I am reading: Harriet Tubman, by Catherine Clinton

I find myself stymied lately when it comes to writing about books I have read. So I thought I would borrow an idea (from Audrey and JoAnn among others), to write about books that I am reading, as I am reading them, as something strikes me. Today that is Harriet Tubman, The Road to Freedom, by Catherine Clinton.

When the announcement came that Harriet Tubman will be featured on the re-designed $20 bill, I realized how little I remembered about her. I was surprised to that a suggested design showed her posed with a gun:

I didn't associate her with active rebellion, but then I knew or remembered so little. In the discussion of the new bill, Catherine Clinton's biography was mentioned several times, so I added it to my reading list. I was happy to find a copy in the library, and I think I will be adding this to my own shelves.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820, in the same section of the state as Frederick Douglass. Like him, she escaped to the north and freedom. But then she returned to the south, over and over again, to bring her family to freedom, and then scores of others, friends and strangers. She made at least one raid a year, working the rest of the time in domestic service and farm work to fund her missions. She was never captured, and she brought her people safely to freedom every single time.

     This is what makes Harriet Tubman's accomplishments so remarkable, as she was certainly the lone woman to achieve such a prominent role within the [Underground Railroad]. Also she was one of only a handful of blacks publicly associated with these extensive clandestine operations to shepherd slaves to freedom. Again, she was the lone fugitive to gain such widespread fame. Her unique vantage point - being black, fugitive, and female, yet willing to risk the role of UGRR abductor - is what allowed her to become such a powerful voice against slavery during the years leading up to the Civil War.
    When she spoke out against slavery, she was not attacking it in the abstract but had personally known its evils. She risked the horror of re-enslavement with every trip, repeatedly defying the slave power with her rescues and abductions. These risks elevated the significance of her contributions to the UGRR movement.

Catherine Clinton explains that the term "abductor" was used for "the very few who ventured into the South to extract slaves . . . to distinguish them from the vast majority of the conductors, who guided fugitives on very limited segments of their journey."

And the gun? "Tubman even carried a pistol and was prepared to use it, which earned her a reputation for toughness. . . Her fearlessness was legendary."

Now back to the book. Harriet Tubman has just been raising funds to support John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. And I'm sure she didn't sit on the sidelines during the Civil War either.

My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass

Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hindrances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutation of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph. -- Frederick Douglass, "The Anti-Slavery Movement" (1855)

It is impossible to understand the United States in the 19th century, particularly the Civil War era, without Frederick Douglass. He was the most prominent African American of his time, an abolitionist, an advocate for the rights of black Americans, a newspaper publisher and public speaker. I learned something of his life years ago from reading his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. He was born into slavery in rural Maryland, probably in 1818. From a young age he struggled with the reality of slavery, which made him a piece of property, with no rights, held to work for others his whole life. His first attempt at running away was betrayed, probably by a fellow slave, but his second, when he was around twenty, succeeded. His Narrative, published seven years later, is considered a classic of American literature, and is also the best-known of the accounts written by escaped or emancipated slaves. These accounts were a key weapon in the struggle to abolish slavery in the United States, by making the people of the northern states aware of the horrors of life under slavery, to awaken their consciences and rally them to action.

From Henry Mayer's book All on Fire, about William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionist movement, I learned that Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison and his wing of the movement in the 1850s. They came to disagree over tactics, and over the question of whether the U.S Constitution was a pro-slavery document, which in turn tainted the whole political structure of the country. (Garrisonians held that it did, so they refused to participate in the government, even by voting.) But Douglass also came to feel that he had a larger role to play. The Garrison people just wanted him to tell his story, his narrative. He didn't want to keep repeating himself, or to keep talking about himself at all. He wanted to challenge the whole system of slavery, and racism in American society as well. His decision to start his own paper, which would complete with Garrison's The Liberator, was seen as an overt challenge to the leadership. Some of the group also doubted that Douglass, with no formal education or training, could handle editing a newspaper.

All of this history is new to me, and I'm interested to learn more. I knew that Frederick Douglass had later published two revised editions of his autobiography. When I discovered that this one, published in 1855, covered the controversy with Garrison, I put it on my reading list. The edition I read is a Penguin Classics edition from 2003, with a very informative introduction and a bibliography.

My Bondage and My Freedom is divided into two sections. The first, "Life as a Slave," is by far the longer, 21 of 24 chapters. This part is an expanded version of the original Narrative, with editor's notes to explain the differences. It is an account of Douglass's life, not just the events but the emotional and psychological toll that slavery took on him; of his awakening to the horrors of slavery, and his own experiences of violence and mistreatment. I have read accounts of slavery in the United States, and histories of it, but I don't think I have ever read anything that delved so deeply into the mind and heart of an enslaved person. But this isn't just his story. It is also a searing indictment of the slave system, an unsparing account of its brutal realities. Douglass wrote about his fellow slaves, giving their names, stressing their humanity, recording them for history - just as he did their owners, recording their crimes. I am haunted by the night a young Frederick watched the brutal beating of his aunt, who had dared to choose a husband for herself. The sexual abuse of enslaved women is a constant theme in this section, and a poignant one given that Douglass's own father was a white man, and may have been his owner.

