Tubman recruited fugitive slaves from her community to listen to his plan, and gave him her stamp of approval as a white man who could be trusted. There were fugitive slaves who were associated with Tubman who signed on with Brown, but they later backed out. Whether it’s because they decided the plan wouldn’t work or for some other reason, we don’t know.
If you have any citations to show that she thought he was a loon, please share them.
The Castner Hanway case is very atypical but I’ll accept it. Hanway was ultimately acquitted, but the case led to revisions in the laws and allowed bloodhounds and armed posses to enter private property to retrieve slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. It could well be argued that it stopped more slaves from escaping. But let’s grant that in this single instance 4 slaves who had already escaped went free due to the death of a master- that’s less than 10% that the number killed twenty years before when Turner rebelled, and again- these are slaves who had already escaped.
Was it justifiable homicide? It’s impossible to know because it’s not known who killed Gorsch. If it was somebody who had not held a weapon on him that he attacked, then yes. If it wasn’t, then know. The fact that it wasn’t known who killed him, and perhaps the fact that Gorsch acted so stupidly, is what kept anybody from being charged with murder.
Ah… so she recruited listeners. Not a single one of whom joined him. “Have fun storming the arsenal boys…”.
Certainly she never used the term loon but the greatest hagiography attributed to her of him occurred long after the attack. Tubman was illiterate and thus there are no primary sources in her own writing, though in later interviews she did say that she dreamt of Brown before and after meeting him as a ‘prophet’ who stuck his head up from behind a wall and was stoned to death and that she knew he was to be a messianic figure who would die for his cause. She discussed the oddity of him always calling her General Tubman and his gifts and the eyes that penetrated and his being possessed of a manner not of the earth, which perhaps is complimentary and perhaps is another way of saying “not all there”. I think the fact that the followers she “recruited” for him and that she and her brothers did not show on the set date (the raid occurred in October incidentally, not July 4) speaks volumes of her opinions about him.
That’s mighty something of you, but that case took me about two minutes of googling to find. Are you suggesting it’s the only one of its sort? I suspect that not many slaves killed their master in an attempt to escape, not out of moral qualms, but because such a killing didn’t seem to aid their overall chances. Once more (I figure eventually you’ll read me saying this), I don’t argue that all slavers needed to die, I simply say that it’s justifiable homicide to kill a slaver in the act of keeping them from enslaving someone, whether it’s an act of re-enslavement or an ongoing act of enslavement.
Are you serious? It appears you’re suggesting that the community protecting Gorsch, assuming they had weapons, would not be justified in using them to prevent Gorsch’s re-enslavement of the escapees. Is that what you’re saying?
We can’t know who killed Gorsch, but let’s say it was Bob, who held up a shotgun and said, “These men are free, and you can’t have them.” Gorsch brandished his own pistol, appearing like his was about to shoot anyone who stood in his way; Bob, standing in his way, shot Gorsch. You appear to be suggesting that Bob’s actions weren’t justified.
Is this correct?
Speaking of presentism…Tubman operated in a world steeped in old Testament religious symbolism, and what little I know about her speech patterns indicate that’s how she liked to talk, also. The chance that she’d use such language in a modern hipster sarcastic fashion, calling him a loon via allusions to old Testament prophets, seems a unlikely.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Are you serious? It appears you’re suggesting that the community protecting Gorsch, assuming they had weapons, would not be justified in using them to prevent Gorsch’s re-enslavement of the escapees. Is that what you’re saying?
We can’t know who killed Gorsch, but let’s say it was Bob, who held up a shotgun and said, “These men are free, and you can’t have them.” Gorsch brandished his own pistol, appearing like his was about to shoot anyone who stood in his way; Bob, standing in his way, shot Gorsch. You appear to be suggesting that Bob’s actions weren’t justified.
Is this correct?
[/QUOTE]
Justifiable homicide is a legal term. It was not justifiable homicide if he came onto the property with a warrant and a deputy marshall, which he did. If a man had a warrant to come onto your property and repossess a car and you shot him, is it justifiable?
Her language was probably substantially embellished both ways by whoever was recording it. Some recorded her in dialect, some in purple florid prose you can be sure she didn’t speak in, which was not uncommon for reporting at the time. The same was done in the Federal Writer’s Project- most used dialect and some paraphrased.
Oh, for pity’s sake. Was it a justifiable killin’?
That’s a very different thing, and the answer would be “it depends”. For coming onto the farm in and of itself, no. For “acting a fool” and potentially igniting a powder keg, perhaps. I will say it was a killing for which I would have felt no sympathy for him, rather like I’d feel little sympathy for somebody walking down a street in a bad area of town holding hundred dollar bills who gets mugged. (Nobody had the legal right to mug him, but few are going to cry outrage when it happens.)
