Saturday, October 10, 2020

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-All Honor To “General” Harriet Tubman

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for “General” Harriet Tubman

February Is Black History. March Is Women’s History Month. Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits. Any one , or all, of those reasons can be used as the reason to honor “General” Harriet Tubman


Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

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The Revolutionary Vanguard of the Civil War

Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom


Toward the end of her long life, the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman commented on her years of service to the liberation of black people in a conversation with a journalist:

"She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: 'Do you like apples?' On being assured that I did, she said: 'Did you ever plant any apple trees?' With shame I confessed I had not. 'No/ said she, 'but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said, "Some day I'll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat," and I guess I did it'."

—Frank C. Drake, The New York Herald, 22 September 1907, quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman

In this simple metaphor, Tubman recognized the vanguard role she played in laying the groundwork for black freedom in the United States in the revolution that was the Civil War. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a military strategist and spy during the war, "General" Tubman, as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. Like John Brown, the heroic martyr of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and the outstanding political leader of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass, Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. Harriet Tubman's life is a microcosm of the struggle for black liberation in the
19th century; her life directly reflects the issues of the time.

Although the hope for a complete liberation of black people was later defeated in the cowardly betrayal of Reconstruction, Tubman's "apple orchard"—freedom for the slave—was a tremendous historical advance. The abolition of slavery and the fight for full citizenship for the black population was the great historic task of the Civil War, the second American Revolution, which carried forward the unfinished business of the first American Revolution.

The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, the 19th century descendant of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. The abolitionists were part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820, encompassing such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Particularly among the most politically radical wing, the abolitionists were motivated by a vision of human emancipation profoundly rooted in religion. To men like the clergymen Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, slavery was an abomination to god and the Christian Bible and a gross betrayal of the rights of man as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Although slavery was their pre-eminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers' rights. The women's suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression. As the abolitionist and women's rights leader Angelina Grimke' said at the May 1863 meeting of the Women's Loyal League, a convention of support for the North in the Civil War, "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours" (see "The Grimke' Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights," W&R No. 29, Spring 1985).

The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom—which included years as a soldier in the Union Army—she lived in poverty all her life.

A fugitive from bondage, black and a woman, Tubman triumphed over exceptional odds to become a leader of the second American Revolution. Like Frederick Douglass, she was able to generalize her bitter and brutal experience of oppression into a revolutionary social consciousness and a determination to fight for all the oppressed. She was an advocate of militant political action and revolutionary insurrectionism. As opposed to the "moral suasion" Garrisonian wing, she was part of the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement. As the "Moses" of her people on the Underground Railroad, Tubman was famous throughout the U.S. and beyond by the time of the war.

However, many details about her work are obscure, since she operated in the secrecy of what was essentially a revolutionary underground. She was illiterate, and much of what is known about her life comes from a biography of her by Sarah Bradford, who interviewed Tubman as an old woman (quotes from Tubman which were originally printed in dialect are here transposed into modern English spelling). Thus much of the story of her life must be told by others, especially by Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared the conviction, through the bleak decade of the 1850s, that the coming war must crush the slave system and break the bonds of black oppression. She was a co-worker and friend not only to John Brown and Douglass, but to many other key figures of her time, from abolitionist William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, to Sojourner Truth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith. She knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and most of the leading women's rights activists of her day.
Douglass honored Tubman's role in a letter written in 1868, in which he defended her right to an army pension as a Civil War veteran:

"The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encourage¬ment at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt 'Cod bless you' has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you."

—quoted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman; The Moses of Her People
Slave vs. Free in the Antebellum U.S.

Like Frederick Douglass, Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland, probably in 1820. At that time the country was embroiled in the first of the major fights over slavery and the expanding U.S. territory, "resolved" in this instance by the Missouri Compro¬mise of 1820.

Since the founding of the U.S. in the late 18th century, when the slave system was left intact throughout the South, two economic systems, capitalism and slavery, coexisted within one country. The inevitable clash of economic interest which must lead to the victory of one over the other was postponed in a series of "compromises" centering on the maintenance of control by the slave states over the relatively weak federal government. But. the underlying economic conflicts between the two systems eventually reached the point at which compromise was no longer possible. The development of large-scale industrial capitalism required wage labor to exploit, the source of its tremendous profits, as well as a mobile and at least somewhat educated working population. Key to capitalist expansion was control of a growing home market. In contrast, the slave system was based on primitive, labor-intensive agricultural production; the slaveowners sought new lands to increase the highly profitable slave trade and to move plantations to fresh, non-exhausted soil. The clash came to a head over the huge, expanding territories of the West: would they be slave or free?

Karl Marx described the slow but inexorable sweep of political power by the slave states in their effort to increase control of the growing U.S.:

"The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic
northwest of the Ohio... The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed."

—Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19

In 1820, when Tubman was born, news of the first of these bitter debates undoubtedly reached even the slave quarters, however isolated the slaves were kept from news of the day. Perhaps the slaves with whom Tubman lived as a child heard rumors about the deep split in Congress over the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have prohibited the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and provided for gradual emancipation of those already there. This first great debate on slavery was a harbinger of things to come. Abandoning even his earlier, contradictory anti-slavery position altogether, Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed the Tallmadge Amendment. In 1821 he wrote, "All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later."

As a child Tubman was acquainted with all the horrors of slavery. By the age of five or six she was at •work and suffering from whippings on her face and neck by a vicious mistress. Later she worked as a field hand. She was still a child at the time of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, put down by the slaveholders swiftly and ruthlessly. In 1832, the opposition of the agricultural South to the federal tariff designed to protect Northern industry led to the Nullification Crisis, in ' which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The slaveholders' fear of black insurrection, sparked by Nat Turner's revolt, fueled their intransigence against the federal government.
Tubman was around 15 years old when the incident that literally marked her for life occurred. While trying to defend a fellow slave from the vindictiveness of the overseer, she was struck on the head with a two-pound iron weight which cracked her skull. For months she lingered between life and death, lying on rags in her family's slave cabin. The injury left a deep scar on her head and left her subject to spells of unconsciousness, sometimes three or four times a day, which plagued her for the rest of her life.

But instead of being crushed by the brutality of her life, Tubman hardened and determined to fight. When she recovered, she built up her physical strength until she could lift huge barrels of produce as well as a man, despite her small size. Her master would exhibit her strength as one of the "sights" of the plantation. She let people think her half-witted because of her brain injury, and plotted her escape. She began to experience daily visions, which inspired her driving commit¬ment to black freedom as part of a deeply personal religion.

In 1849, although it meant leaving her husband, a freeman who refused to go with her, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. Rumor had reached her and her family that their owners planned to sell them to the deep South, a dreaded fear of every slave in the bor¬der states. Already two of her sisters had been sent off in a chain gang, separated from their children. Her brothers lost courage for the escape; Tubman went on alone. As she later told Bradford: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me."
Aided by a white woman who gave her the first address of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made her way North, traveling at night. "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter.... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also." Cooking and laundering to support herself, she began the life of a fugitive slave in the North.

The 1850s: The Irrepressible Conflict at the Boiling Point

Tubman arrived in the North on the eve of the biggest struggle yet over the question of slavery. Congressional debate sparked over California's petition for admission to the Union as a free state continued for months, while legislatures and mass rallies North and South adopted fiery resolutions. Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states. Over time a compromise satisfactory to few on either side was worked out, largely due to the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster, who was voted out of his Senate seat by an enraged Massachusetts legislature in 1851. Webster was replaced by the uncompromising abolitionist radical, Charles Sumner. Later a leader of the Radical Republicans, in 1856, after a stirring anti-slavery speech, Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by a Southern Congressman.

The terms of the Compromise of 1850 centered on a series of tradeoffs: while California would be admitted as a free state, no restrictions on slavery were to be made in the Mexican cession; and while Washington, D.C. ceased to be a depot for the slave trade, the 1793 fugitive slave law was to be replaced with a much tougher version. This new law was an unspeakable atrocity, a threat to the lives and freedom of black people in every state. In his scathing indictment of hypocritical American "democracy," "July Fourth and the Negro" (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass described it:

"For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave taw makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to near only his accusers.'

