations, highway projects. Millions were dying from starvation and brutality. Dr. Delany had long since been frozen out of Nigeria, his treaty torn up under British orders. Afrikan emigration, while exploring a militant rejection of u. s. injustice, was a dead end.

Even more to the point, it was a class plan for only a small minority of the “best & brightest.” This did not go unnoticed by other New Afrikans. In 1860, the newly-elected Abraham Lincoln found his Union dissolving. The Southern states were seceding even before his Inauguration. The new President tried to calm settler fears about possible masses of freed ex-slaves by picking up Dr. Delany’s own plan for Central American settlements. He promised that as quickly as Blacks were freed they would be sent out of the country. The Lincoln administration and congress appropriated funds to establish a Black colony for ex-slaves in Panama. Overwhelmingly, the Anti-Slavery movement attacked Lincoln playing the Black colony card as a racist move. To get rid of the Black community’s boldest & most resourceful, potential leaders, as well as divide their people just as the Crisis was upon them. A few, notably the nationalist forerunner Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, did support Lincoln. (Dr. Delany, on lecture tour in the West, wasn’t in the debate).

It is true that Harriet was not a public leader and writer in the way that Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Delany were. It’s also true that these debates among “free Negroes” in the North were only in the periphery of her vision. Harriet was focussed on guerrilla war in the South. Where the great majority of her people still were, workers & laborers just as Harriet was, isolated and in chains. She always likened slavery to being literally in Hell, and her attention was concentrated on the immediacy of jailbreaking her people out of Hell. An Amazon warrior, she was busy at war.

While Dr. Martin Delany’s vision of Black businessmen building a new nation empire in Afrika won him lasting recognition, Harriet had no such vision that history has recognized. For Harriet had no politics that men would recognize as such then or now. Not having a political party or a written doctrine or a plan for hierarchical government. Strong as her politics were, they existed hidden in different form. Of the three leaders whose paths came together then in Canada — John Brown, Dr. Martin Delany, and Harriet Tubman — it was Harriet who had the most rooted vision. For hers was a radical, people-centered way of life that in and of itself stood in war-like opposition to the madness of capitalism. This is important to us, and we’ll come back to it later.

The New Afrikan volunteers that Harriet & Dr. Martin Delany had recruited, working together in the Canadian exile communities, drifted away to other activities. Delany himself left on a pioneering Pan-Afrikanist expedition to Nigeria. By the time the Harper’s Ferry raid finally took place over a year later, Harriet had been taken ill while traveling & was out of contact with John Brown.

Sympathetic historians have always been at pains to stress how Harriet had unexpectedly been brought down by sickness, as though her absence at Harper’s Ferry somehow needed explaining. The plain truth was that Harriet wasn’t spending her life waiting around for white men to get it together. She had her own guerrilla work, her own political agenda, and she was pursuing those while the dedicated but disorganized John Brown was figuring out what to do. She wasn’t the supporter, remember, she was the warrior and leader herself. Even as strong a personality as John Brown couldn’t make her into a follower. Harriet raises for us the question of what it means to be an Amazon, to unite the questions of culture and war into your own life and body.

A New Afrikan Political-Military Leader

Harriet’s involvement with the failed John Brown conspiracy in 1858-59 signalled a shift*. She moved into a different period, in which her guerrilla work merged into the larger & more open clash that would be the Civil War. But these armies were settler men’s organizations. The Union Army was purely a patriarchal and hierarchical structure. And Harriet Tubman was an Outsider, biologically marked in race & gender as one of amerikkka’s subject proletarians. But if we ask what Harriet did with the Union Army, the truest answer might be: anything she wanted.

To get this we have to sidestep a moment in our story, shaking off our indoctrination even more & refocusing on Harriet’s real life as an Amazon. Harriet’s singular characteristic wasn’t bravery, as we’re always told. That’s another sly put-down of women. After all, many other New Afrikan women had also resisted in every way. Took part in prison breaks. Died under torture after attacking settlers. Took part in the Civil War. No, courage was as common as blood to those sisters.