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

by Lee, Butch

  And it can hardly be a surprise that they fought with a determination that struck whites on both sides.

  Naturally, it was the slaveowners more quickly than anyone else who understood that New Afrikan soldiers made their downfall inevitable. Judge John Underwood of Richmond said after the war: “I had a conversation with one of the leading men in that city, and he said to me that the enlistment of Negro troops by the United States was the turning point of the rebellion; that it was the heaviest blow they ever received. He remarked that when the slaves deserted their masters, and showed a general disposition to do so and join the forces of the United States, intelligent men everywhere saw that the matter was ended.”

  A Multi-faceted Reality

  This should help us to come to grips with war in a deeper way. The patriarchal view of war is schizophrenic, dividing up the flowing reality into constricted boxes of macho dualities: master vs. subject; mind vs. body; men vs. women and children; fighting vs. building; army vs. community; military vs. political. And so on. This isn’t stupidity on their part, merely a necessary construct for their kind of alienated universe. In the popular macho view, fighters are only those hitting or killing someone. Unless Harriet, for example, had put on a Union Army general’s uniform and had done a book signing tour talking about how many men she had killed, she can’t be recognized as a warrior. Although she saw more danger and combat than a Colin Powell, by far.

  Even making a hit movie about the Black regiments only perpetuates that ideological domination. “Glory obscures the ambivalence, the ambiguity, and disillusionment that military experience held for many African-American men and women during the Civil War. Indeed, the absence of Black women in the film belies their presence in many military encampments as civilians, nurses, or, the case of Harriet Tubman, crucial strategic combatants.” (Historian Jim Cullen.)

  When we speak of the flow of reality, we mean, for instance, that the explosion of the New Afrikan troops was only a part of and the inevitable flowering of the mass prison breaks and over fifty years of guerrilla work in the Underground Railroad. Harriet was both a participant and one of the foremothers of the Black regiments. While they wore the Union “blue” and were under white settler officers, these soldiers were in reality a part of the New Afrikan nation — and its political movement. They had a dual identity, living the possibilities of both regular soldiers of the u.s. settler empire and New Afrikan rebels against it. Unresolved for that brief moment, they wore both possibilities, one superimposed upon the other.

  Even inside the u.s. military these New Afrikan soldiers took part in mass resistance against the u.s. government, against the racist policies of the Lincoln Administration. Units refused to take their pay at all, rather than accept the half of settler troops’ pay that President Lincoln had ordered for them. There were protests and fights daily against racist treatment, and even many rebellions — eighty percent of the Union soldiers executed for mutiny during the Civil War were New Afrikans.

  Harriet was part of this struggle, criticizing Lincoln for his white supremacist policies. This is an important point. While Harriet is pictured today as a loyal supporter of the u.s. government and President Lincoln, in real life she never supported Abraham Lincoln until he was safely dead. Harriet, as a leader in the Anti-Slavery cause and someone who always had valuable information from behind Confederate lines, was welcome in official Washington. She had an open door at the Whitest House. Very conspicuously, Harriet refused to speak with Lincoln, whom she correctly perceived to be a crude white-supremacist.

  “...I didn’t like Lincoln in those days,” she said later. “I used to go see Mrs. Lincoln but I never wanted to see him. You see we colored people didn’t understand then that he was our friend. All we knew was that the first colored troops sent South from Massachusetts only got seven dollars a month while the white got fifteen. We didn’t like that.”

  Harriet would drop by the Whitest House to talk politics & the conduct of the war... but only with Ms. Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln is described today in history books as just another insane woman, a “shrew” who was unkind to her busy President husband. But among her contemporaries she was considered much more intellectual and radical than the President. And more sympathetic to the Black cause.

  When she was in d.c., Harriet would not only meet with Mary Lincoln, but stay with u.s. secretary of state William H. Seward (who was a supporter of Harriet’s from when she was a fugitive, even though he was then a u.s senator). Although, after Lincoln was forced to sign the Emancipation Proclamation and then got assassinated, Harriet had to tactically go along & say a few nice words about him. We shouldn’t be misled. Harriet was not only, in her guerrilla way, a player in national politics, but someone who was on the militant edge of the Black Nation’s politics.

  Warrior as Healer

  Certainly, Harriet was respected in the Black regiments. The ex-slave William Wells Brown writes: “When the Negro put on the ‘blue’ ‘Moses’ was in her glory and travelled from camp to camp, being always treated in the most respectful manner. The Black men would have died for this woman.”

  Not because she was an icon, but because she was one of them & valued for what she did. Even today diseases & exposure often cause more casualties in wartime than enemy fire, and in the age before antibiotics and medivacs that was even more true.

  For every white soldier who died in battle with the Union Army, two died from diseases. Due to poor health from slave life and Union racism (being forced to clean out latrines for white units, do heavy labor, etc.), it was geometrically worse for New Afrikans. For every Black Union soldier who died in battle, ten died from diseases. In fact, one of every five New Afrikan soldiers in the Union Army ended up dying of disease. To them, a healer was as militarily essential as a skilled artilleryman or sharpshooter — or more so.