—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2

Many Northerners vowed to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, a long-time anti-slavery radical, defied even the army to enforce the statute: "Let the President... drench our land of freedom in blood; but he will never make us obey that law" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction). When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was kidnapped in 1854 under the law in Boston by a gang of thugs organized by the federal government and Burns' Virginian master, the city erupted in seething conflict from the halls of government to the men in the street. The local vigilance committee, dedicated to helping fugitive slaves, organized mass rallies; a badly coordinated assault on the federal courthouse failed to rescue Burns. The federal government and the slaveholders succeeded in returning Burns to slavery. But he was the last fugitive to be returned from anywhere in New England. In fact, nine Northern states passed per¬sonal liberty laws, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court struck down the personal liberty laws as unconstitutional.

One of Harriet Tubman's most publicized actions was the courageous rescue of a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the Troy, New York court where he was pronounced guilty in 1860 under the Fugitive Slave Law. For several hours a battle raged between the abolitionists and the authorities until Tubman, with the help of others, seized Nalle and started him off on the journey to Canada.

But the North was by no means free of pro-slavery or racist forces. Many states had "black laws"; Indiana, Oregon, Illinois and Iowa all eventually passed statutes banning black migration into the state. These measures reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.

Indeed, opposition to slavery was all too often based on the wish to exclude blacks altogether. And throughout the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement grew in strength, so did the pro-slavery mob. Tubman had first¬hand experience with the violence of the Northern racists when she was part of a defense guard for Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison at a Boston meeting in 1860, raided by pro-slavery hooligans.

The Underground Railroad

Under these conditions of mounting assaults on blacks, free and slave, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. Marked by her scarred head and subject to spells of unconsciousness, she faced incredible dangers which grew greater as the years passed. She raised money for her trips through her own labor and by fundraising among abolitionists. Given the secrecy of her missions and the price on her head—the slaveholders offered rewards totaling $40,000, an enormous sum in those days—there were few records of her 19 trips back South. She always carried a pistol and threatened to use it on those whose courage failed, on the principle that dead men carry no tales. In her native Maryland, where she returned many times to rescue dozens, including all but one of her entire family, so many slaves escaped that a panic broke out among the slaveholders, leading to the 1858 Southern Convention in Baltimore. Ancient laws were resurrected to crack down on escaping slaves; 89 free blacks were re-enslaved under a new law.

But Tubman continued her work up to the Civil War. She personally brought out some 300 people altogether, from all parts of the South. In the 1880s, she spoke of
these years at a meeting of women's suffragists in Rochester, New York: "Yes, ladies...I was the 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." As Frederick Douglass said of the Underground Railroad:

"I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Indeed, the political impact of the Underground Railroad spread beyond the comparatively small numbers it freed, which have been estimated at probably less than 1,000 a year out of a total slave population of four million. As an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk imprisonment or death in their work, it was a rallying point in abolition work. Speaking tours of ex-slaves, who described the horrors of their lives in bondage, won over many to abolition.

The vigilance committees not only helped to settle newly arrived blacks, but tried to fight the racism of the North.

Most importantly, the Underground Railroad effectively allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote:
"Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coordinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic."

—W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown

It was becoming more and more clear that liberation for the American slave was a national task beyond the scope of local slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Denmark Vesey's. Leadership for black emancipation thus developed in the North, among the core of militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— people like Douglass, Tubman, Brown, Wendell Phil¬lips and Charles Sumner. A small but crucial element of experienced radicals existed in the "Red 48ers/' European refugees from reaction following the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Black, white, foreign-born, many of these later formed the left wing of the Republican Party.

The abolitionists were by no means a homogeneous group. One of the most famous abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, opposed all political activity—running for office, petitioning the government—on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery. Advocating "moral suasion," Garrison opposed the use of force in the fight against slavery. He finally ended up by proposing the secession of the North as the "answer"—which needless to say would have done nothing to end slavery.

Although Douglass and Brown originally subscribed to "moral suasion," they both soon realized that it was doomed to fail. Even the Underground Railroad, although constantly defying the slave system and the federal laws which protected it, was not a critical weapon to end slavery and as such was more inspirational than strategic. Douglass, Brown and Tubman embraced all means to fight slavery, from petitioning and agitation to armed self-defense and insurrection. As Douglass commented in 1852 at a national free-soil convention, "The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check" ("The Fugitive Slave Law," The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2). When the war broke out, it was Douglass and the other radical abolitionists who argued for the immediate freeing and arming of the slaves. Black insurrection at last would destroy the slave power: only that way could the Union Army win the war.

Harpers Ferry: The First Battle of the Civil War

As the years passed,to anti-slavery forces it seemed that the slaveholders were winning every battle. Every "compromise" increased the power of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruling on the Dred Scott case effectively extended the boundaries of slavery throughout the country. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southern Democrat, led the court decision that residency in a free state did not free a slave and that the Missouri Compromise barring slavery in the Northern territories was unconstitutional. As Marx said, "... now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery" ("The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19). Most notoriously, Taney wrote that blacks had no claim to U.S. citizenship under the Constitution because blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

But many abolitionists and free-soilers were determined to fight with every weapon available. To the free-soil farmers of the West, the expansion of slave-based agriculture was a direct threat. The South hindered by every possible means the colonization of the territories by free labor, seeking instead new lands for the plantation system and for the immensely profitable slave trade. Outraged free-state settlers organized in self-defense. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened Kansas to slavery under the dubious slogan of "popular sovereignty," border ruffians from the neighboring slave-state of Missouri spread terror and murder throughout the area to prevent a free-soil government from forming. John Brown and his followers, armed with rifles and the determination that slavery would not triumph, were key in the eventual victory of freedom in Bleeding Kansas.

It was shortly thereafter that Brown began to finalize and execute his plan to initiate a slave insurrection to found a black republic in the South. When Brown approached Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass and others (among whom were the Secret Six) in 1858 with his plan for launching a guerrilla war against the slavocracy, they recommended Tubman as the key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen who had settled in Canada, beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Her work in bringing slaves out of the South gave her not only detailed knowledge of the terrain throughout Brown's planned Appalachian route, but invaluable military experience. Brown went to meet the woman he called "General Tubman" at St. Catherines in Canada; she enthusiastically embraced his plan for arming the slaves and setting up mountain strongholds from which to wage war against slavery.

Tubman agreed to recruit followers and raise money for the plan. She also may have attended the Chatham, Ontario convention in May 1858, where Brown and his followers discussed the constitution for the new black republic. A sternly religious man not given to superlatives, Brown wrote to his son: "Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that / ever met with. There is the most abundant material; & of the right quality; in this quarter; beyond all doubt" (quoted in Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood).

But when the time came to launch the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry which was to begin the guerrilla war, Tubman was ill and out of reach. Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, kept her from being with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Thus Tubman was not there when federal troops dispatched by President Buchanan and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart rounded up Brown and his men. A few escaped; of the rest, those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia. At his execution in December 1859, John Brown's last, prescient words spoke of the years to come: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done" (ibid., emphasis in original). In the North John Brown's martyrdom was a rallying cry for abolition, while hysterical fear of insurrection swept the South and led to lynchings of suspected agitators. In later years Harriet Tubman spoke of Brown, "We Negroes in the South never call him John Brown; we call him our Saviour. He died for us."

The Civil War Years

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 out of the struggle for Kansas. For the 1860 presidential election the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as a moderate capable of winning wider support than more radical candidates. Although he opposed the expan¬sion of slavery, Lincoln's platform did not call for its elimination in the states where it already existed. Lincoln explicitly denounced John Brown's raid and declared his execution just. But Lincoln was still too anti-slavery for the South, and the secession of (eventually) eleven states led to the Confederate States of America. The Northern government, hoping for yet another compromise, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the war, which was forced on them by the slaveholders' cannons at Fort Sumter. To Lincoln and the majority of the Northern ruling class, the goal of the war was not to end slavery but to put down the secession of the South.
Harriet Tubman again saw further, earlier: that the war for the Union must become a war to free the slaves. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child quoted her words in a letter to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (quoted in Conrad, op. c/t.):

"They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer and the ague in the winter— They may send them one year, two year, three year, till they tire of sending ortill they use upthe young men. All of no use. God is ahead of Mister Lincoln. Cod won't let Mister Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Mister Lincoln, he is a great man, and 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. Suppose there was an awfully big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. You send for the doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolls up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again ... and so he keeps doing till you kill him. That's what Mister Lincoln ought to know."

