Book Blog #6

Harriet Tubman meets John Brown

An encounter with the famous White insurrectionist, John Brown, who had consecrated his life to a war against slavery, became a crossroads for Harriet to begin to reframe her role more aggressively as a warrior against the brutal slave culture. She would transition from being a “Moses” figure to being a “Joshua.” She had dramatic visions of John Brown before she ever met him. When introduced to Brown in 1858, she felt she had known him for a long time. Harriet described the anticipatory dream that foreshadowed their meeting:

I was in a wilderness sort of place, all rocks and bushes, when a big snake raised his head from behind a rock, and while I looked, it changed into the head of an old man with a long White beard on his chin, and he looked at me wishful like, just as if he was going to speak to me. Before he could speak, a crowd of men rushed in and struck him down, while the “old man looked at me so wishful.” This dream repeated itself several times. Brown’s, she decided, was the “wishful face” of this particular dream.

Before meeting Harriet, John Brown already had an intense career as an abolitionist speaking out against slavery. His children recalled how he railed against prevailing strands of racism:

These ministers who profess to be Christian, and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them. My knees will not bend in prayer with them while their hands are stained with the blood of souls.

In November 1837 Brown’s antislavery convictions intensified in the wake of the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, a firebrand antislavery editor murdered by a mob while defending his printing press near Alton, Illinois. John Brown attended a meeting about Lovejoy’s murder, and stood up to proclaim,

“Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!” [i]

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, nullified the north-south compromise in the Missouri Act, which had outlawed slavery in new territories above the latitude of 36° 30’. Instead the slavery issue was to be settled through popular votes. Consequently a series of armed conflicts between slavers and abolitionists were inflamed and called “Bloody Kansas.”

In 1855, Brown took members of his clan to the Kansas frontier, where passions were running high. On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown was the instigator of an infamous raid, the Osawatomie Creek Massacre. Leading a band of abolitionists intent on revenge, Brown directed the executions of a handful of proslavery men. These victims were dragged from their homes in the dead of night, despite screams of mercy from wives and children. Brown then declared:

I have only a short time to live – only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than extend slave territory.

As Brown returned to New England, seeking recruits to fight for the abolitionist cause, he had developed plots by which he would fire up the slaves to organize warfare that would end slavery. He scorned those abolitionists who rejected his call to warfare, as practicing “milk and water” pacifism. Although sufficiently persuasive to receive some financial support, there were very few who expressed interest in joining his army; or, supported any of his various plans as being realistic.

On his first trip to Canada, John Brown was galvanized by his encounter with “Moses,” of whom he had heard so much. Harriet reinforced her role as a woman of action when Brown shared his plans with her. First and foremost, she shared Brown’s impassioned hatred of slavery, which gave them a strong emotional and intellectual bond. Tubman had long viewed slavery as a sin, but under Brown’s influence, she came to perceive slavery as a state of war.

Tubman had never been associated with any kind of insurrectionary plots (except for mass escapes), but she was clearly ready to shift gears. Tubman focused her considerable energies on plans of military action. To that end, she offered up her extensive knowledge of the Virginia countryside. As a conductor on the liberty lines of the UGRR, she had made scores of contacts over the years. She would be able to provide John Brown with practical information for his operation. To get the ball rolling, Brown paid Harriet twenty-five dollars in gold to use to locate recruits for him in Canada. John Brown dubbed her General Tubman and referred to her by this military title in correspondence and conversation.

By the middle of June, Tubman had moved east to Boston. She was in Worcester visiting Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, a prominent citizen of Massachusetts and a subsequent commander of a Black regiment in the Civil War. He gave the following description of Harriet:

We have had the greatest heroine of the age here, Harriet Tubman, a Black woman, and a fugitive slave. . . .She has had a reward of twelve thousand dollars offered for her in Maryland and will probably be burned alive whenever she is caught, which she probably will be, first of last, as she is going again.

While Harriet was on tour in New England, raising money for John Brown, he settled near Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with several of his sons. Having problems raising the Army that he envisioned, Brown nevertheless, decided to launch his assault on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Unfortunately, his revised launch date did not get communicated in time for Harriet to alert countryside slaves to follow him; and Brown was not able to do such work himself.

John Brown Attacks Harpers Ferry

Brown, with fewer than two dozen Black and White men in tow, led them into Harpers Ferry and moved swiftly to secure the arsenal. He left a man in charge of protecting the Shenandoah Bridge (the main rail and wagon access into town), while he personally took charge of the primary target, the arsenal. Brown sent his remaining volunteers out into the countryside to scare up slaves, to urge them to flee into town, seize weapons, and join the battle for liberation. This was a key component of his plan, but despite the months and months of preparation, Brown had failed to do the proper advance work.

