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

by Lee, Butch

  Harriet was called to organize an Intelligence Service for the Department of the South. She recruited seven New Afrikan scouts who knew the region well and were experienced at evading the Southern patrols. She also recruited two New Afrikan river pilots, who were familiar with the coastal waters & river systems. The ten of them made contact with networks of hundreds of anonymous New Afrikans still in slavery in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, providing detailed information on every Confederate move. Did you think that Harriet could personally spy on hundreds of miles of enemy territory?

  This fills in a picture for us. Instead of Harriet as a lone superwoman spy for a white men’s army — which is what the capitalist patriarchy has wanted us to think — we can see that she was the Commander (as she always put it) of a sizeable Black intelligence network, guiding units of Black troops, who were the spear & shield of a warzone community of embattled Black women, children, and men.

  Part of Harriet’s work with the Black regiments then was as an intelligence officer, leading her detachment. But she also personally served as a scout, going armed with a rifle to guide the advance when the regiments struck. After the War, Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote of her: “I can bear witness to the value of her services in South Carolina and Florida. She made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

  Harriet herself rarely spoke of her battlefield experiences. But her grand-niece Alice Stewart remembers her & her mother visiting the elderly Harriet. The young Alice played in the tall grass of the field:

  Suddenly I became aware of something moving toward me thru the grass. So smoothly did it glide and with so little noise. I was frightened! Then reason conquered fear and I knew it was Aunt Harriet, flat on her stomach, and with only the use of her arms and serpentine movement of her body, gliding smoothly along. Mother helped her back to her chair and they laughed. Aunt Harriet then told me that was the way she had gone by many a sentinel during the war.

  After months of training, the first Black regiment was ready to fight. In January 1863, the New Afrikan troops, carried by Union gunboats, raided plantations up the St. Mary’s River that divides Georgia from Florida. While that first raid brought back large quantities of rice, livestock, lumber, bricks and iron to the hard-pressed Sea Islands, a more valuable prize soon became their target. The 2nd South Carolina Regiment was still understrength — and all the intelligence reported that many still in chains there were ready to join up as soon as they saw a way to escape.

  Just as the original mass jailbreak strategy of the New Afrikan nation and the experience of the Underground Railroad gave shape to John Brown’s guerrilla plans, so it continued in the building raids of the Black regiments. On March 6, 1863, Gen. Saxton wrote Secretary of War Stanton about Florida, based on the reports of Harriet’s Intelligence Service: “I have reliable information that there are large numbers of able-bodied Negroes in that vicinity who are watching for an opportunity to join us.”

  Four days later both regiments went up the St. John’s River, with orders to capture Jacksonville, Florida. The ambitious Union plan was to stay and win back all of the state from the Confederacy. While the Black ex-slaves easily seized Jacksonville, Confederate reinforcements over the next several weeks made their situation unpromising, and the regiments had to retreat back offshore. New soldiers had been recruited in Jacksonville, however, and the experience of those campaigns led to a new military strategy that Harriet herself would initiate.

  Several months later the most famous episode of Harriet’s life happened, when she initiated and led the Combahee River raid in June 1863. It began when Harriet told Gen. David Hunter that plantation slave spies along the Combahee River in South Carolina had reported the location of all the floating mines, or “torpedoes” as they were then called, that the Confederates had placed to guard against Union attacks upriver. She felt that the rich area along the River was now ripe for invasion.

  Gen. Hunter asked her, according to Harriet, “if she would go with several gunboats up the Combahee River, the object of the expedition being to take up the torpedoes placed by the rebels in the river, to destroy railroads and bridges, and to cut off supplies from the rebel troops. She said she would go if Col. Montgomery was to be appointed commander of the expedition.... Accordingly, Col. Montgomery was appointed to the command, and Harriet, with several men under her, the principal of whom was J. Plowden... accompanied the expedition.”

  Of course, Harriet led the raid as much as anyone. She wanted Col. Montgomery as the official commander because of their working relationship. Before their troops even set out, Confederate intelligence had received advance warning from agents in the North: “The N.Y. Tribune says that the Negro troops at Hilton Head, S.C. will soon start upon an expedition, under the command of Colonel Montgomery, differing in many respects from any heretofore projected.” That was definitely a historic understatement, it turned out.

  Remarkable as the night raid was, it might have been lost in history, as so many of Harriet’s activities were, if it hadn’t been caught in a reporter’s dispatch printed in the Boston newspaper, The Commonwealth:

  HARRIET TUBMAN

  Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman[emphasis in original], dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch. It was a glorious consummation.

  After they were all fairly well disposed of in the Beaufort charge, they were addressed in strains of thrilling eloquence by their gallant deliverer... The Colonel was followed by a speech from the black woman, who led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted. For sound sense and real native eloquence, her address would do honor to any man, and it created a great sensation.