He didn’t act the fool, he tried to force four people back into a life of horror. The question isn’t whether anyone had the legal right to shoot him–they almost certainly didn’t, because they lived in under a government that sanctioned his brand of horror. The question is whether people were morally in the clear killing his evil ass in an attempt to prevent him from re-enslaving his victims.
Your analogy fails, therefore, but maybe it can be fixed. What would you think about a guy who goes into a dangerous part of town waving a baseball bat and saying he aims to cripple the first little black kid he meets, and then starts chasing a little black kid down the street? That’s a lot closer to our situation.
Or what about Uganda? A cop busts into a gay bar, going after one particular gay guy. The dude will probably be executed if the cop catches him; that’s the cop’s intent. Our victim lashes out, killing the cop, in an attempt to escape. In my eyes, that’s totally copacetic: you don’t get to hide behind evil laws in the commission of evil, and it’s acceptable to use proportionate violence to prevent someone from committing an evil.
Slavery was peacefully ended in every Eastern state north of the Mason-Dixon Line, beginning at the time of the Revolution and going on until the early 19th Century. It was peacefully excluded from the Northwest Territory from the start. It was excluded from huge areas by the Missouri Compromise, albeit not without significant political controversy. There were numerous attempts to end slavery in various Southern states (including Virginia) well into the 19th Century; slavery seemed to be on its way out in the Border States–it was pretty much a vestige in Delaware, about half gone in Maryland (as many free blacks as slaves by 1860), and seemed to be on its way to ending naturally in Kentucky and especially Missouri. All through the first half of the 19th Century, it was very common for Southerners to profess that they wanted and hoped for slavery to go away, and would get around to getting rid of the institution in their own due time–if only those meddling Yankees would just leave them be. In many cases, these schemes and proposals and vague plans for emancipation seem very half-hearted–as in many of the Northern states, there were proposals for gradual emancipation, with slaves born after a certain date to be freed (and even them, perhaps after some period of servitude), and it was a very common assumption that freed slaves would of course have to be sent away to Africa or some other place far, far away from White America. Schemes for gradual emancipation also left plenty of time for slave owners to sell slaves down South before emanicpation day arrived, and in fact it was very common for more northernly Southerners to openly hope that their slaves (in Kentucky or Maryland or even Virginia) could be peacefully “drained” away to places like Mississippi and Texas, and thus relieve them of the burden of slavery.
But attitudes in the South had greatly hardened by the time secession and war rolled around. It’s a mistake to see history as some simple, unidirectional movement in any direction; just as not everyone in the “olden days” was a Puritan/Victorian about sex until the 60’s, so too there is not a simple progression from wicked unenlightened slave-owners to modern racially egalitarian democrats. Many 18th Century slave owners were far more conflicted on slavery than were the leaders of 1860, however ineffective and hand-wringing and self-serving those 18th Century Thomas Jeffersons may seem to us now–and those attitudes did persist deep into the 19th Century.
But by the time 1860 rolled around, the pro-slavery side had gotten much more radicalized–secession declarations and speeches were full of paeans to the glories of slavery, with no more mention of how slavery was a terrible and regrettable evil, to be gotten rid of, eventually, someday, if only those meddlesome outside agitators would just leave us the heck alone. In some cases, the very people waxing poetic about the benefits of slavery, now and forever, as a permanent and good institution, worthy of pride, not shame, had themselves expressed the view, ten or twenty years before, of slavery as a regrettable, terrible evil, which they of course wished they could somehow be shut of. (And of course, there had always been some unabashed supporters of slavery as a “Positive Good”; conversely, in 1860 there were still those who kept to the “Alas, slavery is a terrible thing, but we cannot get rid of it yet” view–Robert E. Lee is always quoted here, of course.)
As noted, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a very radical anti-slavery man in 1860; but one sectional clash after another between slave owners and Northerners increasingly sick and tired of being bossed around by slave owners (whatever they may have felt about the slaves themselves) had hardened attitudes. I’m sure John Brown’s raid contributed its bit, but by 1860 there was pretty much no prospect of the South giving up its slaves, nor of the North simply going along with Bleeding Kansas and the Fugitive Slave Laws and the Dred Scott Decision and all the other impositions of the “Slave Power” on free white Americans (along with some genuine and growing movement for abolition on moral grounds). Slavery could maybe have been ended peacefully if they had started back in the days of the Revolution, but it was far too late to escape war by 1860.