But in the early months of the war Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in a military/political maneuver to woo secessionists and would-be secessionists into the Union. When General John C. Frernont, commander of the western depart¬ment, declared in August 1861 that all property of Missourians in rebellion was confiscated and the slaves emancipated, Lincoln fired him and rescinded the order. It took two years of ignominious defeats at the hands of the rebels to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. When it became clear by late 1862 that the North could not win the war in any other way, he made plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—finally ending the spirit of compromise which had immobilized the North:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."

Although the Emancipation Proclamation expressly left intact slavery in Union-loyal states like Maryland, January 1, 1863 was a day of rejoicing among all anti-slavery people. Douglass described his reaction:

"...I took the proclamation, first and last, for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter. Its meaning to me was the entire abolition of slavery, wherever the evil could be reached by the federal arm, and I saw that its moral power would extend much further."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. Harriet Tubman herself was within earshot of one of the first battles employing blacks in combat: the heroic assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863. It was here that the Massachusetts 54th, the first regiment of free Northern blacks, led by Tubman's friend Robert Gould Shaw, demonstrated before the eyes of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers. It was probably this battle Tubman was describing in her dramatic words: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." From then on black soldiers were thrown into the fighting on all fronts, tipping the balance of power for the ultimate Northern victory against the slavocracy.
Fort Wagner was quite near to Port Royal, South Carolina, where Tubman spent most of the war years working for the Union Army. One of the earliest Union victories had liberated the lush Sea Islands from the slaveholders; from here the Union Army ran its Department of the South. Control of the port allowed Union gunboats to patrol the coastline from Savannah to Charleston and begin a blockade of Confederate shipping, cutting off trade between the cotton South and the textile merchants of Great Britain. Fugitive slaves and freedmen flocked to the protection of the Union Army. Abolitionists set up schools to teach the blacks, young and old, to read and write.

Here Tubman worked in the army's service in many capacities. Her authority as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad was enormously important in reassuring the freedmen of the trustworthiness of the Yankees. As a nurse she first ministered predominantly to the blacks suffering from malnutrition. Later she nursed both black and white soldiers, going from camp to camp where men were dying of dysentery, smallpox and malaria. She set up a laundry and taught women to earn a living, while supporting herself by baking pies and brewing root beer at night after her hard day's labor.

Tubman's outstanding contribution to the war was as a Union spy and scout. General Hunter, the commander at Port Royal, recognized her expertise, tempered by her years in the Underground Railroad; under him Tubman organized a scouting service of black scouts and river pilots who surveyed and patrolled the Combahee River area in South Carolina.
In this capacity she was integral to a celebrated military action on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Three ships under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the guerrilla battles in Kansas and a trusted comrade of John Brown, raided deep into South Carolina in a blow pointing forward to Sherman's march on Georgia. The Boston Commonwealth described the battle:

"Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch."

The liberated slaves were brought back to Port Royal, where the able-bodied men among them were inducted into Montgomery's regiment.

Reconstruction Betrayed

At the war's end in 1865, over 600,000 Americans lay dead—almost equal to the number of American deaths in all the rest of the nation's wars combined. It took this bloody conflagration to resolve two key questions in American history: the Civil War forged a loose confederation of individual states into a modern nation. And underlying this question of political power lay the conflict between slavery and capitalism. The black question is the linchpin of American history.

Northern industrialism, unfettered at long last from the opposition of the slaveholders, wasted no time. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. A federal protective tariff fostered the growth of domestic industry. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for the free-soil colonization of the vast territories of the West.

But in 1865 the question of what position the newly liberated slaves should occupy in American society cried out for an answer. The initial conciliationist policy of the federal government under Andrew Johnson was strenuously opposed by the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Congressional legislation provided for full political equality for blacks: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are the legal codification of the gains of the Civil War. Slavery was wiped from the American Constitution, and blacks were made full citizens by law. The 15th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was passed to provide federal protection of blacks against Southern counterrevolu¬tionary violence. Black rights were enforced at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army.

But the foundation upon which black equality must rest was never laid: only confiscation of the huge plantation holdings of the ex-slaveowners and their distribution'among the ex-slaves would have laid the economic basis without which "equality" remained a legal formality. Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution— the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the econom¬ic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression.

Radical Reconstruction was destroyed in a political counterrevolution which stripped blacks of their newly won economic and political rights. Nightriding race-terrorists intimidated and murdered thefreedmen; the Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the war by ex-Confederate officers. The Compromise of 1877 codi¬fied the rollback of Reconstruction: the Republican Party bought the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops from the South. Over the years a new form of rural repression developed to replace the slave plantations. The Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement bound the liberated slaves to poverty and oppression as landless sharecroppers.

The betrayal of the struggle for black freedom was certainly experienced by Harriet Tubman. At the war's end, almost 50 years old, she was at last able to head for her home in Auburn, New York. Exhausted by her years of labor, subject to increasing bouts of sickness, and with family members looking to her for support, her active political life was essentially over. En route North she was beaten by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass, entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. She was thrown into the baggage car, badly hurt and humiliated by this racist and sexist attack. She suffered from the effects of this injury for years. Then began a decades-long battle for the pension to which her three years of war service entitled her. Tubman commented scornfully, "You wouldn't think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds." She did not receive a penny until after the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, in 1888, when she was awarded $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government made some recognition of her service to the Union. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home, named in honor of John Brown, for indigent elderly blacks. Harriet Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old.

Finish the Civil War!

At the time of Lincoln's re-election in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was a leading member, sent the president a letter of congratulation:

"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholdersdared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; whenon the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up,whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man wasissued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; ...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy crusade of property against labor... "

But the stars and stripes, the proud banner of the Civil War, has long since become mired in the filth of racism and imperialist war. Only the working class, under revolutionary socialist leadership, can lead mankind out of the putrid decay that is capitalist society today.

Marx said, "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the "American dream" is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx's words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is fhe race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.

Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, "Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!" to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolution¬ary party. A workers party as the tribune of the people will fight for the interests of all the oppressed. Liberation for blacks and women can be won only by a workers government which will smash the capitalist system and reorganize society on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Key leadership in the revolutionary struggle will be provided by the Harriet Tubmans and Frederick Douglasses of our time. We honor these great black leaders for their role in bringing the day of liberation one giant step closer.

Friday, October 09, 2020

Channeling The Ghost Of Ti Jean Kerouac- In Honor Of the 60th Anniversary Of The Publication Of “On The Road” (1957)

Channeling The Ghost Of Ti Jean Kerouac- In Honor Of the 60th Anniversary Of The Publication Of “On The Road” (1957)





By Gordon Gleason   


Even Phil Larkin could not remember when he first heard the name Jack Kerouac mentioned in his presence. Jack, his muse since early adult days in the late 1960s, was like a book sealed with seven seals in the Larkin household in the early 1960s when Rose Larkin prohibited any talk of atheist rabble commie unwashed beatniks in the house (the latter not the least in the list of Rose sins although atheist in the high holy Roman Catholic Larkin household where Jack apostate had some consideration). So it must have been sometime before that. Maybe name heard on a vagrant television show, The Steve Allen Show, which he sneak watched at midnight hours to see what was what and which Phil in perusing YouTube has noticed that hipster in exile Steve and “king of the beats” Jack bantered around many subjects of mutual interest under the sign of cool ass jazz and word play aficionado-hood. (One such clip of the show showed Jack reading the famous last page of his On The Road where he and Dean Moriarty are searching, endlessly searching, for the father they never just like Phil looked for literary father Jack when the time came among other things but that clip did not ring a bell when he tried to date that first heard name question ringing in his brain one Jack October in the railroad dream night.)     

Phil, never much for deep introspection although overloaded with surface introspection like any half-arsed speculator writer (Irish expression check James Joyce if you please), in any case abandoned that endless thought, that father, literary father remember thought, as he tried to place Jack’s name in his head. A thought which was triggered once he read in  a small publication magazine that the year 2017 would be the 60th anniversary of the publication of the sensational On The Road which would get many a young man and some young women on the road, on the car highway, bus sweat, freight train hobo, hitchhike thumb road, no question.