Harriet Tubman’s expertise was sorely missed. She had met with great success operating within the slave states by patiently laying the groundwork for her raids, studying options and alternatives. Tubman infiltrated a region, gained the confidence of local Blacks, and then put out the word about an upcoming flight northward. Her careful preparations and her meticulous arrangements proved invaluable. And although there were many times when she resorted to prayer to rescue her from a tight spot, more often she had multiple escape routes lined up as fallbacks. Perhaps John Brown, as a White, felt more complacent in this respect.

Harriet had a premonition about Brown’s disastrous outcome. On the actual day of the Harpers Ferry raid, she felt “something was wrong—she could not tell what. Finally she told her hostess that it must be Captain Brown who was in trouble and that they should soon hear bad news from him.” Shortly thereafter, she discovered that he had been captured.

After his capture, Brown spoke:

It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause,—not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must. . . . My whole life before had not afforded me one half the opportunity to plead for the right. In this, also, I find much to reconcile me to both my present condition, and my immediate prospect.

As with the demise of Nat Turner, Harriet saw Brown’s execution as both symbolic and sacrificial:

“When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was so brave to the end; it's clear to me it wasn’t mortal man, it was God in him.”

Harriet took Brown’s death as a sign that the time was drawing near for liberation.

“When I think of all the groans and tears and prayers I’ve heard on plantations, and remember that God is a prayer-hearing God, I feel that His time is drawing near. He gave me my strength, and he set the North Star in the heavens; He meant I should be free.”

In the months following Brown’s death and the death of his dream, it was difficult for Tubman to maintain optimism. She had spent over a decade on the liberty lines, watching North and South grow farther and farther apart. She had rescued hundreds, while millions still groaned under the lash. Tubman had hoped a charismatic leader like John Brown might lead the way out of the wilderness, but he had been struck down, executed by the slave power Tubman so hated.

Harriet Transitions from Being a Moses-like Leader in the Night to Becoming a Joshua-like Warrior in the Day

In the wake of Brown’s passing, to honor his memory, Harriet vowed she would do more and, if necessary, proclaim what was right in the light of day, rather than under cover of darkness, as she had done with the UGRR. Surreptitiously, she was soon presented with the opportunity. While visiting a relative in Troy, New York, she became involved in the public rescue of a fugitive slave.

Charles Nalle, an African American coachman, was being held by Troy authorities. He had escaped from Virginia in 1858. By the spring of 1860 his luck ran out when a Virginia slavecatcher came to reclaim him. Nelly was being held in a federal commissioner’s office, but a large group of antislavery protesters began to gather. Observers were barred from the courtroom, but Harriet had a plan. She wrapped herself in a shawl and sought admission carrying a food basket. She appeared elderly and innocuous and gained entry. She might have been mistaken for a scrub woman employed by the office building. Harriet was standing at the back of the room when the decision was announced to ship Nalle back to Virginia. After a tussle, the judge demanded that Nalle’s guards keep a tight hold on the prisoner until transportation South might be arranged.

The crowd surrounding the bank building began to swell. Harriet decided to test the commitment of the good people of Troy: would they rise to the occasion and help her strike a blow for freedom? She worried about getting Nalle down to the Hudson River. She did not know how to transport him safely to the dock. Shortly after Nalle was manacled, Tubman maneuvered herself into a position to take action. In the blink of an eye, the frail old woman transformed herself, taking the guards by surprise. Whirling out of her shawl and grabbing hold of Nalle, she wrenched him free and dragged him down the stairs into the waiting arms of comrades assembled below. This was no easy feat, and an eyewitness reported:

“She was repeatedly beaten over the head with policeman’s clubs, but she never for a moment released her hold . . . until they were literally worn out with their exertions and Nalle was separated from them.”

Bleeding and half-conscious, Nalle was carried down to the river and across the water on a skiff, followed by a ferry full of nearly four hundred abolitionists bent on protecting him from recapture. However, authorities on the other side apprehended Nalle again and he was dragged back into custody.

The battle seemed lost, until Tubman herself landed and rallied her followers. On her signal, the mob of abolitionists stormed the judge’s office where Nalle was being held. Bent on liberation, this human battering ram caused all hell to break loose. A Troy newspaper described the scene:

At last, the door was pulled open by an immense Negro and in a moment he was felled by the hatchet in the hands of Deputy Sheriff Morrison; but the body of the fallen man blocked up the door so that it could not be shut. This gave the antislavery mob its opportunity. “When the men who led the assault upon the door of Judge Stewart’s office were stricken down,” a participant reported, “Harriet and a number of other colored women rushed over their bodies, and brought Nalle out, and putting him into the first wagon passing, started him for the West.”

A Tribune correspondent reported that this incident “has developed a more intense Anti-Slavery spirit here, than was ever known before.” The Troy Times weighed in: The rescuers numbered many of our most respectable citizeens,—lawyers, editors, public men and private individuals. The rank and file, though, were Black, and African fury is entitled to claim the greatest share in the rescue.

