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

by Lee, Butch

  Even more to the point, it was a class plan for only a small minority of the “best & brightest.” This did not go unnoticed by other New Afrikans. In 1860, the newly-elected Abraham Lincoln found his Union dissolving. The Southern states were seceding even before his Inauguration. The new President tried to calm settler fears about possible masses of freed ex-slaves by picking up Dr. Delany’s own plan for Central American settlements. He promised that as quickly as Blacks were freed they would be sent out of the country. The Lincoln administration and congress appropriated funds to establish a Black colony for ex-slaves in Panama. Overwhelmingly, the Anti-Slavery movement attacked Lincoln playing the Black colony card as a racist move. To get rid of the Black community’s boldest & most resourceful, potential leaders, as well as divide their people just as the Crisis was upon them. A few, notably the nationalist forerunner Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, did support Lincoln. (Dr. Delany, on lecture tour in the West, wasn’t in the debate).

  It is true that Harriet was not a public leader and writer in the way that Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Delany were. It’s also true that these debates among “free Negroes” in the North were only in the periphery of her vision. Harriet was focussed on guerrilla war in the South. Where the great majority of her people still were, workers & laborers just as Harriet was, isolated and in chains. She always likened slavery to being literally in Hell, and her attention was concentrated on the immediacy of jailbreaking her people out of Hell. An Amazon warrior, she was busy at war.

  While Dr. Martin Delany’s vision of Black businessmen building a new nation empire in Afrika won him lasting recognition, Harriet had no such vision that history has recognized. For Harriet had no politics that men would recognize as such then or now. Not having a political party or a written doctrine or a plan for hierarchical government. Strong as her politics were, they existed hidden in different form. Of the three leaders whose paths came together then in Canada — John Brown, Dr. Martin Delany, and Harriet Tubman — it was Harriet who had the most rooted vision. For hers was a radical, people-centered way of life that in and of itself stood in war-like opposition to the madness of capitalism. This is important to us, and we’ll come back to it later.

  The New Afrikan volunteers that Harriet & Dr. Martin Delany had recruited, working together in the Canadian exile communities, drifted away to other activities. Delany himself left on a pioneering Pan-Afrikanist expedition to Nigeria. By the time the Harper’s Ferry raid finally took place over a year later, Harriet had been taken ill while traveling & was out of contact with John Brown.

  Sympathetic historians have always been at pains to stress how Harriet had unexpectedly been brought down by sickness, as though her absence at Harper’s Ferry somehow needed explaining. The plain truth was that Harriet wasn’t spending her life waiting around for white men to get it together. She had her own guerrilla work, her own political agenda, and she was pursuing those while the dedicated but disorganized John Brown was figuring out what to do. She wasn’t the supporter, remember, she was the warrior and leader herself. Even as strong a personality as John Brown couldn’t make her into a follower. Harriet raises for us the question of what it means to be an Amazon, to unite the questions of culture and war into your own life and body.

  A New Afrikan Political-Military Leader

  Harriet’s involvement with the failed John Brown conspiracy in 1858-59 signalled a shift*. She moved into a different period, in which her guerrilla work merged into the larger & more open clash that would be the Civil War. But these armies were settler men’s organizations. The Union Army was purely a patriarchal and hierarchical structure. And Harriet Tubman was an Outsider, biologically marked in race & gender as one of amerikkka’s subject proletarians. But if we ask what Harriet did with the Union Army, the truest answer might be: anything she wanted.

  To get this we have to sidestep a moment in our story, shaking off our indoctrination even more & refocusing on Harriet’s real life as an Amazon. Harriet’s singular characteristic wasn’t bravery, as we’re always told. That’s another sly put-down of women. After all, many other New Afrikan women had also resisted in every way. Took part in prison breaks. Died under torture after attacking settlers. Took part in the Civil War. No, courage was as common as blood to those sisters.