He guessed not having any success at pinpointing some exact event or date that the first time would have had to be about 1962 when his old high school friend from his growing up town, the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville, Peter Paul Markin always known since junior high school as “Scribe” forced all the corner boys to read the damn thing under penalty that he would read it to them on those forlorn Friday and Saturday nights when without money, without a car to flee the burg, without some girl willing to go on a date via public transportation or walking and maybe willing to do the “dutch treat” number (and thus no hope, no fucking hope for testosterone-hammered boys, of coping feels, snatch, blowjobs since any girl who consented under those conditions saw the guy, saw Phil before he became known as Foul-Mouthed Phil which is a whole story for another time since is about father Jack time not Phil schemes for those feels, snatches, blowjobs) they would be huddled against the wall in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. Hoping, endlessly cold-nosed hoping when first starting out in late freshman year that some girl (or girls) would come by and maybe go into Tonio’s and play the jukebox and that would get things started. At worst start the “con,” low con for sure about what songs those chicks played which was an art-form first perfected by shy-boy Scribe as his “come on” to the girls when he was too nervous to sweet baby talk them like any other guy, like Phil when he found out that some girls, some social butterfly girls and not just the school sluts liked to hear what in “polite” society would be considered vulgar language worthy if you were a Catholic boy, a Rose Larkin Catholic boy confession worthy and a hell of a lot of hail marys and acts of contrition.        

On those nights when that low slung prospect did not look promising, Jesus were times that bad that some sweet thing come Friday night didn’t at least risk a fucking slice of pizza and iced Coke to at least tempt their fates and keep the Scribe from his altar, say around 10 PM, maybe a little later, which meant that whatever girls were going out had gone out for the night or were down Squaw Rock freely parting with feel, snatches and blowjobs and not just the school sluts either remember those social butterflies, the Scribe would take out his tattered and well-worn copy of the book and start reading. A book which he in high holy Roman Catholic Delores Markin household had to sneak buy over in Harvard Square at some dimly-lit bookstore (a bookstore that a couple of years later would be a place like lemmings to the sea where shy-boy Scribe would find the slightly neurotic, slim, okay skinny, black-attired girls that drove him wild and provide him with those freely given feels, snatches, blowjobs that he longed for in hometown high school).

Before long he would be stopped, usually by the naturally selected leader of this motley crew, Frankie Riley, who threatened murder and mayhem if the Scribe continued. Those guys were no surplus literary bums or wannabe dharma bums of some later Phil dream but hard-nosed corner denizens who were as likely to jack-roll some “faggy” guy, some punk kid or some father/uncle/older brother drunken sot paycheck fresh (and short) from Irish Grille/Dublin Pub/ Johnny Murphy’s and you don’t have to consult Mister James Joyce as look at you. Whatever short-comings the Scribe had in the manly prowess province the long and short of it was that at some point Phil and almost every other guy on the stoop read the book if only to see what the Scribe was talking about or just to keep him quiet on those depressing empty nights.

It took a long time for Phil to realize that what drew the Scribe to Jack Kerouac (the Scribe would always call him Ti Jean once he heard somebody in school who knew French call out John name that way) was that there were many affinities between the way Jack grew up a generation before them in factory-strewn Merrimack River textile heavy from Frenchie/ Irish/ Hungary/Italy Lowell about sixty miles away and working-class ship-building North Adamsville. Knew want and hungry a bit, knew more importantly “wanting habits” which drove a lot of the Scribe’s (and the rest of the Tonio corner boys) baser instincts. Knew that same craving for privacy that never came in cold water flats above vacant stores with mother hectoring and crying out one venial and about seven mortals sins per hour 24/7/365. No room to breathe. Knew that desire to break out from the tedium of what was to be scheduled fate wrapped in a big fat package box unless the break-out came and soon.

(Prelude to Jack breakout aside from vivid memory black and white film Majestic Theater Saturday afternoon haunts and hanging with the boys cool daddy jazz, big swing jazz big bad ass bands led by guys named Duke, Count, Earl, hell, maybe Emperor with some snow white song-bird fronting except when black as coal Billie fronted and blown them snowbirds all away even before the “fixer” man came calling around midnight and later, late 1940s later cool as a cucumber jazz with plenty of variations and riffs, riff to blow that high white note out to the Frisco Bay China seas like happened one night in North Beach by some unknown cat who just blew and blew  and maybe is still blowing that one time high white note and is dead ass dead having run himself raged and culled looking for that sequel in some dead night fog horn freighter of the world. Prelude to Tonio boys breakout aside from vivid memory black and white film Strand Theater Saturday afternoon matinees double-features and hanging with the boys hot off the presses big daddy rock and roll music any old way you use it proclaimed by the President, President of rock and roll Chuck Berry that one Mister Mozart and his crew (Bach, Brahms, that Russian guy) that they had best leave town because a new high sheriff was in town to shake, rattle and roll and later when the sniff of Jack dope, tea-head dope turned to modern Moloch chemical madness cloud-covered French curves and swirls acid rock.)      

The funny thing about the Scribe’s crazed campaign was that Phil, beside his lack of deep introspection then, was not any kind of bookworm-then  (a pejorative term on the Tonio corner which would usually have banned a guy like the Scribe from that place except he had a double-heart, had as well as that literary funk an exceptionally larcenous heart and produced in quality well-thought out plans to grab dough, grab it any way they could although nobody in their right mind would let him carry out those plans that was left to the clever Frankie Riley already mentioned). The funny part was that later, several years later when he was in the Army and confined to the base for disciplinary reasons, he ambled into the base library one afternoon and noticed that On The Road and several other books by Kerouac were on a bookshelf he was perusing looking for something by sci-fi writer Kenneth Koch. And that was that. That was that being he re-read Road and scampered through such Jack works as Dharma Bum and Desolation Angels (and in the end much more than that but check some Jack bibliography and you will have pretty much encompassed what Phil read before the fall).              
                 
The Scribe and Jack connection would intersect Phil’s life several times before The Scribe’s early violent death down in Mexico from still unknown and uninvestigated by the Federales causes around a busted drug deal. Probably the most dramatic connection driven by Jack hitchhike road dreams in the late 1940s before Interstate Route 66 car-hopping night had been Phil’s involvement through the Scribe in the westward trek to what has been called the Summer of Love out mainly in San Francisco in 1967 (although some action happened in Monterey at the first Pops Festival but that was before Phil headed out and in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur when he/they hitched a ride from a moving house of a converted yellow school bus). The Scribe, partially influenced by Jack’s book and partially by his own endless predictions that things were going to go through a sea-change especially among the young in this country and had dropped out of college in Boston his sophomore year to see what was what out west. A couple of months later the Scribe came back and practically force-marched all the corner boys still around to head west as soon as they could. Phil under the Jack spell (and having no money a la Jack most of the time as well and no permission a la Rose Larkin who had a bloody fit when she found out where he was and had Father Lally say about ten prayers for Phil’s already damned soul) hitchhiked out with Frankie Riley in a spasm of high adventure. Phil, not in school, no money, working at some madness Robert Hall men’s clothing store to kill time and make some college-bound dough,  at the height of the madness in foreign country Vietnam would only stay out there a couple of months since he received a draft notice in late August to report for a physical in September. But while he was out west he imbibed in all the dope, music, sex and whatnot available that Mother Larkin had railed against citing one John Kerouac, lapsed Catholic sweet cherib big tubby Buddha in his brain now as correspondent. Even went to Jack beat down, beat around beatitude if you want to call it that spots in North Beach like Eddy’s and Big Max’s (where that skinny kid blew the high white note out into the Frisco Bay China seas and never looked back) to see what that earlier cultural scene had been all about.          

This year’s (2017) 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love out again mainly in San Francisco which Phil had not been aware of until Alex James, one of his old corner confederates, had been out there and seen an art exhibition all about the music, fashion, poster art (advertising upcoming concerts in Golden Gate Park, the Avalon, Fillmore and so on) and photography and when he came back to Boston  had gathered all the remaining corner boys who had gone out in ’67 together to write their memoirs for a small Scribe tribute book had sparked some remembrances beyond that event. Got him thinking about how much Jack Kerouac, his dog-ear short life (Kerouac had died at 47), had influenced him. How episodes in Jack’s life had some meaning. One night Phil was sitting with Alex in Jimmy’s Irish Pub in downtown Adamsville (an old haunt of theirs where the drinks were cheap for no money boys when they came of drinking age just like their fathers, uncles and older brothers before them) ostensibly to talk the talk about the mad monk Scribe when he laid out to Alex what he was thinking about. Mainly thinking about from having in the subsequent years read most of Jack’s books (and remember check out some Jack bibliography and you will have an idea of how cuckoo Phil Jacked).      