Tubman’s prominent and public role in the Nalle rescue symbolized her gladiator status. She had become the general John Brown envisioned. From this time forward, she was not just Moses but had finally taken on the mantle of the warrior Joshua as well. Tubman later recalled that “shot was flying like hail above her head,” but she felt the thick of public battle was where she belonged.”

One of Tubman's favorite parables, countering the Colonization Society’s efforts to send Blacks back to Africa, was the tale of a man who sowed onions and garlic on his pasture to increase the output of his dairy cows. The butter came out too strong and would not sell. He then decided to sow clover instead—but the wind had already distributed the garlic and onions throughout all his fields. Tubman suggested that

“just so, the White people had got the Negroes here to do their drudgery, and now they were trying to root them out and ship them to Africa, but they can’t do it. We’re rooted here and they can’t pull us up.”

Beyond resistance to being uprooted, Harriet became a recognized force for freedom! She was on the slaveholders’ most wanted list with a steep price on her head. Posters with a description of “Moses,” as she was called, were prominently plastered throughout the upper South until the Civil War broke out.

Frederick Douglass explained that the time for compromise was over:

Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon slaveholders. It is vain to reason with them. One might as well hunt bears with ethics. . . . Slavery is a system of brute force. . . . It must [ii]be met with its own weapons.

Harriet was confident she would see Jubilee (the slaves’ Old Testament term for general emancipation) within her own lifetime. She wanted to bring her family back to the United States, and other American-born Blacks out of Canadian exile. She decided it was time to step up the pace, to promote a more direct opposition to slavery. During her treks south, she had repeatedly faced down the slave power and her own fears. But she did fear indifference and resignation in the face of the increasing influence of White supremacists, who would stop at nothing to get their way. After all, slavery was war.

Slaves themselves, and increasing numbers were ready to take the risks of flight. Some called it a “Stampede of Slaves” – on the night when twenty-eight slaves made their escape from Cambridge, Md. A reward of $3,100 was offered.. . Maryland slaveholders, fretting over their loss of control, decided to levy stiffer fines for anyone found guilty of aiding and abetting fugitives. They decided that, above all, Moses must be stopped. They imagined she roamed unimpeded through their countryside, rousing slaves to flee, mocking their impotence with her every abduction. They hoped by offering incredible sums, they might coax someone to betray her. The price on Tubman’s head was anywhere from $12,000 (allegedly the legislature’s top offer) upward to $40,000 (reputedly the total of all rewards put forward to capture her).

Harriet’s friend and admirer Thomas Higginson feared for her safety, as Maryland slaveholders debated the “various threats of the different cruel devices by which she would be tortured and put to death.” He viewed her as a kind of modern-day Joan of Arc, sure to be burned at the stake if she were ever caught. Since Nat Turner’s head was allegedly put on a pike in 1831 for his role in slave uprisings and, most recently, John Brown had swung from the gallows, there was every reason to believe that Tubman would be executed if caught, whether by a party of slaveholders or the courts of Maryland.

As pre-Civil War rhetoric heated up, Harriet feared for the families trapped within slavery’s borders. She decided to make one last quick trip south before it became even more dangerous to smuggle people out. She set off to rescue a couple and their two children from her home county in December 1860 – and in typical Tubman fashion collected two other fugitives along the way. The friends feared for her safety, Harriet with her usual aplomb guided these fugitives all the way to Canada.

Civil War Breaks Out

By early 1861, sectional tensions in the United States were roiling, as the sudden rebellion proceeded apace. Several seceding states declared their collective sovereignty as the Confederate states of America and inaugurated Jefferson Davis as their president. Abraham Lincoln struggled to hold his fractured nation together. But within weeks of his own inauguration, following the Confederates’ firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln responded with a call to arms, requesting 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. Harriet Tubman crossed back into the United States. The streets of every American city were soon filled with soldiers marching off to enlist. The South could draw on 900,000 eligible White men, while the North had a pool of more than 4 million.

Following Lincoln’s call to arms, Black men rallied in Pittsburgh to form the Hannibal Guards. Black drill companies assembled in Cleveland, Boston, and throughout the North, responding to war fever. The government received their efforts coolly, as Lincoln’s administration prohibited Black volunteers from enlistment. Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, advocated the enlistment of Black soldiers. Douglass complained:

“Men in earnest don’t fight with one hand, when they might fight with two, and a man drowning would not refuse to be saved, even by a colored hand.”

Tubman prophesied that a Union victory would deliver slavery’s death blow. With the political machinery in motion, Tubman and her African American comrades threw themselves into the fray to help shape the war as well as to help win it. She began by informally attaching herself to Massachusetts troops in May 1861, returning to familiar territory by slogging with General Benjamin Butler’s men through her home state of Maryland. An encampment was made at Fort Monroe, at the southern tip of Virginia, a Fort that became a major magnet for escaping slaves throughout the region. Because Maryland had remained loyal to the Union, its slaveholders were able to secure federal assistance to retrieve “their property.” The fugitive slaves were desperate for basic supplies and donations were collected from abolition groups in the North. Harriet became both their nurse and their advocate.

