Jailbreak out of History |
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a re-biography of Harriet Tubman |
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by Butch Lee
| 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 . |
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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’...”
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...
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.
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...”
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.