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

by Lee, Butch

  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 medical 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 milit
ant” 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.