  What so distinguished Harriet was that she was a pro. She was one of the most brilliant professional practitioners ever at the art of war. As a guerrilla, so elusive that she could strike fatal blows and never be felt. Lead battles and go unseen. As an Amazon, she conducted warfare in a zone beyond men’s comprehension. But her blows still fell on point.

  Her professional skill as a guerrilla, operating behind enemy lines in the Underground Railroad, is well documented. Season after season, in nineteen raids, she evaded & misdirected the Slaveocracy. Her always changing tactics were like textbook lessons. Coming under suspicion, she would lead her escapees with forged papers onto a train going South, not North, then circle back. Disguises were sometimes used, disguising women as men — something Harriet herself did — or vice-versa. Once, knowing she might meet her former master in town, she dressed even more raggedy. And she carried an armful of live chickens. When she saw him, she “accidentally” let the birds loose. Her former master passed by in amusement at the apparently hapless old Black woman — her face averted as she scrambled on the ground to catch her chickens.

  Other times, when a slave would weaken during the difficult journey & want to go back, Harriet would simply put her pistol to his head and give him her only choices: “Dead niggers tell no tales.” What i’m saying is, she could walk that walk.

  Harriet never put down her personal thoughts, her story as she saw it. She lived in a more personally reticent and cautious age, when women were far less open in proclaiming their personal tactics & strategies. An illiterate ex-slave woman in a hostile land, her only surviving autobiographical accounts were additionally filtered through the motives of interviewers — no matter how well-intentioned — for largely white audiences.

  The reason we need to be reminded is that Harriet couldn’t leave any direct word (like all those countless sisters lost in history), to counteract the capitalist patriarchy’s whiteout of her identity. Unlike, for example, Malcolm X. We have to look at the trail signs she left in the forest of history, where her footsteps led. The improbable picture given out now of Harriet is someone who was a bold opponent & tormentor towards the white settlers of the South, but who was a simple, loyal, political go-along towards the white settlers of the North. When we put it that way, how likely is that? Truth was, Harriet had a guerrilla relationship towards all of white amerikkka, North and South. She had, in a deeper sense, an Amazon guerrilla relationship to the Union Army itself.

  Harriet, who never hid being a feminist, did not challenge the patriarchal military institutions to end “discrimination”. Nor did she put on men’s uniforms and try to pass in a regiment. She wasn’t trying to be admitted to West Point or get white men’s permission to become a soldier — she already was one. Harriet was in a hurry and she wasn’t aiming to be a rifle-carrier in a settler men’s army. Her aim was far beyond that. As a New Afrikan political-military leader her aim was on the actual mass liberating, arming and organizing of her people. While doing this she also aimed to assist, prod, guide, and at times even lead, the huge but often clueless Union Army and its white men’s government into smashing the slave states into the dust. This was a military role so ambitious that it seems inconceivable to us (who are conditioned into accepting the horizons patriarchy permits us) and yet that is precisely what Harriet did.

  Even as the new Republican Party president, Abraham Lincoln, was taking office in March 1861, eleven Slave States were seceding & forming their “Confederate States of America.” Their gathering Confederate armies threatened Washington, D.C. itself, which was only a Southern Slavery city sandwiched between the two Slave states of Virginia and Marylan
d. Lincoln called for white volunteers nationwide, and ordered regular Federal troops from the North, under Gen. Benjamin Butler, down to defend the capitol.

  As Butler’s forces moved slowly on foot through Maryland, New Afrikan slaves began escaping from plantations and taking refuge with the Union Army. According to William Wells Brown, an ex-slave himself and Underground Railroad worker who spoke with Harriet after the War, she was unofficially on the scene. Harriet had hurried down from her hide-out in Canada & just attached herself to the army. As her biographer, Earl Conrad, says:

  Harriet followed Gen. Butler’s army as it marched through Maryland on the way to the defense of Washington during the months of April and May, 1861, when Maryland debated whether to secede and when the Federal troops met with violence at Baltimore. It was, after all, her home country; she knew how to get in and out of here speedily, and she had friends who could shelter her. It was an opportunity to stimulate slaves to escape to the Union Army or to take care of them as rapidly as they came into the Federal camps... Harriet, ‘hanging upon the outskirts of the Union Army’, was possibly the first American woman to visit or work on the battlefields of the Civil War.