Actually, I don’t believe that was true outside of maybe Virginia or South Carolina–in fact, I believe even South Carolina had universal white male suffrage (though there were property qualifications for holding office; and governors and other state officials were elected by the legislatures rather than by the voters directly). In the more aristocratic areas of the South, there were also malapportioned legislatures, with schemes to apportion represenative in state assemblies based on both population and tax revenues (i.e., the amount of property in a given county, i.e., land and slaves); and where older eastern areas (as in Virginia) continued to have the same proportion of delegates as they’d been awarded based on censuses from decades before, with deliberate refusal to reallocate based on any new census, to the detriment of less slave-intensive western areas. On the other hand, in newere parts of the South, it was more common to see a more egalitarian-for-white-males form of racial supremacy championed rather than the class-and-race supremacy found especially in South Carolina: If you were a white man, by gum you were better off than any black man, no matter how humble you were, even if he were some fancy household domestic. (And you therefore had a common interest with the wealthy slaveowner in the big fancy house; besides, those frontier areas, like frontier areas up North, were full of get-rich-quick or at least get-rich-someday optimism, and many people with no or few slaves might hope that someday they would be living in the big fancy plantation house. And of course poor whites has no wish to compete with millions of freed blacks, economically, socially, and politically.)
This argument is just bizarre. The entire historical record, including accounts from Tubman and from contemporaries who knew both Brown and Tubman agree that she held Brown in the highest esteem. You haven’t produce any evidence to the contrary, unsurprisingly, because none exists.
If anyone else is interested, the link I provided above gives a good overview on their relationship, including some info on the recruiting, planning, and fundraising she did with him.
I’m sure Brown had all the otherworldly charisma of, say, Jim Jones.
Virginia was the last state to have a property qualification for voting in all elections, and they abolished it in 1850. (North Carolina had a property qualification on voting for state senate, which they abolished in 1855.) By 1860, the only states that had property qualifications for voting at all were New York, which allowed blacks that had a certain amount of property to vote, and Rhode Island, which allowed foreigners with a certain amount of property to vote. There were a few states that restricted suffrage to tax payers, though (Ohio and Louisiana, although I think they both got rid of them.) Some cities had property qualifications to vote in city elections earlier on: New York, Richmond, Petersburg, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis were a few, but the state legislatures tended after the 1830s to override a city’s stricter voting requirements. In fact, southern states tended to be more likely to support expanded suffrage than northern states, because that encouraged poor whites to join the militia and put down slave rebellions. Check out Alexander Keyssar’s “The Right to Vote”, which has a chapter on removing property qualifications.
I do find that very surprising (unless perhaps you mean “most of all of the slaves held in the United States and its predecessor colonies from Jamestown to the 13th Amendment were not field hands”). I don’t find it surprising that slaves were “domestics, cooks, mechanics, artisans of all kind, blacksmiths, cordwainers, barbers, beauticians, midwives, distillers, boatmen, etc.”, but I really would have thought that the majority of the slaves in 1860 were field hands. (And of course field hands being the cheapest slaves is a different matter.)
For one thing, noodling around with Historical Census Browser at the University of Virginia Library and Microsoft Excel, in 1860 slightly over half of all slaves in the 15 slave states lived in counties where a majority of the population were slaves. (By state, the numbers ranged from over 83% of slaves living in majority-slave areas for South Carolina, to over 77% for Mississippi and Louisiana, almost 68% for Alabama, over 56% for Florida and Georgia, about 45% for Virginia, 32% for Arkansas, over 30% for Texas, 28% for North Carolina, 25% for Maryland, 14% for Tennessee, and less than 3% for Kentucky. No slaves lived in majority-slave counties in Missouri or Delaware in 1860, as neither state had any majority-slave counties. All numbers are of course dependent on me having gotten my rows and columns straight.)
Of course even in the counties where 90% of the population were slaves there were presumably some slave butlers and blacksmiths and so on; but on the other hand, even in counties where only 5 or 10% of the population were slaves, some of them were presumably field hands. And certainly counties in the 40% or even 30% slave range probably still had many plantations.
It’s possible Sampiro’s getting confused by a stat I heard back in college: most slavers owned a small handful of slaves and exploited them for household and work tasks, but most slaves lived on large plantations.
That seems like a cynical take on it, though you may be right. Is there any hard evidence that the reason for broader voting rights in the South was to provide militia fodder? Or is that speculative?
Despite your (intentionally?) annoying and insistent misuse of the word “slaver” I think you may be right on this point.
(Words mean things, and the word “slaver” refers to a person engaged in the slave trade, not the “end consumer” as it were. Your insistence on repurposing the word for political reasons only creates confusion.)
You must have missed the link the first time, but my use is correct and deliberate. I explained this on the first page of the thread.
I don’t know about this, but I do know that women’s suffrage in the South was advocated in large part on the belief that the vote of white women would counterbalance the vote of black men.
I blame John Calhoun. He’s the one that really got the ball rolling on promoting slavery as a positive good rather than a necessary evil.
I’ve always been annoyed he died at the age of 68 in 1850. If he had lived until the age of 88 and died in 1870, he would have seen the price the South paid for his foolishness.