Phil, a fairly well-known writer himself for a while for alternative newspapers when they were in vogue and small literary magazines when they were not, startled Alex by saying that most of what he wrote, had written in the past, sketches and articles for magazines and journals about his early youth and young adulthood, had been fired in his imagination by Jack. He then began a long screed (that was Alex’s expression when he mentioned it to a couple of guys later reflecting that Phil had gon eon about two hours without stop) about Jack starting from some mystical river (the Merrimack) which gave Jack life and which he compared with his own river experience at the local Adamsville River. Talked of Jack boyhood Tom Sawyer-like river adventures up among the Dracut woods, about those boyhood bonding experiences and visions and about Sampas, the ghost of Sampas, the holy goof who was to do so much  in the literary world but who laid his head down in World War II. Saw the Scribe as such a kindred holy goof also laid low as a result of war.

It was at that point, after Alex had flipped out over what Phil had been blasting into his head for a couple of hours, that Phil went into cruise control about the nodal points of Jack’s life as related through books and what others had grabbed onto about him. Some of it commonplace, working class 1930s commonplace, where want and hunger had a field day and wanting habits got great gobs of reinforcement from that want and hunger, made a small-time, small-town mill boy reach up big-handed for the stars, took notes in dime-store notebooks (Woolworth’s on Merrimack Street remember, or Hancock Street in North Adamsville where hungry boys waited on lunch counter waitresses to cook up melted chesses sandwiches the cheapest thing on the menu and later downtown Boston the scene of picket lines by young white people mainly supporting the right, Jesus yes, the right of black people down South and not just down South to have that same melted cheese sandwiches at those same lunch counters cooked by those same waitresses the cheapest thing on the menu). Thought long and hard from early on about redemption and mystery of life, of birth and of dead and older brother passed to the heavens and why. Mentioned cannibal mother who nose-dived him every chance she could get yet he in the end, get this, could never cut that string that bound the two generations like some naughty Greek myth, mentioned not fit for work father (no, not the father searched for and never known he died in some abandoned freight yard bludgeoned by some railroad bull or from an overdose of sterno can take your pick of the accumulated legends of the road) who died young from misery and his own small-hood hubris. 

Passed the passing time of young boy Catholic schools at old Saint Joseph’s the church of good immigrant clans from up north in the North Country over the border in Quebec who came down a few generations back to get off of starvation farms and look for work in noisy spinning mills until exhaustion set in. Transferred over to Acre Bartlett school and all the miseries of junior high school boy and girl hormone troubles from no give French-speaking girls whose no give made those Irish Catholic girls up the street with a Bible tucked between their knees look like street whores and so real miseries until high school track and football hero times when some be-bop girl with a big band swing voice and a flaming red dress which said come thither slaked his thirst. Then back to that Irish cunt up the streets who wouldn’t give anything and she didn’t even have a Bible between her knees. Hell he wrote a whole book about it, called it Mary Magdalen or something like that whose sister knowing Jack value would have given whatever she had to give if he looked her way once-thems the breaks.            

Roll Columbia, roll on all up in arms bigtime when Columbia New York City was big time and football hero Saturday afternoon dreams which would make that famous Lawrence hero game laughable but he couldn’t give up the time to pass some science test and then he broke his fucking bones and so long big time Columbia when Columbia was big time granite grey autumn afternoon gridiron exploits to make the Barnard co-ed wet. Sorry Jack but Time Square hipsters, con men, fags, yes that is what they called them then like now in hidden rooms fags, fairies, queens, queers, drags, fixer man junkies, wide-eyed dope fiends sucking benny tablets from Rexall drug store pharmacies, bent whores who for the price of once around the world would take you for a ride, would later put you up in Mexico City junkie whorehouses and leave you restless and broke howling at some ill-spent moon-some later day pet king said that. Learned to navigate with the dime store junkies (not Woolworth’s this time but some Bargain Basement hooker hang-out) and street wise bandit gangster poets and Harvard-trained morphine madmen. Most importantly maybe not recognized then but would play later when he was gone (at freaking 47 just when his juices should have been flowing, when that great big American anti-novel could have been written, hell, the material was there for it all the way from Lowell town via Quebec provinces to Denver nights and San Fran hump big high white note to the Japan seas swales) a faggy Jew boy who could croon with the Molochs, knew the magic of medieval kabala, said high Kaddish when the time came, could sing of the long gone Whitman night with that same sadness. Howled at San Fran winds and blew his own high white note and drove everybody, every square-assed poet bleeping about some bull to the showers-gone. Yes, he would deliver the totem to a disbelieving world, a reckless dangerous world not looking for second-coming Messiahs.                

Skip a few our mother the sea scenes and cabin fever pitches up in Artic waters and bring in the new world a-borning. A time with acre lots and ranch house breezeways and dishwaters coveted by men in grey flannel suits. And he, Jack he, looking for the meaning of existence thinking that it was on some lame Robert Frost road less travelled so crisscrossed the continent looking for what the Scribe called in his time the great blue-pink American West night (strangely both city boys, both welded Eastern city boys and so of the same mesh when all was said and done the Scribe too done in by pitching his wanting habits to far above). A time when Jack tired of same old, same old traversed and trailed around looking for some model father Adonis Oedipus mother and wound up in a Latimer Street junkie wino hotel with wheelman to the Gods Dean Moriarty and you know how that storied began (and ended). Ended in balmy San Fran nights listening to the willows belch and cool daddies take big brass and blow baby blow, benny, sister, brother, cousin high to make tea-head moan and moan. Wrote about it on all those well-kept and organized notebooks and blasted out in some speed demon time a paper roll of words and adventures.


Then hiatus, writing ever writing but not hip enough to make the New York publishing industry cut until the time of his time came (although he would always groan it was well pass his time and he may have been right who knows) Known: Jack caught some pregnant fever pitch among the young post-war maddened atomic bomb death walk-outs who took up surfing, hot cars, wandering, outlaw motorcycles and to while their times and forget those bomb shelter Horoshima dead. The rest would be history. Strangely the rest would be played out in small coffeehouses and cabarets, out in open air parks and other greenspaces by guys like now straight as an arrow if not straighter Alex and bent out of shape Scribe seeking that newer world that he never was able to catch up to. Sixty years later it still beats a heartbeat to a sullen world. Thanks Ti Jean               

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-All Honor To “General” Harriet Tubman

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for “General” Harriet Tubman

February Is Black History. March Is Women’s History Month. Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits. Any one , or all, of those reasons can be used as the reason to honor “General” Harriet Tubman


Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

*******
The Revolutionary Vanguard of the Civil War

Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom


Toward the end of her long life, the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman commented on her years of service to the liberation of black people in a conversation with a journalist:

"She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: 'Do you like apples?' On being assured that I did, she said: 'Did you ever plant any apple trees?' With shame I confessed I had not. 'No/ said she, 'but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said, "Some day I'll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat," and I guess I did it'."

—Frank C. Drake, The New York Herald, 22 September 1907, quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman

In this simple metaphor, Tubman recognized the vanguard role she played in laying the groundwork for black freedom in the United States in the revolution that was the Civil War. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a military strategist and spy during the war, "General" Tubman, as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. Like John Brown, the heroic martyr of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and the outstanding political leader of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass, Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. Harriet Tubman's life is a microcosm of the struggle for black liberation in the
19th century; her life directly reflects the issues of the time.

Although the hope for a complete liberation of black people was later defeated in the cowardly betrayal of Reconstruction, Tubman's "apple orchard"—freedom for the slave—was a tremendous historical advance. The abolition of slavery and the fight for full citizenship for the black population was the great historic task of the Civil War, the second American Revolution, which carried forward the unfinished business of the first American Revolution.

The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, the 19th century descendant of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. The abolitionists were part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820, encompassing such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Particularly among the most politically radical wing, the abolitionists were motivated by a vision of human emancipation profoundly rooted in religion. To men like the clergymen Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, slavery was an abomination to god and the Christian Bible and a gross betrayal of the rights of man as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Although slavery was their pre-eminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers' rights. The women's suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression. As the abolitionist and women's rights leader Angelina Grimke' said at the May 1863 meeting of the Women's Loyal League, a convention of support for the North in the Civil War, "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours" (see "The Grimke' Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights," W&R No. 29, Spring 1985).

The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom—which included years as a soldier in the Union Army—she lived in poverty all her life.