  It was to be in the military theater of the deeper South, however, that Harriet’s work with the Union Army was to reach full impact. The Summer and Fall of 1861 were frustrating months of sporadic clashes in Virginia, of Union setbacks, of gathering forces. Radical Abolitionists and New Afrikans were critical of the white-supremacist Lincoln, who was unwilling to either legally end slavery or arm New Afrikans. His first commander, Gen. McClellan, hated Blacks and publicly promised that his troops would join the slaveowners to “crush” any Black uprising. Harriet, temporarily back in New England, publicly scorned the settler hopes that by compromising the white family feud could be healed. “Never wound a snake, but kill it!”, she warned.

  A Nodal Point: Blowing away the Whiteness

  Then, in the Winter, came the news of the Union victory at Port Royal Harbor, South Carolina. Carried by the blockading Union Navy, Federal troops seized the rich plantations of the Sea Islands off the Carolina Coast, Hilton Head, and, on December 8, 1861, the mainland town of Beaufort, S.C. Thousands of slaves saw the white settlers fleeing for the interior, while thousands of other New Afrikans would make their way through the forests and swamps and Confederate troops—or die trying—to reach this Union-held territory in the Deep South.

  The importance of this victory was much greater than it has appeared. While attention has always been fixed on the main dueling armies—the Union’s Army of the Potomac & Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—the process that would eventually doom the Confederacy first emerged in the Deep South. That was the Black regiments, inexhaustibly growing as they drew on the millions of the Black Nation. Harriet was right there, one of the military participants & a player in the creation of Black military strength.

  All this has been whited-out, of course, by the capitalist patriarchy. It is laid down for us that “Harriet Tubman was a nurse and spy for the Union Army.” While technically not a lie, this is deliberately misleading. First place: we automatically, when we hear the word “nurse,” picture a nice, respectable civilian profession, with lots of humanitarian white women nurturing the wounded. Not true. At that time in amerikkka, nursing with an army was a male military role. (Nursing in general wasn’t a profession, and women didn’t yet do it.)

  It was a soldier’s job and a “male” role. So much so that, as feminist historian Drew Gilpin Faust points out, the few Southern women volunteering as Confederate Army nurses were...

  ... subjects of gossip and speculation. Women working in hospitals seemed in the eyes of many southerners to display curiously masculine strengths and abilities. Clara MacLean confided to her diary that her neighbor Eliza McKee, recently departed for Virginia as a nurse, had always possessed such strength as to seem ‘almost masculine — Indeed I used to tell her I never felt easy in her society if discussing delicate subjects; I could scarcely persuade myself that she was not in disguise.’ And Mary Chestnut, the famed South Carolina diarist, felt much the same about the intimidating strength of her friend McCord [nurse Eliza McCord], who seemed to possess ‘the intellect of a man.’ Nurses were not truly women, but in some sense men in drag.

  Harriet was an outsider to those white gender restrictions, since New Afrikan women were not considered “real” women (any more than butches were). And she didn’t work in any sterile hospitals. There were no MASH units, no antibiotics, no IV drips, no plasma, neither sophisticated surgery nor protective gloves, no medivac out of there. Standard military nursing then was mostly bringing food and water, and cleaning up the blood and dirt and shit. With lots of danger from infectious diseases. So you’d better believe that Harriet wasn’t hanging out on the New Afrikan ward with crowds of white civilian women. Nor was it some minor “helping” role she created.

