Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman

by Lee, Butch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Dear Mother,

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

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

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

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

  A Revolutionary Politic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To Develop Armed Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  This wasn’t just about Race

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