Kathryn Harris interviewed as Harriet Tubman - YouTube

Wed, Jun 23, 10:27 PM (11 hours ago) to me

-Merlyn Brandbro

How representative is this account of the reality of African Americans in Maryland in the 1840s?

Sir, Mrs. Tubman is one of the least interesting and least representative of the brutality of the slavery experience in Anglo-America. That is why she is the darling of the cause of revisionist history.

First, she was a Maryland slave, and the people of Maryland of all races had been trying to get rid of slavery since the 1780s. Indeed, white slave, David Holiday was finally manumitted after 38 years of slavery in Frederick County Maryland, nine years before Harriet got married in 1847. So many crimes were committed against ordinary folks by the African slaves of the elite who rampaged about at night that many measures, including freeing slaves of all races, sending the whites west and the Africans to Liberia, were hatched and put into practice.

Harriet's condition was typical of a Maryland slave, in that she had many life options while a slave compared to those “sold down the river” which is something her character rails against in this account. This bogus enactment is at once gaslighting and also enlightening if you can read between the lines.

Harriet can only recount one case of being physically disciplined by a master, and that was on the occasion when she dropped her mistress' baby and was smacked for it at age six. She can cite no other case of brutality. She does decry her slave mistress for assigning a six-year-old to watching a baby. As a lifelong resident of Maryland, I can tell the reader that I have observed hundreds of cases of 5 to 9-year-old children of her race being assigned to parent toddlers, including June of 2020 when a three-year-old being walked down an alley in Baltimore by his slightly older brother threatened me for not yielding at his word. Now that is some master-over-slave behavior!

Harriet states that both of her parents were pure African, indicating no history of master-slave-rape in her family. Though rape and also voluntary sexual relations between master and slave was common in The Plantation Era.

Harriet points out that she lived as part of a stable, multi-generational family owned by a white family. Two of her sisters would be sold to the Deep South, which she is pained about. Of course, in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, in the 1700s, white slaves were routinely beaten for the crime of having sex and getting pregnant, were forbidden to marry and had their children sold off. In Pennsylvania in 1748 German children were routinely sold out from under their parents on simple charges that a parent cursed in public or private. Her family condition, demonstrates the reality, that African were brought in as a breeding population by the white elite to replace the [hopefully] non-breeding white working class who were regarded as “trash,” and were intended to die off or drift into the hinterlands.

Harriet, like Frederick Douglas, William Wells Brown, Mister Kraft, Moses Roper, Henry Box Brown and other African American slaves of the early 1800s were taught to read and write, even though, as she states, it was often against the law. That is because these slaves were house slaves who were required to buy groceries, manage inventory and deliver messages for their masters. In contrast, almost no Irish or English slaves were literate.

Further, Harriet, like Frederick Douglas and the mother of Booker T. Washington, was permitted to marry and have an intact family. Like Frederick, she was permitted to marry a free person of color. She decries the fact that she needed her master's permission to marry, not mentioning that her slave mistress had needed her father's permission to marry and that permission for her was granted as it had been for the free white woman. In fact, in 1756, Mary Sprigg would be sold off and worked to death in Maryland for the crime of not obeying her English father.

Harriet complains that her husband, who hired himself out, had to pay room and board to his former owner. She does not mention that this former owner and her husband had the same exact arrangement that I had for 8 years with a black woman in Baltimore, by which she let me live under her roof so long as I paid her $120 a week in rent. Later, in her account, she describes how she hired herself out in Philadelphia in the same manner. She does not discuss whether she paid rent or not. Perhaps her immense privilege followed her to Pennsylvania.

Once in Philadelphia, Harriet describes how all of the African Americans there were free. She mentions nothing about the unfree Germans that still served 3-year terms there. She also seems to know nothing about the fact, that in the 1780s and 90s it had been against the law for George Washington to hold a black slave in Philadelphia for more than 6 months without freeing them. This was at the same time when European Children were being sold for terms of up to 31 years in Pennsylvania, and was a cause of Washington wanting to free his blacks and replace them with Germans. The reason for this ordinance in late 1700s Philadelphia may have been the same for similar laws in Baltimore at that time, that the African slaves of the super elite were robbing, raping, murdering and burglarizing ordinary Americans of all races by night.

At this point, I became sick of this half-fraudulent exercise in acting.

I would note that the accounts of half white or ¾ white slaves such as William Wells Brown and Moses Roper, who suffered great brutality, are never used for such purposes. Additionally, the two white slave narratives we have from 1830-40s Maryland, which get almost all the press, were of a man and a woman who were permitted to marry a free person of color and who were taught to read and write and were helped in their desire for freedom by white Marylanders and were discouraged from running away by other African Americans.

Another popular account is that of Solomon Northup, who was free before and after his bondage, was not held for life, and was married to a free black woman and had free black children and was, like Harriet and Frederick, and Mister Kraft, aided in his desire for freedom by whites of the highest social strata.

It is quite suspicious that our elite academics and media take every opportunity to erase working people of any race from the historical record, and focus only on the tiny intellectual class, even when discussing forced labor and bondage.

America's hunger for a lie to worship as a bright shining truth remains insatiable.