  Again, what we find is that exceptionalizing Harriet, making her this individualistic super-woman torn out of her political context, pretends to honor her but actually trivializes her. We were given this picture of heroic Harriet, the lone Black woman nurse and spy, helping out at the side of the gigantic white men’s Union Army. Seen that way, her deeds were brave, of course, but insignificant to the real deal, the big bloody battles between settler men’s armies that would determine her peoples’ fate. Isn’t that the impression we were slyly poisoned with? As though a New Afrikan Amazon could only be a “helper” at the side of the big boys?

  Placing Harriet back into her politics, back into her people’s struggle, totally changes our understanding of what she was doing. The capitalist patriarchy loves to describe Harriet’s army duty as nursing, because it civilianizes her. Since we associate nursing with nurturing & maternal care of white men, it redefines her as a loyal woman to patriarchy. When actually she was subversive to the core.

  Harriet wasn’t helping a white army, although that’s the impression given us. In the Civil War, Harriet was a woman warrior in a Black army. Just as Harriet was not the only New Afrikan woman who took weapon in hand against the slave masters, just as she was not the only New Afrikan child who rebelled, so she was not the only Black woman warrior by far. She was one of many, there at the creation.

  We know that other New Afrikan women fought. Like Maria Lewis, who served as a cavalry trooper in the 8th New York Cavalry Regiment. Lewis “wore uniform & carried a sword & carbine & road & scouted & skirmished & fought like the rest” (in the words of a contemporary account). She was one of the Black soldiers who presented seventeen captured Confederate battle flags to the War Department, in a Washington ceremony. Fourteen year old Susie King Taylor was led out of slavery in Georgia, along with other children, by her uncle. She had already secretly learned how to read, and ended up attached to the 1st South Carolina regiment as a literacy teacher for the soldiers, nurse and laundress. Thousands of New Afrikan women worked in Union camps, as laborers and nurses, cooks, laundresses, teachers.

  Harriet Tubman might not even have been the most celebrated New Afrikan woman spy of the war. Mary Elizabeth Bowser, who worked at the Confederate White House in Richmond, secretly listened to President Jefferson Davis’ strategy sessions & kept the Union informed. Under suspicion, she split with $2500 and left the Confederate White House burning behind her. The Confederacy was riddled with New Afrikan spies, both women and men. Mary Louveste, who worked at the Confederate Navy Yard where the top-secret ironclad warship Virginia was under construction, took the plans to the Union Navy in Washington so they’d be ready.

  Despite all the publicity around the movie Glory, with Denzel Washington, the Civil War has always been like white men’s personal property. Their personal war (which is why so many thousands of them love to play in costume at Civil War “reenactments”). But in blood-soaked real life, the stalemate that dragged on for years between Union and Confederacy was finally snapped by the Black Nation, whic
h imposed its own agenda and forced the Confederacy to surrender.

  It’s true that the New Afrikan 54th Massachusetts Volunteers of “Glory” fame was special, a regiment that represented much of the New Afrikan leadership in the North. Sojourner Truth’s grandson served in it, as did Martin Delany’s son and two of Frederick Douglass’ sons. But thousands of New Afrikans had already taken up arms before the 54th was formed. New Afrikan militias had been formed in a number of places — not the least of which were the Sea Islands.

  Although it’s seldom discussed, maritime convention and need had always let ships have multi-national and multi-lingual crews (sailors, even white ones, were still semi-slaves at that time, without full citizenship rights and legally wards of the government). So the u.s. navy had always had many New Afrikan sailors on its ships. 30,000 New Afrikans served in the Union Navy during the war.

  New Afrikan soldiers helped fight back Lee in Virginia in 1864, and led the capture of Charleston in 1865. It was known that General Sherman may have marched through Georgia, but the saying back then was “the Black regiments held open the door.” The Black regiments would make up 180,000 troops, ten percent of the Union armies by the last major battles (and one-third of the standing Union Army months later at the end of 1865). These regiments were largely ex-slave escapee forces, forming out of the substance of the South itself like an auto-immune disorder in Slavery.