The second section, "Life as a Freeman," briefly recounts his escape. Douglass refused to give any details about how he escaped, because he did not want to implicate those who had helped him. But he also argued that publicizing the means by which slaves escaped made it that much harder for others, by putting slave-owners on alert - a point I hadn't considered before. This section deals only briefly with the abolitionist movement, and Douglass's later conflict with it. The longest chapter covers the 21 months that he spent in Great Britain, working with anti-slavery activists. During this time British friends purchased his freedom, to spare him from the threat of capture and re-enslavement, and also raised funds to allow him to start his newspaper. Douglass noted more than once the warm welcome and the equal treatment that he received among the British, in contrast to the racism that he and other African Americans faced in the northern United States.

Included at the end of My Bondage and My Freedom is a brief selection of Douglass's speeches and other writings, such as the ""Letter To His Old Master," written during his stay in Britain. I'd like to think that someone sent Thomas Auld a copy, though I doubt that Douglass's writings circulated in the southern states.  I have since learned that his third autobiography, first published in 1881, covers his support of John Brown's raid, his relationship with Abraham Lincoln, his on-going challenge to racism in America, and his strong support for women's rights, among other topics. (Douglass attended the first women's rights convention, at Seneca Falls in 1848.) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass has already gone on my reading list. I have also learned that Penguin will publish a "Portable Frederick Douglass" of his essential writings later this year (coincidentally, just before my birthday).

John Brown's raid

Midnight Rising, Tony Horwitz

The subtitle of this book is "John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War."  When I saw it announced, I wanted to read it because I enjoy Tony Horwitz's writing, and because of the importance of Brown's raid in American history.  On October 16, 1859, he led eighteen men, including two of his sons and five African Americans, on a raid of the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.  One of his stated objectives was to spark an uprising of Southern slaves, to overthrow the slave system.  Brown had taken no steps to alert the slaves in the area, however, and he inexplicably waited in the town while enraged white Virginians armed themselves and federal troops, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, moved in.  Brown was captured with four of his men; ten others were killed in fighting or trying to escape. His two sons were among the dead, as were four townspeople and one of the soldiers. 

Within a week, Brown was on trial for treason and conspiring to incite a slave revolt, and by November 2nd he had been condemned to hang.  After his sentance had been pronounced, he told the court,

"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the end of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!"

Though the trial was rushed, authorities in Virginia delayed his execution for a month, time that Brown spent writing letters and giving interviews to the press, expanding on his words in the courtroom and explaining what had led him to Harper's Ferry.  In that month, Northerners who had originally seen him as a deluded and dangerous fanatic came to see him as a martyr, dying in the cause of abolition of slavery.  Abolition wasn't popular in the North.  While many northerners shared Abraham Lincoln's view that slavery was wrong, like him they also held racist views of African Americans and didn't want freed slaves moving north, competing for jobs or living next door to them.  At the same time, tensions were rising as America expanded westward.  With each new territory and state added, the same question came up: would it be slave or free?  While many northerners, again like Lincoln, believed that the Constitution protected slavery where it already existed, they did not want it expanded into new territory.  There were various tense compromises worked out over the years, admitting slave and free states in exact balance. But the tension exploded in the 1850s over Kansas, as pro- and anti-slavery forces fought for control of the new territory.  There were armed battles, and even murder.  John Brown and his large family had been at the center of this fight, implicated in the murder of at least four settlers in 1856, one a sixteen year old boy (one of Brown's many sons was in turn murdered by pro-slavery forces).

John Brown's execution galvanized anti-slavery feeling in the north.  New York diarist George Templeton Strong, unsympathetic to abolitionists and African Americans, wrote,

"Slavery has received no such blow in my time as his strangulation. There must be a revolution in feeling, even in the terrified State of Virginia. . . So did the first Christian martyrs wake up senators and landed gentlemen and patrician ladies, tempore Nero and Diocletian, and so on. One's faith in anything is terribly shaken by anybody who is ready to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing it."

At the same time, Southerners were outraged by Northern support of Brown. Just days after his execution, Jefferson Davis in a speech on the Senate floor threatened secession.  Less than a year later, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President made that threat a reality.