  At that time there were few useful medicines in Western medicine, and Harriet’s contributions from New Afrikan healing were much in demand. Dysentery from contaminated drinking water was epidemic throughout the war in the Union camps, often fatal. Harriet used herbal remedies slaves had learned from indigenous peoples. Giving soldiers a tea she made from the powdered roots of pond lilies and parts of a flower called cranesbill, she saved many lives where settler doctors were helpless.

  This shouldn’t surprise our expectations. It’s true that the mind of the capitalist patriarchy unnaturally divides healing from fighting, insisting that these activities be kept so separate, so isolated, that only separate persons can embody them. Like the saintly Dr. Marcus Welby, M.D. and his twin, the bloodthirsty Gen. George Patton. Yet, in the Eastern martial arts we have to learn respect for our bodies, stretching & listening to our body, as well as strikes. This is elementary. And many noted martial arts masters have been healers, and spiritual teachers as well.

  During the famed Long March in 1935, Chinese communist commander Chu Teh would give basic health lectures to the guerrillas at night: About sanitation, about the simple importance of washing their feet carefully after a day’s march. Is that surprising, under conditions when a blister or a dirty cut could result in crippling or fatal infection?

  After arriving at Beaufort, S.C. in May, 1862, on a military transport ship, Harriet reported to Gen. David Hunter, Union commander of the Department of the South. She immediately began organizing escaped slaves in the camp, and took over the Contraband Hospital at Beaufort*. In a dictated letter she wrote back North:

  Among other duties which I have, is that of looking after the hospital here for contrabands. Most of those coming from the mainland are very destitude, almost naked. I am trying to find places for those able to work, and provide for them as best as I can, so as to lighten the burden of the Government as much as possible, while at the same time they learn to respect themselves by earning their own living.

  Again, Harriet was leading in doing, helping other New Afrikan women in practic
al ways to build a liberated community from ground zero up. Her biographer writes: “She taught Negro women how to adjust to the new conditions, to produce and create articles for their own consumption... and to make and sell various articles to the soldiers.” With two hundred dollars in pay (the only government pay she would ever get, in fact) Harriet had a laundry shed built, where women could run a cooperative business doing cleaning for soldiers.

  Because of the Sea Islands’ importance as the first “free” territory in the Deep South, the Union had issued a general call for Abolitionists to come assist the new community. Many women, New Afrikan as well as white, came from the North to be teachers & community workers (Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, came to help nurse in the hospital). To say nothing of the many ex-slave women, like the teenage Susie King Taylor, who came there or freed themselves there.

  Contrary to today’s thinking, in which women say we can’t do anything unless we get a grant, Harriet even gave up her few government personal privileges to better organize her people. A report to the u.s. government noted:

  When she first went to Beaufort she was allowed to draw rations as an officer or soldier, but the freed people, becoming jealous of this privilege accorded her — she voluntarily relinquished this right and thereafter supplied her personal wants by selling pies and root beer — which she made during the evening and nights — when not engaged in important service for the Government.

  No Civilians There

  It’s important to see that Harriet’s women’s organizing was only part of the many- sided flow of her life as a warrior. Isn’t it true that when we hear of women & community organizing we assume without thinking that this is civilian activity, like the PTA or block improvement committee (even our word “community” has peaceful & civilian overtones in our minds)? But that wasn’t it at all. Because there were no civilians there. And that temp community was a rear base area right in the war zone.

  That “free” community that Harriet & many others were building was a small beachhead — like a Maroon colony or a guerrilla base — isolated far behind Confederate lines. While in the event of a defeat, the Union Navy might evacuate by sea the few units of Northern white troops and white civilians, for the many thousands of New Afrikans there would be no retreat.

  Every person had chosen to risk their lives in resistance. Whether they had hidden in the swamps & escaped through Confederate lines, or were among the thousands who had defiantly stayed behind when their owners fled. If their community were overrun, recaptured, many would be killed and not a few tortured to death. With no history, few resources, new escapees arriving daily, life was raw & chaotic in those camps. No one knew what would happen. When Harriet taught becoming self-reliant, she was preparing her sisters for survival (even if they had to flee again & scatter). When she organized New Afrikan men & women, helped them to strengthen themselves as a people, this was life & death to them. Part of their own war. And an integral part of Harriet’s life as a woman warrior.

  Ironically, the laundry shed that Harriet had built for a cooperative women’s enterprise was later seized (while Harriet was away on a mission to Florida) by the officers of a Northern regiment, to use as their HQ. This was typical of the daily class conflicts on the Union side between settlers and New Afrikans. We have to keep in mind that this wasn’t any fairy tale war of good against evil. Nor was it simply “the war to free the slaves.” No way. Even as they were winning battles and dying by the thousands, many Black soldiers were completely unpaid. Since they were on wage strike & refusing to accept their apartheid pay from the u.s.government.

  While in private, Lincoln & his generals were secretly thinking of the total extermination of the Black troops.

  A Four-sided War

  The Civil War was actually a four-sided war, in which all the parties maneuvered for their own interests. In part, this was the fratricidal & incestuous “white man’s war” as many described it at the time. Northern industrial capitalism and the Southern slave-owning plantation class were forced into civil war to settle which white patriarchal society would rule the continent. To both of them, New Afrikans were a factor, but only as subjects for “real” people to fight over.