A fugitive from bondage, black and a woman, Tubman triumphed over exceptional odds to become a leader of the second American Revolution. Like Frederick Douglass, she was able to generalize her bitter and brutal experience of oppression into a revolutionary social consciousness and a determination to fight for all the oppressed. She was an advocate of militant political action and revolutionary insurrectionism. As opposed to the "moral suasion" Garrisonian wing, she was part of the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement. As the "Moses" of her people on the Underground Railroad, Tubman was famous throughout the U.S. and beyond by the time of the war.

However, many details about her work are obscure, since she operated in the secrecy of what was essentially a revolutionary underground. She was illiterate, and much of what is known about her life comes from a biography of her by Sarah Bradford, who interviewed Tubman as an old woman (quotes from Tubman which were originally printed in dialect are here transposed into modern English spelling). Thus much of the story of her life must be told by others, especially by Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared the conviction, through the bleak decade of the 1850s, that the coming war must crush the slave system and break the bonds of black oppression. She was a co-worker and friend not only to John Brown and Douglass, but to many other key figures of her time, from abolitionist William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, to Sojourner Truth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith. She knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and most of the leading women's rights activists of her day.
Douglass honored Tubman's role in a letter written in 1868, in which he defended her right to an army pension as a Civil War veteran:

"The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encourage¬ment at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt 'Cod bless you' has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you."

—quoted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman; The Moses of Her People
Slave vs. Free in the Antebellum U.S.

Like Frederick Douglass, Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland, probably in 1820. At that time the country was embroiled in the first of the major fights over slavery and the expanding U.S. territory, "resolved" in this instance by the Missouri Compro¬mise of 1820.

Since the founding of the U.S. in the late 18th century, when the slave system was left intact throughout the South, two economic systems, capitalism and slavery, coexisted within one country. The inevitable clash of economic interest which must lead to the victory of one over the other was postponed in a series of "compromises" centering on the maintenance of control by the slave states over the relatively weak federal government. But. the underlying economic conflicts between the two systems eventually reached the point at which compromise was no longer possible. The development of large-scale industrial capitalism required wage labor to exploit, the source of its tremendous profits, as well as a mobile and at least somewhat educated working population. Key to capitalist expansion was control of a growing home market. In contrast, the slave system was based on primitive, labor-intensive agricultural production; the slaveowners sought new lands to increase the highly profitable slave trade and to move plantations to fresh, non-exhausted soil. The clash came to a head over the huge, expanding territories of the West: would they be slave or free?

Karl Marx described the slow but inexorable sweep of political power by the slave states in their effort to increase control of the growing U.S.:

"The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic
northwest of the Ohio... The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed."

—Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19

In 1820, when Tubman was born, news of the first of these bitter debates undoubtedly reached even the slave quarters, however isolated the slaves were kept from news of the day. Perhaps the slaves with whom Tubman lived as a child heard rumors about the deep split in Congress over the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have prohibited the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and provided for gradual emancipation of those already there. This first great debate on slavery was a harbinger of things to come. Abandoning even his earlier, contradictory anti-slavery position altogether, Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed the Tallmadge Amendment. In 1821 he wrote, "All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later."

As a child Tubman was acquainted with all the horrors of slavery. By the age of five or six she was at •work and suffering from whippings on her face and neck by a vicious mistress. Later she worked as a field hand. She was still a child at the time of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, put down by the slaveholders swiftly and ruthlessly. In 1832, the opposition of the agricultural South to the federal tariff designed to protect Northern industry led to the Nullification Crisis, in ' which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The slaveholders' fear of black insurrection, sparked by Nat Turner's revolt, fueled their intransigence against the federal government.
Tubman was around 15 years old when the incident that literally marked her for life occurred. While trying to defend a fellow slave from the vindictiveness of the overseer, she was struck on the head with a two-pound iron weight which cracked her skull. For months she lingered between life and death, lying on rags in her family's slave cabin. The injury left a deep scar on her head and left her subject to spells of unconsciousness, sometimes three or four times a day, which plagued her for the rest of her life.

But instead of being crushed by the brutality of her life, Tubman hardened and determined to fight. When she recovered, she built up her physical strength until she could lift huge barrels of produce as well as a man, despite her small size. Her master would exhibit her strength as one of the "sights" of the plantation. She let people think her half-witted because of her brain injury, and plotted her escape. She began to experience daily visions, which inspired her driving commit¬ment to black freedom as part of a deeply personal religion.

In 1849, although it meant leaving her husband, a freeman who refused to go with her, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. Rumor had reached her and her family that their owners planned to sell them to the deep South, a dreaded fear of every slave in the bor¬der states. Already two of her sisters had been sent off in a chain gang, separated from their children. Her brothers lost courage for the escape; Tubman went on alone. As she later told Bradford: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me."
Aided by a white woman who gave her the first address of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made her way North, traveling at night. "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter.... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also." Cooking and laundering to support herself, she began the life of a fugitive slave in the North.

The 1850s: The Irrepressible Conflict at the Boiling Point

Tubman arrived in the North on the eve of the biggest struggle yet over the question of slavery. Congressional debate sparked over California's petition for admission to the Union as a free state continued for months, while legislatures and mass rallies North and South adopted fiery resolutions. Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states. Over time a compromise satisfactory to few on either side was worked out, largely due to the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster, who was voted out of his Senate seat by an enraged Massachusetts legislature in 1851. Webster was replaced by the uncompromising abolitionist radical, Charles Sumner. Later a leader of the Radical Republicans, in 1856, after a stirring anti-slavery speech, Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by a Southern Congressman.

The terms of the Compromise of 1850 centered on a series of tradeoffs: while California would be admitted as a free state, no restrictions on slavery were to be made in the Mexican cession; and while Washington, D.C. ceased to be a depot for the slave trade, the 1793 fugitive slave law was to be replaced with a much tougher version. This new law was an unspeakable atrocity, a threat to the lives and freedom of black people in every state. In his scathing indictment of hypocritical American "democracy," "July Fourth and the Negro" (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass described it:

"For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave taw makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to near only his accusers.'

—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2

Many Northerners vowed to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, a long-time anti-slavery radical, defied even the army to enforce the statute: "Let the President... drench our land of freedom in blood; but he will never make us obey that law" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction). When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was kidnapped in 1854 under the law in Boston by a gang of thugs organized by the federal government and Burns' Virginian master, the city erupted in seething conflict from the halls of government to the men in the street. The local vigilance committee, dedicated to helping fugitive slaves, organized mass rallies; a badly coordinated assault on the federal courthouse failed to rescue Burns. The federal government and the slaveholders succeeded in returning Burns to slavery. But he was the last fugitive to be returned from anywhere in New England. In fact, nine Northern states passed per¬sonal liberty laws, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court struck down the personal liberty laws as unconstitutional.

One of Harriet Tubman's most publicized actions was the courageous rescue of a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the Troy, New York court where he was pronounced guilty in 1860 under the Fugitive Slave Law. For several hours a battle raged between the abolitionists and the authorities until Tubman, with the help of others, seized Nalle and started him off on the journey to Canada.

But the North was by no means free of pro-slavery or racist forces. Many states had "black laws"; Indiana, Oregon, Illinois and Iowa all eventually passed statutes banning black migration into the state. These measures reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.

Indeed, opposition to slavery was all too often based on the wish to exclude blacks altogether. And throughout the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement grew in strength, so did the pro-slavery mob. Tubman had first¬hand experience with the violence of the Northern racists when she was part of a defense guard for Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison at a Boston meeting in 1860, raided by pro-slavery hooligans.

The Underground Railroad

Under these conditions of mounting assaults on blacks, free and slave, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. Marked by her scarred head and subject to spells of unconsciousness, she faced incredible dangers which grew greater as the years passed. She raised money for her trips through her own labor and by fundraising among abolitionists. Given the secrecy of her missions and the price on her head—the slaveholders offered rewards totaling $40,000, an enormous sum in those days—there were few records of her 19 trips back South. She always carried a pistol and threatened to use it on those whose courage failed, on the principle that dead men carry no tales. In her native Maryland, where she returned many times to rescue dozens, including all but one of her entire family, so many slaves escaped that a panic broke out among the slaveholders, leading to the 1858 Southern Convention in Baltimore. Ancient laws were resurrected to crack down on escaping slaves; 89 free blacks were re-enslaved under a new law.