I was a little reluctant to read this book, though, just because it is about John Brown.  I first came across his name in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, where Reverend Brown, the Little Town on the Prairie's Congregational minister, is said to be a cousin of "old John Brown of Kansas." Laura doesn't like him, and neither do Ma and Pa. "What he said did not make sense to [Laura], but he looked like that picture of John Brown in her history book, come alive. His eyes glared, his white mustache and his whiskers bobbed, and his big hands waved and clawed and clenched into fists pounding the pulpit and shaking in air."  I didn't know who John Brown of Kansas was then, but I was left with an image of a fanatic Old Testament figure.  What I learned about him later made him seem a 19th century domestic terrorist.

Tony Horwitz addresses this in his Prologue:

     "Viewed through the lends of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Queda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war. We are still grappling with the consequences.
     "But John Brown wasn't a charismatic foreigner crusading from half a world away. He descended from Puritan and Revolutionary soldiers and believed he was fulfilling their struggle for freedom. Nor was he an alienated loner in the mold of recent homegrown terrorists such as Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. Brown plotted while raising an enormous family; he also drew support from leading thinkers and activists of his day, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau. The covert group that funneled him money and guns, the so-called Secret Six, was composed of northern magnates and prominent Harvard men, two of them ministers.
     "Those who followed Brown into battle represented a cross section of mid-nineteenth-century America."

In this book, he traces John Brown's life, before Kansas and before Harper's Ferry, to explain his extraordinary commitment not just to abolition of slavery, but to equality for African Americans, and to place those events in context of his life and of the larger American story.  Brown's character and his beliefs were strongly influenced by the stern Calvinism of his parents, and he was inspired by Old Testament heroes like Gideon and Samson.  Horwitz argues that despite what Brown told his supporters and followers about his plans for the raid, he may have seen himself as a Samson, who in failing would bring down the institution of slavery.  In this, he succeeded.

Thanks to Tony Horwitz, I now have a better understanding of John Brown himself, of his motives and his mind, and of the role he played in American history.  As a popular Civil War song had it, "John Brown's body is a-mouldering in his grave, but his soul is marching on."  Yet he is still a disturbing figure, and understanding his motives still leaves me uncomfortable with the means he chose.

Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

The Fiery Trial, Eric Foner

I had almost finished reading The Fiery Trial when I learned it has won the Pulitzer Prize, and I thought, how right. I was not in the least surprised that it won as history, not as biography, despite the subtitle, "Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." 

Eric Foner clearly states his thesis at the start of the book:

"My intent is to return Lincoln to his historical setting, tracing the evolution of his ideas in the context of the broad antislavery impulse and the unprecedented crisis the United States confronted during his adult life . . .  My aim then is to take Lincoln whole, incorporating his strengths and shortcomings, his insights and misjudgments. I want to show Lincoln in motion, tracking the development of his ideas and beliefs, his political abilities and strategies, as they engaged the issues of slavery and emancipation, the most critical in our nation's history"  (pp xxvii, xxi). 

This, then, would be no hagiography of Lincoln, not just the story of the Great Emancipator.

Reading this book made me realize that I have fallen a bit into hagiography myself (I do have a statue of Lincoln in my home, as well as a picture of him on display, above the shelves of Lincoln books).  It was a salutary shock to be reminded that while Lincoln spoke against slavery from the earliest days of his polical career, he promoted the removal of freed slaves to Africa or Central America (colonization) from those same early days, continuing to do so until well into the Civil War; he did not advocate social or full political equality for African Americans until almost the end of his life; he used racist language and humor; and he once represented a slaveowner trying to force a mother and her four children back into slavery.  Lincoln personally knew very few African Americans before he became president, so his knowledge of African Americans and of slavery was abstract.  It was only as president that he came in contact with people like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and Elizabeth Keckley, and then his views began to change.

One of the keys to Lincoln's greatness is that he could change, change his mind, his position, his policies.  Foner charts these changes, from the 1830s on, as the slavery issue came to dominate American politics, and as many Americans, including Lincoln, moved from a dislike of abolitionists as social and political nuisances to share their convinction of the wrongs of slavery.  Though Lincoln believed that the Constitution protected slavery where it existed, like most Republicans he came to believe it could and must be kept from spreading into the territories. "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" became their rallying cry (and the title of Foner's influential first book).  When the war broke out, Lincoln believed that he had to placate loyalists in the upper south and the border states, so he resisted the calls of more Radical Republicans for action against slavery, until the necessities of war led him to the Emancipation Proclamation. He believed that African Americans could never find a home in America, until the bravery and patriotism of black soldiers convinced him otherwise.

I learned so much from this book, not just about Lincoln, but about the abolition and anti-slavery movements, about the rise of the Republican Party and the Radical wing of it.  For much of the past week I was absorbed in 19th century America, and it was disorienting at times to return to 2011.