  As we know, New Afrikans used this “falling out among thieves” to advance their own liberation. In the early months of the War, once it became clear that Northern capitalism was trying to keep Blacks disarmed and powerless, there was widespread sentiment among Blacks against the Union war effort. Frederick Douglass spoke for many when he said that the War started: “...in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union. The South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees — both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.”

  It soon became clear that the Union would be forced, reluctant step by reluctant step, to encourage slave prison breaks, to shelter ex-slaves, to enlist New Afrikans as soldiers, and finally to end chattel slavery to once and for all destroy the plantation capitalist class. Most New Afrikan activists politically united & converged on this great breakthrough, to put to death chattel slavery. Sojourner Truth put aside her pacifism to become an army recruiter; Dr. Martin Delany dropped his plan of Afrikan nationalist emigration and put on the Union “blue”; and Harriet Tubman stepped-up her guerrilla activity a thousand-fold by using the Union Army as a lever.

  The fourth side to the Civil War were the indigenous nations, who were drawn into this decisive war of change. Native Amerikans took different angles to it, for both tactical & strategic reasons. Some, for example, allied with the Confederate States, under duress — but also because the first total war between white settlers & the splintering of the u.s. empire held possibilities for their own sovereignty. The Union victory was indirectly a disaster for the indigenous nations, since it resolved the major conflict holding back the Westward settler aggression. The decades after the Civil War saw new “final” offensives against Native Amerikans in the West, and the birth of the genocidal reservation system.

  We raise all this to stamp out lingering racist stereotypes we carry with us that the Union represented the cause of justice & that Black people reacted to the War only as enthusiastic supporters of a benevolent u.s. government.

  New Afrikans as a Nation maintained their own independent politics (including their own internal political debates and struggles), their critical distance. Not only in a need to end Southern chattel slavery, but with a healthy distrust of and need to maneuver around white settlers on both sides. Northern white society rarely saw this side because of its own white supremacy. And because New Afrikans often took over stereotypes in a transgressive way, as protective camouflage. New Afrikans on the Sea Islands, for example, tried to conceal their Gullah language & distinctive culture from the occupying Union troops.

  As early as 1861 in Virginia, escaped ex-slaves formed a number of outlaw guerrilla colonies, and operated as “land pirates” preying on Confederate and Union troops alike in an equal opportunity experiment. These New Afrikan guerrillas lived in hidden camps & were aided by a supply and intelligence network of those still on the plantations. When Gen. McClellan’s Union Army of the Potomac advanced into Virginia in 1862, so many Union convoys were held up and white Union troops killed by New Afrikan raiders that they had to travel heavily guarded even behind their own lines. Keep in mind that Gen. McClellan was the Union Army’s commander-in-chief, who had not only threatened to temporarily join the Confederates in killing any slave revolt, but whose Union troops regularly returned escaped New Afrikans to their Confederate owners. That was the first year of the white gentlemen’s “War Between the States”.

  This was the difficult & conflictual war zone that Harriet negotiated her way in. The Union Army’s Department of the South stretched along the Southeastern coast from Charleston, S.C.
to Jacksonville, Florida. In her work as an Amazon warrior, Harriet ranged up & down the coast, carried by Union ships. Now as a spymaster, then as a forward scout leading a raid, after that as a healer or organizer. She flowed, with deceptive ease and without fuss, from role to role. Any one of which might have been thought a major achievement.

  The Inevitable Resolution

  In October 1862, the inevitable breakthrough happened. Arming the New Afrikan man had always been the wild card, the most dangerous strategic weapon that both sides held back in reserve. Staring at defeat, the war unpopular, the Union Army repulsed in bloody setback after setback & even starting to shrink, the white men’s government in Washington decided to form Black regiments.

  As a safeguard for settler power, no more New Afrikans would become militia officers, and new units would be commanded only by white men. This was a last resort step that the Confederacy itself would take two years later, arming thousands of its own slaves. Hoping too late to form a “loyal” New Afrikan mercenary army of 200,000 to save it. While neither side wanted to recruit women into their armies (although over three hundred women are known to have served as regular soldiers in Union regiments), some Confederate white women began demanding gun training. Their reason wasn’t to fight the Union, but to protect themselves from Black slaves while their white husbands were away. (Just as the today’s National Rifle Association and white conservatives support the arming of white suburban women.) And in some areas Confederate officials did give pistol classes for white women.

  The white Union cavalry regiments occupying Beaufort & the Sea Islands were needed elsewhere, so the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Regiments were formed from former slaves. The 1st South Carolina Regiment had been formed months before Lincoln’s new order, despite War Department policy, and thus was the first New Afrikan unit in the u.s. army. Both regiments were commanded by white associates of John Brown and Harriet herself ( One, Col. James Montgomery, had prior experience at commando warfare against the slavers, from the fighting before the War in “Bloody Kansas”). During the Winter of 1862-63, the new regiments trained and started practicing their trade.