Lincoln and his advisors, reluctant to alienate loyal, border states, muddled along, offering little help to the fugitive slaves and accepting only their non-military, manual labor, ditch digging etc. One critic stated, “they are still slaves, having merely changed masters.” Some Yankee politicians, abolitionists, and a few Union officers objected to Lincoln’s appeasement policies, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman among them. They wanted an unambiguous condemnation of slave holding, to bring things to a head. They hoped to shift goals for Union ttriumph from a purely military realm into a moral one as well.

Harriet was on a visit to New England from Fort Monroe when news came about the capture of Port Royal, South Carolina, deep in Confederate territory. Further, abolitionists were buoyed by accounts that Union troops found scores of abandoned plantations and hundreds of slaves left behind. The seacoast of South Carolina and Georgia posted some of the most versatile land in the region, growing the finest cotton; but now through the Union. The slaves were now tilling for the North,, but without even the basics that their former owners had provided for them. William Garrison, prominent abolitionist in Boston, wrote:

.... They are now suffering from the lack of clothing hitherto provided by their masters…. The people of the North owe at least this much to the subject-people of the South that their condition shall not be worse for our invasion.

Volunteers were organized and the Governor of Massachusetts asked Harriet to join the states contingent, promising sponsorship. She would be assigned to a region where thousands of slaves were seeking escape routes and Union sanctuary. Journeying to help would closely resemble the life she had been used to leading – creating lifelines for Blacks trapped within slavery. It was a natural course of events for her to burrow deeply into enemy terrain. Yet even so, this was a dangerous proposition: she was still a wanted woman in the slave South.

While she was preparing to head for South Carolina, Americans learned the bloody outcome of one of the Civil Wars deadliest battles. The toll of soldiers killed at Shiloh shocked the nation. 4000 soldiers were killed and 27,000 were wounded. Nor, were battles going so well elsewhere. And, the Union troops perched along Coastal South Carolina were also having difficulties; in fact, they were surrounded on three sides. It finally became clear to Lincoln that if the Union was going to win the war, they needed to allow the Blacks to follow their desires and help defeat the Slave Powers. Still, Lincoln partially dragged his feet, not allowing Blacks to become officers. He reasoned that a White soldier would not be able to stomach saluting a Black officer. Nevertheless, Blacks bearing rifles would turn the tides of battle.

When Harriet arrived in South Carolina, she was first of all drafted to work alongside the medical director. They needed her knowledge of herbal medicine to deal with the challenges of diseases fostered in South Carolina’s heat. Three out of five Civil War soldiers who died during the war were killed by disease unrelated to wounds. Harriet used local plants to concoct her remedies. When Port Royal soldiers quickly learned they were dealing with the famed conductor of the Underground Railroad; recognizing her as the woman called Moses, Union officers “never failed to tip their caps in meeting her.” The diseases which she addressed included smallpox and other malignant fevers, without being felled herself. Once again, miraculous powers were ascribed to her as her healing powers became legendary among her Union comrades.

When the war first began,. Harriet was reluctant to support Abraham Lincoln. She found the Republican president’s cautious policy toward slavery frustrating. As the war dragged on, she feared the North might “use up all the young men.” And what’s worse she asserted,

it was to no avail to send the “flower of their young men down South” because “God won’t let Mr. Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing.” She wanted an end to slavery. “I’m a poor Negro; but this Negro can tell Mr. Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free.”

Harriet Develops a Band of Scouts and Black Warriors

By early 1863, after 10 months spent ministering to the sick, Tubman was recognized as an underutilized resource and was granted the authority to line up a roster of scouts, to infiltrate and map out the interior. Most of her agents were men recruited directly from the surrounding low country. Several were trusted water pilots, who could travel upriver by boat undetected. Her closely knit band became an official scouting service for the Department of the South.

Tubman’s espionage operation was under the direction of the Secretary of War, Edward M Stanton. He had wanted to postpone the use of Black soldiers and had sided against commissioning Black officers, fearing the wrath of northern public opinion. Nevertheless he was not opposed to risking Black lives as Union spies. He readily welcomed Tubman’s spy ring.

Soon she did her practiced intelligence work among slaves in the interior of Florida and prepared them to be ready to join the Union troops in an assault on Jacksonville, Florida. The success convinced Union brass that extensive guerrilla operations would be feasible.

Confidence in Harriet led to the famed Combahee River Raid in June 1863 – a military operation that would mark a turning point in her career. Previously, her attacks on the Slave Power had been anonymous strikes by a “woman named Moses.” After this operation, her fame would spread nationally. The target was rich plantation country populated by the wealthiest and most politically influential plantation slavers.

The night of the Union raid, as the moon played hide-and-seek with the clouds, three federal ships headed cautiously up the Combahee River. The water slapped against the sides of the gunboats, carrying a band of 150 Black soldiers who knew that on this mission their fates were in the hands of the famed Moses, as she guided them upriver. Catching slaveholders off guard in their own backyards, was vintage Harriet. It resembled the days when she would return to Maryland under the nose of her former slaveholder and steal her brothers to freedom.

