by Butch Lee
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 themain 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 asindividuals 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 A
frikans, but in the shadows of this law white kidnapping of any Afrikans in the North for quick sale on the Southern auction blocks was taking place.
A movement of illegal but open mass resistance arose to the u.s. criminal justice system. A mass movement that rescued Black prisoners and fought the police and courts and federal marshals. Like all true mass struggles, it had many leaders and many brilliant local battles. One of the most famous then was the Battle of Troy, New York. Which was led by an illiterate working class woman who was herself a fugitive with a bounty on her head. None other than Harriet Tubman (for you see, in real life “America’s Most Wanted” was a Black woman).
On April 27, 1860, Harriet Tubman was traveling to Boston to attend a large Anti Slavery meeting. Stopping in Troy to visit a relative, she was immediately told that a fugitive New Afrikan, Charles Nalle, had been captured by the slavers. Federal marshals were holding him at the downtown courthouse, where his owner was applying to a u.s. commissioner for Nalle’s return in chains back to Virginia. (Those at the hearing were surprised, for the thirty-year-old Nalle and his owner looked strikingly alike, differing only in a shade of skin color. They were biologically two brothers with the same father, but one the slave and one the owner.) Downtown stores had closed, as everyone was going to the courthouse to see the Roman spectacle.
Harriet had helped quickly organize a conspiracy. With her face hidden in a large shawl, carrying a basket, Harriet bent over acting like an old woman. Two other Black women were by her side, pretending to support her by the arms. Tugging the guard by his coat, Harriet persuaded him to admit the “harmless” women to the courtroom. Where she sank down in the doorway.
Outside, a New Afrikan man named William Henry started speaking to the crowd, covertly warning some among them to get ready: “There’s a fugitive in that office. Pretty soon you will see him come forth...He’s going to be taken to the depot to go to Virginia on the first train.” Henry, who was an unknown laborer, is believed to be Harriet’s brother and the relative she was visiting in Troy.
When the u.s. commissioner ruled against Nalle, the prisoner suddenly leapt for the window and stepped out on the ledge. Cries of support came from below. But his hopes to jump down into the crowd were cut off when Federal agents grabbed him and dragged him back inside. As the local newspaper reported:
The crowd at this time numbered nearly a thousand persons. Many were black, and a good share were of the female sex. They blocked up State Street from First street to the alley, and kept surging to and from.
Nalle’s defense attorney, Martin Townsend, delayed the slavers by filing an emergency appeal right then and there. He won an order demanding Nalle’s appearance before a judge of the State Supreme Court. As the slavers and Federal agents convoyed the chained Nalle out, Harriet Tubman rose and threw off her disguise. Racing to the open window, she shouted to the Anti-Slavery fighters mixed in the crowd: “Here he comes! Take him!”
Harriet and her Underground group had arranged for a boat to be secretly waiting at the river outside town. She ran down the courthouse stairs, overtaking the Federal party and breaking into their circle. Locking her arms with Nalle’s Harriet began pulling him away from the u.s. marshals. “This man shall not go back to slavery!” she shouted. “Take him, friends! Drag him to the river!”
In the middle of a crowded downtown street, a small battle raged. Federal agents and police swung their clubs, and some drew their pistols and began firing. Black guerrillas and their white allies charged into them. Nalle himself fought desperately to get free, side by side with Harriet. Attorney Townsend witnessed it all:
In the melee she was repeatedly beaten over the head with policemen’s clubs, but she never for a moment released her hold, but cheered Nalle and his friends with her voice, and struggled with the officers until they were literally worn out with their exertions, and Nalle was separated from them.
They hurried Nalle down to the river, where a sympathetic ferryman rowed him to the other side. But no sooner had a bloodied and exhausted Nalle touched the shore again than he was recaptured. This time the u.s. marshals and police rushed him under heavy guard to Police Justice Stewart’s office, which they barricaded. Just in time, as Harriet had led a rush of four hundred Anti-Slavers on to the steam ferry boat and across the river.
When the u.s. marshals hiding inside started firing wildly at the surrounding force, someone rallied the attackers. “They can only kill a dozen of us — come on!” New Afrikan men charged up the stairs and forced open the door. The first of them was cut down by a hatchet swung by Deputy Sheriff Morrison. His body stuck in the doorway, though, so the door could not be slammed shut. The Anti-Slavery men broke in, but were overcome in hand-to-hand fighting one by one. Then, as Attorney Martin Townsend tells us, it was all on a squad of Black Amazons to win or lose the battle:
And when the men who led the assault upon the door of Judge Stewart’s office were stricken down, Harriet and a number of other colored women rushed over their bodies, brought Nalle out, and putting him into the first wagon passing, started him for the West.
After the battle u.s. marshals tried to hunt them down, but members of the underground hid them well. And an entire Black Nation protected Harriet. How shallow is today’s false image of Harriet as a lone, non-political do-gooder, when we glimpse her reality as an Amazon leader of an entire people at war. What was happening in the guerrilla war was that violent battles were taking place not only in the South but in the North as well. Thousands upon thousands of New Afrikans — women easily as much as men — created new battlegrounds, and endured the real costs and real casualties of bitter struggles. In that long, difficult, and successful process to develop the North as a vibrant Rear Base Area for their war, Black women and men stepped up to recreate themselves in dignity. Freedom is never given, but only won.
Underground Railroad leader William Still gave an example of the militancy of escaping New Afrikans. In 1855, six fugitives breaking out of Virginia complete with the owner’s horses and carriage, were stopped on the road by a posse of white patrollers:
At this juncture, the fugitives verily believing that time had arrived for the practical use of their pistols and dirks, pulled them out of concealment — the young women as well as the young men — and declared they would not be taken! One of the white men raised his gun, pointing the muzzle directly towards one of the young women, with the threat that he would ‘shoot’, etc. ‘Shoot! shoot!! shoot!!!’ she exclaimed, with a double barrelled pistol in one hand and a long dirk knife in the other, utterly unterrified and fully ready for a death struggle. The male leader of the fugitives by this time had pulled back the hammers of his pistols, and was about to fire! Their adversaries seeing the weapons, and the unflinching determination on the part of the runaways to stand their ground, ‘spill blood, kill, or die,’ rather than be taken, very prudently ‘sidled over to the other side of the road’...
“Moses” and “The General”
All this is the larger context in which Harriet Tubman was a part. To blow away the individualistic fiction of Harriet as a lone rescuer or as a Black superwoman takes nothing that is hers away from her. Instead, it frees her in our understanding to be her true self, a New Afrikan woman who was part of the military and political leadership in her Peoples’ war. While her underground name was “Moses,” it was meaningful that both John Brown and Union Army commanders who knew her respectfully called Harriet “the General.”
Her second biographer, Earl Conrad, pinpointed the widespread lack of understanding of Harriet Tubman’s military role, and the real influence she had in the major events leading to the destruction of the Slave Power:
It has often been said, ‘She made nineteen trips into the slave country,’ but the meaning of this enormous enterprise has been hidden in the lack of illustration. A trip into the slave territory and the “kidnapping” of a band of blacks was no less than a militar
y 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.