But Tubman continued her work up to the Civil War. She personally brought out some 300 people altogether, from all parts of the South. In the 1880s, she spoke of
these years at a meeting of women's suffragists in Rochester, New York: "Yes, ladies...I was the 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." As Frederick Douglass said of the Underground Railroad:

"I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Indeed, the political impact of the Underground Railroad spread beyond the comparatively small numbers it freed, which have been estimated at probably less than 1,000 a year out of a total slave population of four million. As an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk imprisonment or death in their work, it was a rallying point in abolition work. Speaking tours of ex-slaves, who described the horrors of their lives in bondage, won over many to abolition.

The vigilance committees not only helped to settle newly arrived blacks, but tried to fight the racism of the North.

Most importantly, the Underground Railroad effectively allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote:
"Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coordinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic."

—W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown

It was becoming more and more clear that liberation for the American slave was a national task beyond the scope of local slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Denmark Vesey's. Leadership for black emancipation thus developed in the North, among the core of militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— people like Douglass, Tubman, Brown, Wendell Phil¬lips and Charles Sumner. A small but crucial element of experienced radicals existed in the "Red 48ers/' European refugees from reaction following the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Black, white, foreign-born, many of these later formed the left wing of the Republican Party.

The abolitionists were by no means a homogeneous group. One of the most famous abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, opposed all political activity—running for office, petitioning the government—on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery. Advocating "moral suasion," Garrison opposed the use of force in the fight against slavery. He finally ended up by proposing the secession of the North as the "answer"—which needless to say would have done nothing to end slavery.

Although Douglass and Brown originally subscribed to "moral suasion," they both soon realized that it was doomed to fail. Even the Underground Railroad, although constantly defying the slave system and the federal laws which protected it, was not a critical weapon to end slavery and as such was more inspirational than strategic. Douglass, Brown and Tubman embraced all means to fight slavery, from petitioning and agitation to armed self-defense and insurrection. As Douglass commented in 1852 at a national free-soil convention, "The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check" ("The Fugitive Slave Law," The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2). When the war broke out, it was Douglass and the other radical abolitionists who argued for the immediate freeing and arming of the slaves. Black insurrection at last would destroy the slave power: only that way could the Union Army win the war.

Harpers Ferry: The First Battle of the Civil War

As the years passed,to anti-slavery forces it seemed that the slaveholders were winning every battle. Every "compromise" increased the power of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruling on the Dred Scott case effectively extended the boundaries of slavery throughout the country. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southern Democrat, led the court decision that residency in a free state did not free a slave and that the Missouri Compromise barring slavery in the Northern territories was unconstitutional. As Marx said, "... now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery" ("The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19). Most notoriously, Taney wrote that blacks had no claim to U.S. citizenship under the Constitution because blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

But many abolitionists and free-soilers were determined to fight with every weapon available. To the free-soil farmers of the West, the expansion of slave-based agriculture was a direct threat. The South hindered by every possible means the colonization of the territories by free labor, seeking instead new lands for the plantation system and for the immensely profitable slave trade. Outraged free-state settlers organized in self-defense. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened Kansas to slavery under the dubious slogan of "popular sovereignty," border ruffians from the neighboring slave-state of Missouri spread terror and murder throughout the area to prevent a free-soil government from forming. John Brown and his followers, armed with rifles and the determination that slavery would not triumph, were key in the eventual victory of freedom in Bleeding Kansas.

It was shortly thereafter that Brown began to finalize and execute his plan to initiate a slave insurrection to found a black republic in the South. When Brown approached Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass and others (among whom were the Secret Six) in 1858 with his plan for launching a guerrilla war against the slavocracy, they recommended Tubman as the key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen who had settled in Canada, beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Her work in bringing slaves out of the South gave her not only detailed knowledge of the terrain throughout Brown's planned Appalachian route, but invaluable military experience. Brown went to meet the woman he called "General Tubman" at St. Catherines in Canada; she enthusiastically embraced his plan for arming the slaves and setting up mountain strongholds from which to wage war against slavery.

Tubman agreed to recruit followers and raise money for the plan. She also may have attended the Chatham, Ontario convention in May 1858, where Brown and his followers discussed the constitution for the new black republic. A sternly religious man not given to superlatives, Brown wrote to his son: "Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that / ever met with. There is the most abundant material; & of the right quality; in this quarter; beyond all doubt" (quoted in Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood).

But when the time came to launch the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry which was to begin the guerrilla war, Tubman was ill and out of reach. Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, kept her from being with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Thus Tubman was not there when federal troops dispatched by President Buchanan and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart rounded up Brown and his men. A few escaped; of the rest, those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia. At his execution in December 1859, John Brown's last, prescient words spoke of the years to come: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done" (ibid., emphasis in original). In the North John Brown's martyrdom was a rallying cry for abolition, while hysterical fear of insurrection swept the South and led to lynchings of suspected agitators. In later years Harriet Tubman spoke of Brown, "We Negroes in the South never call him John Brown; we call him our Saviour. He died for us."

The Civil War Years

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 out of the struggle for Kansas. For the 1860 presidential election the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as a moderate capable of winning wider support than more radical candidates. Although he opposed the expan¬sion of slavery, Lincoln's platform did not call for its elimination in the states where it already existed. Lincoln explicitly denounced John Brown's raid and declared his execution just. But Lincoln was still too anti-slavery for the South, and the secession of (eventually) eleven states led to the Confederate States of America. The Northern government, hoping for yet another compromise, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the war, which was forced on them by the slaveholders' cannons at Fort Sumter. To Lincoln and the majority of the Northern ruling class, the goal of the war was not to end slavery but to put down the secession of the South.
Harriet Tubman again saw further, earlier: that the war for the Union must become a war to free the slaves. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child quoted her words in a letter to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (quoted in Conrad, op. c/t.):

"They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer and the ague in the winter— They may send them one year, two year, three year, till they tire of sending ortill they use upthe young men. All of no use. God is ahead of Mister Lincoln. Cod won't let Mister Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Mister Lincoln, he is a great man, and 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. Suppose there was an awfully big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. You send for the doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolls up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again ... and so he keeps doing till you kill him. That's what Mister Lincoln ought to know."

But in the early months of the war Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in a military/political maneuver to woo secessionists and would-be secessionists into the Union. When General John C. Frernont, commander of the western depart¬ment, declared in August 1861 that all property of Missourians in rebellion was confiscated and the slaves emancipated, Lincoln fired him and rescinded the order. It took two years of ignominious defeats at the hands of the rebels to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. When it became clear by late 1862 that the North could not win the war in any other way, he made plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—finally ending the spirit of compromise which had immobilized the North:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."

Although the Emancipation Proclamation expressly left intact slavery in Union-loyal states like Maryland, January 1, 1863 was a day of rejoicing among all anti-slavery people. Douglass described his reaction:

"...I took the proclamation, first and last, for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter. Its meaning to me was the entire abolition of slavery, wherever the evil could be reached by the federal arm, and I saw that its moral power would extend much further."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. Harriet Tubman herself was within earshot of one of the first battles employing blacks in combat: the heroic assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863. It was here that the Massachusetts 54th, the first regiment of free Northern blacks, led by Tubman's friend Robert Gould Shaw, demonstrated before the eyes of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers. It was probably this battle Tubman was describing in her dramatic words: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." From then on black soldiers were thrown into the fighting on all fronts, tipping the balance of power for the ultimate Northern victory against the slavocracy.
Fort Wagner was quite near to Port Royal, South Carolina, where Tubman spent most of the war years working for the Union Army. One of the earliest Union victories had liberated the lush Sea Islands from the slaveholders; from here the Union Army ran its Department of the South. Control of the port allowed Union gunboats to patrol the coastline from Savannah to Charleston and begin a blockade of Confederate shipping, cutting off trade between the cotton South and the textile merchants of Great Britain. Fugitive slaves and freedmen flocked to the protection of the Union Army. Abolitionists set up schools to teach the blacks, young and old, to read and write.

Here Tubman worked in the army's service in many capacities. Her authority as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad was enormously important in reassuring the freedmen of the trustworthiness of the Yankees. As a nurse she first ministered predominantly to the blacks suffering from malnutrition. Later she nursed both black and white soldiers, going from camp to camp where men were dying of dysentery, smallpox and malaria. She set up a laundry and taught women to earn a living, while supporting herself by baking pies and brewing root beer at night after her hard day's labor.

