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

by Lee, Butch

  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.

  Harriet steps forward

  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.

  Increasing Violence and Will

  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 trends of urbanization and 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 an
d 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 Conspiracy in U.S. History

  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 In
dependence 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.’