  The Confederates, placing too much confidence on the river mines which Harriet quickly had disabled, were caught off guard and fled in disorder. New Afrikan soldiers advanced rapidly along both banks of the river, torching four plantations and six mills. Hundreds and hundreds of slaves reached the river, despite the plantation owners’ efforts to drive them all inland. More than the three gunboats, overloaded, could carry. Harriet remembered the morning:

  I never saw such a scene. We laughed and laughed and laughed. Here you’d see a woman with a pail on her head, rice-a-smoking in it just as she’d taken it from the fire, young one hanging on behind... One woman brought two pigs, a white one and a black one; we took them all on board; named the white pig Beauregard [a Southern general], and the black one Jeff Davis [president of the Confederacy]. Sometimes the women would come with twins hanging around their necks; it appears I never saw so many twins in my life; bags on their shoulders, baskets on their heads, and young ones tagging behind, all loaded...

  Official Confederate Army reports admitted: “The enemy seems to have been well posted as to the character and capacity of our troops... and to have been well guided by persons thoroughly acquainted with the river and country.”

  The Exact Spot of Enemy’s Imbalance

  While there was a dead-on significance to the event itself, to a New Afrikan woman leading troops into action against the slaveowners, there was a broader impact not in Harriet as a person but in what she helped start. The use of the regiments in a New Afrikan guerrilla way, in utilizing superior intelligence to avoid confrontation & strike unexpected blows, freeing large numbers of prisoners while sinking the slaveowners’ economy, was strategic. As a warrior, she put her hand on the exact spot of her opponent’s imbalance.

  This was grasped by Gen. Hunter, who the next day wrote u.s. Secretary of War Stanton that the Combahee action was but an experiment of a new plan. He felt that with this app
roach the entire, fertile coastal areas of the Deep South, which contributed so much to the Confederate economy, would have to be completely abandoned by the slaveowners. All without any Northern white reinforcements. New Afrikans would do it all themselves. Hunter immediately planned for more such raids, “injuring the enemy... and carrying away their slaves, thus rapidly filling up the South Carolina regiments of which there are now four.”

  Suddenly, like a momentary clearing in a storm, we can see a brilliantly sharper picture of wars within wars. Hidden within the war of Union vs. Confederacy was always the subversive power of the New Afrikan Nation to carry out their own war. To be their own liberators. And in Harriet’s life as an Amazon we see the hidden striving of millions of women — as a People unto ourselves — to defy the capitalist patriarchy and to put our will upon the world.

  Exhausted from several years at the front & receiving word that her aged parents needed her, Harriet took leave and went back to N.Y. in June 1864. After months of recuperation, she became involved in a new military plan. News had reached the North of a desperate Confederate effort to create a 200,000-man New Afrikan army of the South to hold back the Union (the New Afrikan mercenaries would be made “free,” of course, in return for fighting for the slaveowners).

  In February 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis told his people to recognize a bitter truth: “We are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us or against us.” Confederate soldiers sent petitions to Richmond supporting the controversial proposal, as their front lines crumbled. Finally, on February 18, 1865, General Robert E. Lee asked the Confederate Congress to authorize a New Afrikan mercenary corps: “The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers.” Such legislation passed at the war’s end, too late to make any difference. The State of Virginia had already gone ahead and was training its first two companies of Black Confederate soldiers.

  Dr. Martin Delany saw this as an opportunity. Meeting with Lincoln at the Whitest House, Delany proposed that a separate u.s. Black army be created, officered by Black men, to prevent that Confederate threat. Delany saw this new army boldly advancing straight into the Confederate heartland: “Proclaiming freedom as they go, sustaining it and protecting it by arming the emancipated, taking them as fresh troops...”

  President Lincoln, knowing that a large New Afrikan mercenary army fighting for the Confederacy could change the whole situation, surprisingly agreed to Dr. Delany’s plan. Delany was tested by an army board for days & then given the rank of Major of Infantry, the first & in the Civil War the only New Afrikan to reach that rank. He was given orders to start forming his Black army in the Sea Islands. The New Afrikan strategy of the Underground Railroad, of John Brown’s raid, of the Carolina regiments growing out of armed jail-breaks, reached its final form in this projected Black army.

  Of course, Delany realized just as John Brown had that the expedition needed the intelligence & propaganda services of the Underground Railroad, moving through the plantations ahead of it. His biographer writes: “Certain leading spirits of the ‘Underground Railroad’ were invoked. Scouts incognito were already ‘on to Richmond,’ and the services of the famous Harriet Tubman, having been secured to serve in the South...” Delany & Harriet, having once worked together recruiting volunteers in Canada for John Brown’s guerrilla effort, again found themselves comrades in a new and even more ambitious Black military effort.

  All this time, even while she had been Commander of the Intelligence Section of the Union Department of the South, Harriet had never been on the books. She was a free-lance Amazon, who worked with the Union Army but who supported herself and led herself. As is our way. (Not that this prevented her from making claims for money rightfully due her once the War was over.) Her herstorical vision stamped its mark again after she had joined the Delany-Lincoln New Afrikan army project.

