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NEWS & LETTERS, January - February 2011
Black/Red View
by John Alan
Harriet Tubman and the Civil War
Editor's note: We commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with excerpts from John Alan on Harriet Tubman from the April 2004 News & Letters.
Since the 1960s there has been a growing interest in Harriet Tubman. Catherine Clinton in Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Little, Brown, 2004), lets her reader know immediately that the life of a slave was a process of dehumanization from birth to death. Thus, when Harriet Tubman was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1820 or 1822, she was just another commodity to be bought and sold.
Slaves rarely knew the actual year of their birth. But as children they "learned the twin maxims of slavery by harsh experience: their labor is not their own, and they could be deprived of kin. Although African Americans toiling in the field might be seen as the quintessential image of slavery, the more potent symbol of the system was the auction block."
Families were destroyed on the auction blocks. Mothers and fathers were sold to one slave buyer and their children to another slave buyer. Harriet Tubman wanted her family to escape this vile fate.
Harriet Tubman was to challenge this ruthless economic system that lived by the brutal exploitation of Black slave labor. Clinton points out that both the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the prohibition of the importation of Black slaves from Africa and the Caribbean after 1808 "had a profound impact on slavery in the United States--with especially drastic results for slaves in the upper South, where Tubman and her family lived.
"Suddenly, enslaved African-American women, already expected to perform harsh and exacting physical labor, became the sole legal source of slave labor." In other words, enslaved African-American women were forced to produce both material commodities for the market as well as human laborers who would produce more commodities for the market.
This dual exploitation of African-American women made Maryland slaveholders extremely wealthy. They sold the children of African-American women to Southern cotton plantation owners at a high price. Harriet Tubman lost two sisters in this diabolical exploitation.
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
According to Clinton, Harriet Tubman heard a rumor in 1849 that her master was planning to "sell her down the river" and had to take action. The white woman who aided her in escaping gave her a slip of paper to deliver to the home of another white woman, who ordered her brusquely to take a broom and sweep the yard. This was to make her appear as a servant, at the very moment she had entered into the Underground Railroad. When the woman's husband came home, he loaded Tubman into his wagon and transported her to another town where she was directed to another station.
Harriet Tubman later became the most prominent "abductor" on the Underground Railroad. She went deep into the South to bring slaves out. Only very few had the courage and the skill to engage in this dangerous activity. Conductors only conveyed slaves from one specific depot to the next depot. The abductor went into the very center of slavery and organized willing slaves into an expedition. "She spread the word along the slave grapevine, informing members of plantation communities about the time and place for her rendezvous with candidates for escape. She might provide false information at first to flush out any betrayers. Once she found local prospects to her satisfaction, Tubman made her final appeal….'She directed them by her songs, as to whether they might show themselves or continue to lie low.…No one would notice what was sung by the old colored woman as she trudged along the road.'"
BLACK WOMEN'S GENIUS
She must have led hundreds of African Americans to freedom. She never learned to read or write, which, as Raya Dunayevskaya points out, might have led some to underestimate her intelligence. In 1975, Dunayevskaya said, "Sojourner Truth and sometimes also Harriet Tubman are dutifully mentioned, condescendingly admitting their bravery--and of course their suffering as slaves--but never as Reason which drove the educated to face reality: that the Black women were the orators, generals, and, yes, thinkers, whereas they, the middle-class intellectuals, were but subordinates." ("Today's Women Theorists" reprinted in Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution) As Clinton documents, Tubman was consulted by John Brown about the lay of the land at Harpers Ferry, set the date for his attack, and became a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War.
Once the war broke out, she knew it had to be about freeing the slaves and not saving the Union. She said at the end of 1861 to abolitionist Lydia Maria Child: "I'm a poor Negro; but this Negro can tell Mister Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free." This was Marx's criticism of Lincoln at the time, that he was not winning the Civil War because he did not make emancipation of the slaves the main issue of the War.
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