Harriet had been provided with the location of rebel mines planted below the surface of the water and guided the ships to avoid them. On this journey, she was liberating more than the handful at a time she had freed during her conductor days. On the lookout, Tubman guided the boats to designated spots along the shore where fugitive slaves had hidden. Once given the all clear, they would approach the shore to be loaded onto the ships to cast their lots with “Mr. Lincoln’s Army.”

The response of the slaves was astonishing. Tubman described the scene when Union boats approached the Riverside in the wee hours of June 3.

I never saw such a site… 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 along behind, all loaded; pigs squealing, chickens screaming, young ones squealing.

A landing party of over a dozen Union soldiers was enough to send the Confederate watchman to run for help. But before the Confederates could respond the group was torching the wealthy plantations. Robbing warehouses and purging Planter homes was a bonus for former slaves now soldiers, striking hard and deep at the proud master class.

The late arriving Confederate troops staged a futile counterattack, with their bullets plunking into the river as they could only catch a glimpse of escaping gunboats. In a furry, they engaged in pursuit, only to get trapped between the riverbank and Union snipers. The Union invaders and their human cargo (750 slaves) escaped entirely unharmed. Tubman’s plan was triumphant.

Tubman later provided a comical highlight of the rescue. A woman with two pigs in tow – a white one named after a Confederate general and a black one jokingly referred to as Jefferson Davis. Tubman wrestled with the woman’s livestock stepping on the hem of her dress and falling trying to get back to the ship. She vowed never again to wear a skirt on a military expedition. Upon her return, she wrote a friend in Boston that they might send her some bloomers. The friend commented that if she were to receive a new wardrobe, she will probably share it with the first needy person she meets.

Tubman’s regrets about the raid had only to do with the aftermath of publicity for the Union officers, while underplaying the credit that was due to the Black soldiers. The lack of due recognition for the Black troops was a pattern that would continue to irritate Tubman. It even extended into the way White and Black wounded soldiers were treated differently and even segregated in their burial. This racism added onto her resentment toward Lincoln for his foot dragging when it came to allowing slaves to join the Union army, and emancipation.

As I write this draft, 6/11/2020, The Senate Armed Services Committee is recommending that the names of Confederate Generals be removed from the names of military bases, places and entities – (this recommendation has attracted opposition from Pres. Trump.) Recommendations have included noting the implicit insults experienced by Black soldiers who serve on these bases whose very name honors the Confederate legacy of slavery..A further step, such as honoring the Black soldiers whose valor in the Civil War brought victory over slavery, has not been publicly discussed.

A bright moment for Tubman occurred when a Black sergeant became the first African-American soldier to earn the Medal of Honor, after a particularly bloody battle in which he was wounded. Tubman offered a moving assessment of that battle:

And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, that was big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, that was the drops of blood falling;and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead man that we reaped.

After the war, Confederate leaders and soldiers were acclaimed for their chivalry and bravery. The so-called Southern Lost Cause was romanticized and monuments proliferated across Southern cities. Harriet wished for the same recognition of Black soldiers; and for African-Americans to be granted the freedom and dignity they deserved, as well as the legal status they had won. It became part of her life long mission to become a friend and protector to those soldiers who could not care for themselves.

Tubman herself fell victim to the postwar backlash against Blacks, even as she was returning home, a war hero. On the train, she was roughed up while passing through New Jersey. The conductor decided that Harriet’s papers must have been forged or illegally appropriated, finding it incredible that a Black woman could carry a soldiers pass. She was asked to leave her seat. Tubman politely refused. The conductor called for assistance; it took four men to reject her from her seat. She was dumped unceremoniously into the baggage car for the rest of her trip, let out of her imprisonment only when she reached her destination. Tubman suffered additional physical injuries from this incident, injuries that plagued her for several months!

After emancipation and the lack of need for an ongoing Underground Railroad, Harriet turned her missionary zeal to the women’s suffrage movement. After being introduced at a conference with acclamation for her achievements, Harriet remarked,

I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Harriet Tubman’s Legacy Again Challenges America

Plans were made in 2016 to place Harriet’s photo on the $20 bill in 2020, formalized by the US Sec. Of the Treasury but the Trump administration has balked. Congressional support For the Harriet Tubman Act to be implemented, however, continues:

Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., made the case to use the image of the woman who helped hundreds of slaves escape to freedom via the "Underground Railroad" rather than that of former President Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves and who supported policies that led to the forcible removal of Native Americans from their homes.i.

The late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., advocated

"Placing Harriet Tubman on our U.S. currency would be a fitting tribute to a woman who fought to make the values enshrined in our Constitution a reality for all Americans."ii

The Revolutionary Era Changed Outlooks of Both Slave and Master

The age of the great democratic revolutions –-the American, the French, and the Haitian – marked a transformation in the lives of Black people. Men and women who had been swallowed whole by the plantation struggled to remake themselves. in often bloody contests with their owners. Slaves demanded freedom; free people demanded equality.

