The South, Secession, Slaves & John Brown

Four days ago, there were fancy celebrations in South Carolina. It was the 150th anniversary of the Palmetto State becoming the first to secede from the US. Much was made by the partiers of the proposition that this had been an exercise in fighting Big Government and upholding states’ rights.

They are unlikely to be celebrating today, at least in public. That’s because 150 years ago the elected legislators of South Carolina issued a document explaining their move, Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

I know you’ll be stunned to learn this, dear reader, but it turns out the reason the state tried to bail was: slavery. No, make that: slaves.

Of course it is customary in thinking about the period to refer to “slavery” as the cause of the Civil War, and my point here may be a bit nit-picky, but to me, “slavery” seems too abstract a term. It describes a social institution, but slaves were people! Sometimes folks lament the carnage of the Civil War by saying “Slavery would have died out anyway….” Make the subject of that sentence “Slaves” and the whole premise has to be reconsidered.

And the SC legislature was well aware that the stakes in their desperate political stroke was slaves, not just slavery. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes in its short paragraphs contains a twofold vision of slaves, as valuable pieces of property to be defended and as an omnipresent danger to be kept under tight guard.

The charges justifying separation from the Northern States, whose citizens had just elected the next President, Abraham Lincoln, read, in part:

[T]hey have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Servile insurrection! This had always been the deepest dread of the slaveowners. Look at the ascending nature of the list of offenses the people of the Northern States are charged with--speaking against slavery, organizing to free the slaves, acting to free them and, the ultimate enormity, helping slaves to rebel and free themselves.

And in 1860, this prospect was glaringly real, thanks to the Harpers Ferry raid conducted by abolitionist John Brown and a small band of Black and white freedom fighters only a year before.

The Harpers Ferry raid is usually portrayed as helping trigger secession because it stirred Northern opposition to slavery and Southern fears that Northern tolerance of this great evil was coming to an end. But, as the Declaration of Immediate Causes shows, Southern fears were also directed at menaces more local and immediate.

To underline this, one need only look at events in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the weeks between John Brown’s trial and his execution on December 2, 1859. As word of the raid spread through the plantations, they began to burn. “The heavens are illuminated by the lurid glare of burning property,” fretted a Richmond daily.

On October 31, “a Negro boy” torched the barn and stable of George Fole. Eleven days later three straw ricks belonging to John LaRue and the carriage house and granary of a Dr. Stephenson combusted on the same night. Planters rushed to reap and harvest early, lest their crops go up in flames

A planter by the name of Ulare who raised cattle, soon wrote the governor, blaming abolitionists and begging help:

[T]hree stockyards have been burnt in this county alone since their capture and since their trial—last night one of mine was burned destroying not less than $2000 worth of property.

To no avail. On December 2, all the animals on two separate farms belonging to members of the Turner family died suddenly. The next day one of those farms caught fire. And that same week, properties owned by three of the jurors who convicted Brown and his men were destroyed by flames!

Small wonder the South trembled and sought to cut off ties with the contagion from states where many citizens memorialized and honored John Brown.

[The historical material is largely drawn from a splendid article entitled “Regional Black Involvement in John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry.” It was written by a scholar named Hannah Gellert, with the assistance of Jean Libby. It details extensive Black participation in the planning and preparation of the raid, the death of as many as 17 local free Blacks and slaves who joined Brown's squad during the battle and the response summarized above. The piece can be found in a volume entitled Prophets of Protest, edited by McCarthy and Stauffer.]

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The People's Organization for Progress visits Harriet Tubman home & gravesite

Like most popular versions of oft-repeated stories, we are all familiar with Harriet Tubman's role as an Underground Railroad "conductor"; shepherding over 300 runaways to freedom in the north and (after the Fugitive Slave Act) to Canada. And like most "legendary" tales, the more complicated real story gets lost in what we might describe as the children's version.

Yes, while still a teenager, Harriet Tubman (then known as Araminta Ross) got in the way of a slavecatcher chasing a runaway and was hit over the head with a scale-weight while the other slave escaped. Tubman suffered from epilepsy for the rest of her life as a result. And yes, Harriet Tubman escaped bondage in Maryland and followed Polaris (the North Star) to her freedom in Philadelphia where she became active wth the Underground Railroad and abolitionist movement. But this is the same Harriet Tubman who later in life became active in the women's suffrage movement, turned her home in Auburn, NY into one of the first Homes for the Aged in the U.S. This is the same Harriet Tubman who, after being denied her military pension for service during the Civil War, built the John Brown Hospital for Disabled Military Veterans on her property.

Yes, Harriet Tubman led hundreds of captives north on the Underground Railroad, but she also guided many hundreds more while working as a "spy" for the U.S. Army. On one mission, she was put in command of three patrol boats for an expedition up the Combahee River, assaulting plantations and freeing more than 700 slaves along the way. She and her troops were responsible for guiding the boats around "torpedoes" (river mines) to burn the plantations and escape with former slaves who swam out to the boats. Tubman's tactical brilliance and strategic sagacity later led to the liberation and capture of Jacksonville, Florida.

While John Brown was the first to give Tubman the title "General" (during the planning phase of the failed Harper's Ferry Raid, which she'd supported and intended to lead until succumbing to an epileptic seizure), this was no mere honorific. Her war-time experience as the only woman to ever command regular U.S. troops in combat (to this day), proves that she deserves the rank. Even though the U.S. government refused to grant her military pension (she collected a widow's pension from the Army after her second husband, Nelson Davis, who she'd met leading the Combahee River Raid, passed on), newspapers of the period make her role as a military leader clear. Following the Civil War, Tubman's main efforts shifted to the Women's Suffrage movement and various humanitarian activities.

As regular Fire on the Mountain readers know, the People's Organization for Progress is an activist organization working for social change within the African-American community of northern New Jersey. My colleague and FotM founder, Jimmy Higgins, and I have frequent posted articles about POP's campaign to keep public hospitals open (see "POP Says Save Our Hospitals" and "Save Our Hospitals—Muhlenberg Defense Moves to Trenton", plus additional stories) the ongoing anti-war activism during which POP built the largest peace and justice coalition in NJ history (see "Black-Led March in NJ" and "Black NJ Organizes Against the War, and many others) as well as many additional postings about POP marches, rallies and forums. It is unusual for the People's Organization for Progress to run bus trips, other than to demonstrations, because we are primarily an activist organization, building struggles in the Black community. Nonetheless, the visit to Harriet Tubman's home and gravesite was both educational and transformational for the many members and friends who accompanied us. POP hopes to return to Auburn, NY again to share this experience with others (for additional pictures from this trip see Harriet Tubman Davis home & gravesite.)

It is only by knowing and understanding our past that we can change the present and our children's future…

—Lawrence Hamm

Pauline Copes Johnson, great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman Davis, with POP Chairman Lawrence Hamm.

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