Tubman's outstanding contribution to the war was as a Union spy and scout. General Hunter, the commander at Port Royal, recognized her expertise, tempered by her years in the Underground Railroad; under him Tubman organized a scouting service of black scouts and river pilots who surveyed and patrolled the Combahee River area in South Carolina.
In this capacity she was integral to a celebrated military action on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Three ships under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the guerrilla battles in Kansas and a trusted comrade of John Brown, raided deep into South Carolina in a blow pointing forward to Sherman's march on Georgia. The Boston Commonwealth described the battle:

"Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch."

The liberated slaves were brought back to Port Royal, where the able-bodied men among them were inducted into Montgomery's regiment.

Reconstruction Betrayed

At the war's end in 1865, over 600,000 Americans lay dead—almost equal to the number of American deaths in all the rest of the nation's wars combined. It took this bloody conflagration to resolve two key questions in American history: the Civil War forged a loose confederation of individual states into a modern nation. And underlying this question of political power lay the conflict between slavery and capitalism. The black question is the linchpin of American history.

Northern industrialism, unfettered at long last from the opposition of the slaveholders, wasted no time. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. A federal protective tariff fostered the growth of domestic industry. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for the free-soil colonization of the vast territories of the West.

But in 1865 the question of what position the newly liberated slaves should occupy in American society cried out for an answer. The initial conciliationist policy of the federal government under Andrew Johnson was strenuously opposed by the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Congressional legislation provided for full political equality for blacks: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are the legal codification of the gains of the Civil War. Slavery was wiped from the American Constitution, and blacks were made full citizens by law. The 15th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was passed to provide federal protection of blacks against Southern counterrevolu¬tionary violence. Black rights were enforced at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army.

But the foundation upon which black equality must rest was never laid: only confiscation of the huge plantation holdings of the ex-slaveowners and their distribution'among the ex-slaves would have laid the economic basis without which "equality" remained a legal formality. Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution— the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the econom¬ic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression.

Radical Reconstruction was destroyed in a political counterrevolution which stripped blacks of their newly won economic and political rights. Nightriding race-terrorists intimidated and murdered thefreedmen; the Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the war by ex-Confederate officers. The Compromise of 1877 codi¬fied the rollback of Reconstruction: the Republican Party bought the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops from the South. Over the years a new form of rural repression developed to replace the slave plantations. The Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement bound the liberated slaves to poverty and oppression as landless sharecroppers.

The betrayal of the struggle for black freedom was certainly experienced by Harriet Tubman. At the war's end, almost 50 years old, she was at last able to head for her home in Auburn, New York. Exhausted by her years of labor, subject to increasing bouts of sickness, and with family members looking to her for support, her active political life was essentially over. En route North she was beaten by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass, entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. She was thrown into the baggage car, badly hurt and humiliated by this racist and sexist attack. She suffered from the effects of this injury for years. Then began a decades-long battle for the pension to which her three years of war service entitled her. Tubman commented scornfully, "You wouldn't think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds." She did not receive a penny until after the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, in 1888, when she was awarded $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government made some recognition of her service to the Union. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home, named in honor of John Brown, for indigent elderly blacks. Harriet Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old.

Finish the Civil War!

At the time of Lincoln's re-election in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was a leading member, sent the president a letter of congratulation:

"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholdersdared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; whenon the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up,whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man wasissued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; ...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy crusade of property against labor... "

But the stars and stripes, the proud banner of the Civil War, has long since become mired in the filth of racism and imperialist war. Only the working class, under revolutionary socialist leadership, can lead mankind out of the putrid decay that is capitalist society today.

Marx said, "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the "American dream" is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx's words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is fhe race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.

Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, "Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!" to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolution¬ary party. A workers party as the tribune of the people will fight for the interests of all the oppressed. Liberation for blacks and women can be won only by a workers government which will smash the capitalist system and reorganize society on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Key leadership in the revolutionary struggle will be provided by the Harriet Tubmans and Frederick Douglasses of our time. We honor these great black leaders for their role in bringing the day of liberation one giant step closer.

Thursday, October 08, 2020

In The Thick Of The Great Depression-Daydreams Of Social Mobility-The Film Adaptation Of Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams” (1935)- A Review

In The Thick Of The Great Depression-Daydreams Of Social Mobility-The Film Adaptation Of Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams” (1935)- A Review    


DVD Review
Si Lannon
Alice Adams, starring Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, from a novel by Booth Tarkington, 1935   

Growing up poor is a tough dollar no doubt about it. Maybe that is why I was assigned this film Alice Adams (based on the Booth Tarkington novel) by site manager Greg Green although a number of other writers here have also grown up under those conditions. Perhaps Greg chose me because my family circumstances kind of mirror those of the main character Alice, played by Katharine Hepburn. I grew up in the working-class poor Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville south of Boston where we were kind of the “middle class” meaning nothing other than we had our own house, small and dingy but our own as my mother was always fond of saying until her dying breathe (to distinguish us from those who rented apartments in the array of triple-decker buildings that were peppered around the neighborhood). Which also meant that my father, Norman, always had steady if not well-paid work at the North Adamsville Gear Works which was a sub-contracting outfit for the shipbuilding operations which dominated the town’s economy and kept us going until that shipbuilding pulled out to off-shore locations well after I came of age in the 1950s. That steady work was an important difference in the area since many, mainly men in those days of male breadwinners and female housewives, like Peter Paul Markin’s father for one, were always last hired, first fired in the up and down shipbuilding economy. There was always a tension between those who looked like they had made and those who were going to be left behind-always left behind.
That though is where the similarities between Alice, once again played by severely beautiful Katharine Hepburn, in the film and I differ significantly. Alice was always “putting on airs,” always lying to herself and others about her class situation. Always doe-eyed daydreaming that she was someplace above her station only to be crushed more times than not-for a while. I, on the other hand unknowingly accepted that we were working poor and that I should stay with guys like Markin and some of the guys who work here who grew up in the same town or small circumstances. Maybe it was because the rich and poor classes in my town never mixed much, except maybe a little in school and that only in passing.  (The very rich or the strivers sent their kids to private schools to “escape” having to deal with the raucous public schoolers and gain some resume credentials-some sent their kids to Catholic parochial schools but they were poor as church mice too and just wanted their kids away from the heathens like me and my crowd.)      
It was almost painful to see Alice and her upward social mobility strivings at the cost of her dignity and her intelligence kowtowing to others in town who flouted their good fortune fortunes. Of course some of this is just the myth of the American dream come to small-town America via a small town American girl who maybe read too many romantic novels, Cinderella stuff, when young. Abetted by a social striving mother who harpooned her father into giving a up a steady if underpaid and underutilized his skills job in order to rise economically for Alice’s benefit. Jesus, no wonder Alice was ready to debase herself at every moment in her quest for a rich man who would carry her off.  
Maybe I better set the story and you can figure out whether she was a holy goof or had more sense than I did in trying to get out from under that small- town girl rock. Alice, via her father, lives in an old-fashioned working- class house which befitted an employee, a clerk working for somebody else. Alice though had dreams and maybe some small connections to the upper classes via a tenuous friendship with one of the town debutantes. In order to “fit in” or believe she did she developed a whole persona who denied reality and lived in cloud cuckoo land. Except at one key dance she “met” Arthur, a rich young man played by Fred MacMurray last seen in this space bleeding like a sieve after Barbara Stanwyck threw a few off-hand slugs into him after the pair plotted the murder of her husband for dough and freedom in Double Indemnity, who somehow despite her wanderlust was attracted to her. Attracted despite being in some kind of relationship with that debutante who threw the party where they met.
Despite Alice’s antics, despite her slavish devotion to her dreams of upward mobility and her willfully false consciousness about her family’s financial condition Arthur stays the course. Stays the course even when she invites him to what turns out to be a disastrous dinner. Stays the course despite her brother’s getting into legal trouble and her father too in attempting to move up in class for her sake. Ms. Hepburn in the early days had a certain refreshing rose-cheeked charm and beauty but I will be damned unless Arthur was an airhead how she snagged that guy. But she did.

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”



In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
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Markin comment on the lyric here:
While I have always considered this a very good anti-war song the tone of the lyrics leave me a little off-put these days. There are, in this wicked old world, some just wars, the Northern side in the American Civil War, The American side in the struggle for independence, The Irish side in the struggle against the British on Easter, 1916 and so on. Thus, until we take the guns away from those cruel oppressors of the mass of humanity we had best keep our own guns at the ready-and our class struggle soldiers prepared. Then someday this song will be an interesting relic for archeologists to uncover and laugh about the follies of primitive humankind.


Universal Soldier-Buffy Sainte-Marie
He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.