The War for American Independence gave slaves new leverage in their struggle with their owners, offering the opportunity to challenge both the institution of chattel bondage and the allied structures of White Supremacy. Slavery rested upon the unity of the planter class and its ability to mobilize the state and rally non-slaveholders to slavery's defense. But the American Revolution divided planters between Patriots and Loyalists and forced both to employ their slaves in ways that compromised the masters' ability to invoke state authority.

As the slaveholders faltered, so did the support once rendered them by non-slaveholders.

How can Americans "complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them," mused Tom Paine in 1775, "while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery?"

Revolutionary ideology was only one source of the new spirit of liberty and equality. An evangelical upsurge that presumed all were equal in God's eyes complemented and sometimes reinforced revolutionary idealism and placed new pressure on slaveholders. The evangelicals despised the planters' haughty manner and high ways, and they welcomed slaves into the fold as brothers and sisters, Black men and women who joined, and occasionally led, the evangelical churches considered worldly freedom an obvious extension of their spiritual liberation, and many White congregants enthusiastically agreed.

In 1789 the Bastille fell, and the Revolutionary Assembly promulgated its Declaration of the Rights of Man. Three years later, the Jacobin-controlled General Assembly declared against racial distinctions, and in 1794 it abolished slavery. Events in France resonated in French America. No colony was more affected than Saint Domingue (Haiti), where-people of color seized notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity and pressed their case for full citizenship. Planters denounced them as degenerates and incendiaries and imprisoned their leaders, executing many after torture and mutilation. Driven to the brink, in 1790 the free people took up arms and, when defeat loomed, armed their slaves, who needed no primer on revolution. With the slaves' success in creating the Haitian republic, neither master nor slave could doubt the possibility of a world turned upside down.

Bracing themselves against the gale of change, slaveowners labored to smother the slaves' rising expectations and, if possible, increase their control by extracting still greater draughts of labor. If the bloody events filled slaveholders with dread, they induced slaves to act with ever greater urgency and confidence. Nothing strengthened the slaves' hand more than the growing number of Black people who escaped bondage, some freed by their owners, some as fugitives, some as emigres from Saint Domingue – to slave or slaveowner-their very existence demonstrated that free Blacks were not content simply to lead by example. Most espoused the cause of universal freedom and the liberation of family, friends, and indeed anyone one who had shared with them the bitter fruits of bondage. Those who labored against racism and discrimination believed that their success depended upon the liquidation of slavery.

Great planters and small, slaves, free Blacks and the underclass of Whites from Haiti, searched for shelter in the storm of revolution. The initial flight of close to 10,000 men and women from Haiti’s Cap Francais in 1793 was followed by many more who abandoned the island during the next two decades. Although most settled on nearby islands, large numbers took refuge in mainland North America, finding shelter in ports from Boston to New Orleans. The emigres carried a variety of messages, which, depending upon the recipient, hardened opposition to emancipation or encouraged demands for freedom.

Far more Black people lived in slavery at the end of the revolutionary age than at the beginning. Much of this increase was the result of an evil re-construction of revolutionary ideology that removed moral opposition. If indeed all men were created equal and some men were slaves-the argument ran - then, those who remained in the degraded condition of slavery, were not fully human after all. This racist argument, for its advocates reduced the issue of slavery from a moral question to a property question. Subsequently, in the constitutional convention, abolitionists argued that the nation would be punished for the sin of slavery; but planters argued that it was only a property question and they embodied their argument in the Constitution, inserting several phrases protecting their property; while also contending that their slaves could be counted as 3/5 of a man when it came to counting the population for purposes of voting, though, of course, slaves would not be permitted to vote.

The prevalence of arguments that Blacks were not only slaves, but also subordinate to Whites by nature, spearheaded racist attitudes that would go beyond the abolition of slavery, penetrating the North as well as the South.

Much as the plantation revolution had sparked a protest wave of insurrection, the quelling of revolutionary ideals among Whites towards Blacks ignited a counter movement of insurgencies. Fires that smoldered in Charleston, New Orleans, and New York in the 1790s again burst into flames, as insurrectionary activity continued into the new century. In 1800, Virginia officials uncovered a wide-ranging conspiracy in their own capital. The execution of its prime movers, the Blacksmith Gabriel and some dozen of his co-conspirators, hardly ended the plotting. Within months, authorities discovered similar intrigues south of Richmond, and during the next decade their successors unearthed more conspiracies in the slave states and territories. Cool heads dismissed many of these as the feverish reaction of alarmists, but an uprising by several hundred-armed slaves upriver from New Orleans in the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist shook even the most confident. Led by Charles Deslondes - a slave whose roots may have reached into Saint Domingue - the insurgents marched on New Orleans. When confronted by United States troops, they did not break and run but formed themselves in a line and returned the fire. Eventually, American soldiers subdued the rebels and hanged and beheaded Deslondes and his troop. Their mutilated remains hung in public as an object lesson to those who dared to challenge the slave regime.