  On March 20, 1865, Harriet was in Washington to pick up her papers from the u.s. Department of War giving her passage on a transport ship from New York harbor back to the Sea Islands. A trip she never completed.

  While travelling through Philadelphia on her way up to New York, Harriet was intercepted by representatives of the u.s. Sanitary Commission. They asked her help in dealing with terrible conditions in the New Afrikan hospitals run by the u.s. government near Washington, d.c. Putting a hold on her assignment, Harriet immediately travelled to the hospitals and began trying to save as many as she could. Major Delany himself had not yet sailed for the South, and wouldn’t arrive there until April 3, 1865. That was the day that the triumphant Union Army captured the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia. Seven days later, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his starving Army of Northern Virginia, and it was done.

  Harriet was still more than busy, working in the hospitals for months after the War’s end. In July 1865, she returned to Washington to protest the conditions in the hospitals. The result was that on July 22, 1865, u.s. surgeon-general Barnes appointed Harriet Tubman as the “matron” or woman manager of the Colored Hospital at Ft. Monroe, Virginia. Her military travel pass back there still survives. But with the end of the War her appointment never took effect, and eventually Harriet returned to Auburn, N.Y. Her parents and other family were there, and Harriet would spend the rest of her life there. Still in exile from “home,” the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was never going to be safe for Harriet to go home. She would always be the target of assassination.

  It is said that Harriet “retired” after the Civil War. This is yet another misdirection. The fall of the Slave System ended an entire historical period, and began a new period where the oppressor system was based on neo-colonialism. In that new political environment Harriet was repressed out of official politics, as all Black women were. Not that she nor they ever stopped working at building the new base for the New Afrikan Nation. Or stopped publicly supporting women’s struggle.

  We know that Harriet is hidden in a manipulated fame, her Amazon identity dis-figured by a femmed-up image as men’s supporter and helper. Even Black Nationalists have been drawn into this white tactic, paying lip service to Harriet’s Amazon legacy by occasionally saying her name (but really dis-missing her). We need to talk about Harriet not just as a doer of heroic deeds but as a person.

  The truth is that Harriet makes amerikkkans uneasy. Because she wasn’t what women are supposed to be. Yet was much more. That’s why she was & is exceptionalized in such a way. Take her celebrated physical powers. Harriet’s military deeds are often implicitly linked to tales of how amazingly strong she was. Not even biologically like “real” feminine women, it’s silently implied. This actually has its origins right in the slaveowner’s mouth.

  Her owner when she was a teenager was proud of his human property. He would exhibit Harriet boastfully to his white friends. Harriet would “lift huge barrels of produce and draw a loaded stone boat like an ox.” This picture is no accident. For Harriet and other Black women were only a kind of animal to euro-capitalism. Not “real” women, at all.

  Some of Harriet’s relatives later complained that white journalists had played up her muscular strength, making her into a freak. As we know, many New Afrikan women were physically strong. For the same reason that some six foot white u.s. marines over in ’Nam found that they couldn’t carry as much as some 80-pound Vietnamese peasant grandmothers. Harriet had spent years in the fields at hard labor — often lifting heavy weights from sunup to sundown. Plowing, handling horses, hauling logs by hand, chopping and loading heavy chunks of timber hour after hour. Developing muscles was natural in those circumstances for women as for men.

  While Harriet in her youth may well have been as strong as any man on their plantation, there is no evidence of anything more. We do know that at least twice in middle age she got into scuffles with white men and — outnumbered — lost both times. The second time she was knocked unconscious. Our sis wasn’t superstrong or superhuman, and she too
k her lumps in the rough and tumble of life. She was, however, an Amazon.

  Just as a glamorous actress played Harriet on television, on several book covers she is shown as tall, muscular and threatening. Harriet would have probably had a good laugh at that. Because, in real life, Harriet was five feet tall, slight of build, beginning to be stooped over by the time of the Civil War, missing her front teeth. She wore the cheap cotton dresses that working class women wore then. Her one act of styling was the brightly colored bandanna that she always wore around her head (maybe to hide the mark of her childhood head injury). There is an early photograph actually showing Harriet with a group of ex-slaves she has led to freedom. Harriet is hard to pick out. Short and somber, with worn face and clothes, Harriet just fades back into the band of ex-slave escapees. So common as to be invisible.

  Sometimes in science we can suddenly penetrate an ecology or culture not by what is overtly there, but by what is missing. Seeing the pattern of what is not there. While certain things about Harriet are played up, what is never discussed is Harriet’s relationship to men. Both personally and in the larger sense, of her relationship to the roles for women that patriarchy made.

  Harriet wasn’t what women are supposed to be. Her life wasn’t centered around men, she didn’t swerve from her course to suit men, and she wasn’t even vaguely interested in the role women were assigned. Like, Harriet never had children. Not any. Perhaps she was infertile or maybe she used birth control, but in an age when u.s. women were expected and required by the capitalist patriarchy to have six, eight, or twelve children — New Afrikan enslaved women particularly — Harriet had none.