Racist Ideologies Are Solidified in Public Opinion

In the middle years of the nineteenth century. Many, perhaps most, believed that the inferiority of Black people originated not in their circumstance - be it enslavement in the South or poverty in the North - but in their nature. Proponents of racist beliefs bolstered their case with a hodge-podge of conflicting Biblical and scientific interpretations of human origins.

White Supremacy manifested itself in every aspect of society, from the ballot box to the bedroom.

Slaveholders discovered much of value in supremacist ideology. The inferiority of Black people confirmed the necessity, if not the benevolence, of mastership. Planters elaborated such notions, sometimes endowing Black men and women with a vicious savagery and sometimes with a docile imbecility. From either perspective, the vision of the natural inferiority of peoples of African descent became a mainstay of the defense of slavery and proof certain that the proper and most humane place for Black people was under the watchful supervision of a White master.

The limitations on Black life grew along with the celebration of democracy in the free states as well slave states. Either through exclusion or segregation, Black people played a far smaller role in northern society in 1850 than they had in 1750. Plantation economics dominated South but the racism they amplified filtered into racist perceptions in the North.

Resilience – Black Spirituality, Communal Caring, Family Strength and a Collective Quest for Freedom Became the Enduring Fruits of Slave Communities

Imagine the, torturing of your loved ones; or, having them stand sold out from your family. The strength to not be overcome by these agonies has its foundation in African spirituality, where Life is pervasively sacred. In this religiously experienced context, tribal and community bonding provided the foundation for enduring family relationships, adversities notwithstanding. C. Eric Lincoln, eminent Black sociologist and historian of Black culture, describes this African heritage and its subsequent adaptation to the conditions of slavery and racism, as the basis for what he calls the Black Sacred Cosmos. Herein is the seedbed of Black Culture resilience in America.[iii]

Not always visible, the Afro-Spiritual underpinning of Black resilience is often noted or is just below the surface, continuing to present time. Tellingly of how personal and cultural history intertwine, Langston Hughes’ first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”[iv] was written when he was 17, crossing the Mississippi River on a trip from Harlem to Mexico to see his father. He wrote,

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,

and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Musing further on the African heritage experienced as flowing through his veins, Langston Hughes wrote, “Afro-American Fragment,”[v]

So long, So far away Is Africa. Not even memories alive Save those that history books create, Save those that songs Beat back into the blood— Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue— So long, So far away Is Africa.

The African roots of Black spirituality, the enduring sense of the world as sacred, were evolved under the conditions of enslavement into a belief system consistent with Christianity. But it was a process of adaptation rather than assimilation, giving Black Christianity its own characteristics. The musical rhythms, the ecstasy of emotional expression that carries worshipers into extraordinary consciousness (overcoming the agonies of the day plus enhancing personal communication with the divine) and the emphasis on freedom, all distinguish African-American churches from mainline American Christianity. Freedom was, first of all, freedom from slavery, but subsequently it is also freedom to respond to God’s calling, without selective interference by other persons or institutions. This is the “freedom” that echoed through slave revolts, through the Civil War, fueling the runaway exodus from plantations, and cascading through history to the civil rights movement.

This is the expanded concept of freedom, of liberty, that James Weldon Johnson exhorts through song in the Black National Anthem,[vi]

Lift ev'ry voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring. Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise, evening meeting High as the list'ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.

Are you bowed down in heart? Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life? Then come away, come to the peaceful wood, Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now, From out the palpitating solitude Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains? They are above, around, within you, everywhere. Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come. They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones. Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale Until, responsive to the tonic chord, It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ, Filling earth for you with heavenly peace And holy harmonies.

The weaving together of Black resilience includes a tapistry of nature, community or church and family. Familial resilience is captured by Paula Giddings, in her forward to the book, Climbing Jacob’s ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families by Andrew Billingsley. She describes how Black family cohesiveness survived against all odds through the tribulations and separations of slavery.

Black culture scholars have attributed this remarkable feat to their African heritage and their churches, both visible and invisible, that formed even during slavery. The determination of Black families to live their lives together (wrote Giddings), despite involuntary separations is evidenced by the large numbers of slave couples that lived in long marriages. Mothers and fathers were most often coequal heads of the household. Union soldiers noted that Blacks whose wives and husbands the rebels had driven off firmly refused to form new connections and declared their purpose to keep faith with the absent ones. Those who had married as slaves often exercised their 1st social act as freed men and women to marry again under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau.[vii]

Children too had to be recovered. Apprenticeship laws in many Southern States allowed former slave Masters to expropriate children of their former slaves, if the courts determined that they would be better off apprenticed to Whites than remaining in their own families. Freedmen's bureau records document numerous and extraordinary efforts by both fathers and mothers to get their children back.[viii]

In the early days of reconstruction, women with the cooperation of their husbands - refused to work Southern cotton fields so that they might spend more time with their families. Boston cotton brokers, analyzing the disastrous cotton crop of 1867 – 68, concluded that the greatest loss resulted from the decision of growing numbers of Black women to devote their time to their homes and children. When it became impossible to sustain their position as non-wage earners, Black women’s undiminished determination was one factur why sharecropping took precedence over other kinds of collective labor because it allowed the whole family to work together.[ix] (Economic and racist oppression factors that determined the rise of sharecropping are discussed later in this book. – Construct cross reference)

Giddings describes these resilient Back families as forming dual-headed households in which fathers and mothers played equally important partnership roles. Langston Hughes poem in praise of “The Negro Mother,”[x] captures the sense of spiritual history that contributed to their endurance.

The Negro Mother Children, I come back today To tell you a story of the long dark way That I had to climb, that I had to know In order that the race might live and grow. Look at my face—dark as the night— Yet shining like the sun with love’s true light. I am the child they stole from the sand Three hundred years ago in Africa’s land. I am the dark girl who crossed the wide sea Carrying in my body the seed of the free. I am the woman who worked in the field Bringing the cotton and the corn to yield. I am the one who labored as a slave, Beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave— Children sold away from me, husband sold, too. No safety, no love, no respect was I due. Three hundred years in the deepest South: But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth. God put a dream like steel in my soul. Now, through my children, I’m reaching the goal. Now, through my children, young and free, I realize the blessings denied to me. I couldn’t read then. I couldn’t write. I had nothing, back there in the night. Sometimes, the valley was filled with tears, But I kept trudging on through the lonely years. Sometimes, the road was hot with sun, But I had to keep on till my work was done: I had to keep on! No stopping for me— I was the seed of the coming Free. I nourished the dream that nothing could smother Deep in my breast—the Negro mother. I had only hope then, but now through you, Dark ones of today, my dreams must come true: All you dark children in the world out there, Remember my sweat, my pain, my despair. Remember my years, heavy with sorrow— And make of those years a torch for tomorrow. Make of my past a road to the light Out of the darkness, the ignorance, the night. Lift high my banner out of the dust. Stand like free men supporting my trust. Believe in the right, let none push you back. Remember the whip and the slaver’s track. Remember how the strong in struggle and strife Still bar you the way, and deny you life— But march ever forward, breaking down bars. Look ever upward at the sun and the stars. Oh, my dark children, may my dreams and my prayers Impel you forever up the great stairs— For I will be with you till no White brother Dares keep down the children of the Negro mother.

Enslaved Blacks were hungry to learn, for educational resources that would help them understand and surmount their challenging environment. Sociologist, Andrew Billingsley, traces how the Blacks in Savannah, for example, turned to education with a vigor matched only by their allegiance to their churches and their families. Indeed, in little more than a month after they had helped Sherman capture Savannah, Blacks had established 10 schools, with some 500 students enrolled. There had been a strong history of Black participation in education in Savannah even during slavery, despite laws and custom which tried to thwart it. Sometimes Blacks were taught by sympathetic Whites, sometimes by free Blacks, and sometimes they taught themselves.[xi]

Before reconstruction was abortively ended by White violence, (construct cross reference) it seemed that Black families would outdistance the legacy of slavery, the abolitionist, Frances Ellen Harper wrote after her tour of the South. In 1870 Blacks were getting homes for themselves and putting money in the bank.

Throughout the 1st half of the 20th century, heroic efforts to keep extended families together were required when driven by disenfranchisement, lynching, economic depression, and sexual exploitation in the South and economic opportunity in the North, hundreds and thousands of families trekked there to urban cities. There too, when possible, the labor force was bent to family needs. Domestic workers for example, asserted their determination to work day jobs instead of live-in work so that a more coherent family life could be maintained.[xii]

Welfare, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, was welcomed by African American women for the same reason; with it domestic workers, the majority of Black women workers, could stay home with children instead of leaving to work and having the hours that they could spend there being subjected to the whims of White employers. The North with its fickle and discriminatory employment practices, housing covenants and violent response to economic competition from Blacks, was not the hoped-for promised land. Nonetheless, numerous studies of Black migrants in the North revealed that families managed to ride out the vagaries that placed disorganization pressures on family life.[xiii]

[i] [ii] [iii] C. Eric Lincoln, Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. [iv] Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. [v]Ibid [vi] James Weldon Johnson, [vii] Paula Giddings, Forward, Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob's Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families, Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (February 1, 1993) [viii] Ibid. [ix]Ibid. [x] Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics) (p. 288). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. [xi] Andrew Billingsley. Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (Kindle Locations 634-636). Kindle Edition. [xii]Paula Giddings, Forward, Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob's Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families, Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (February 1, 1993) . [xiii]Ibid.