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H arriet Tubman was born into American slavery, a complex legal, social, economic, cultural, and psychological world that had evolved in the colonies of the eastern seaboard over nearly two hundred years.1 After the Revolutionary War and the federal abolition of the slave trade in 1808, the legal institution was well on its way to gradual extinction in the North, primarily for economic reasons, but also because of growing religion-based antislavery organizing by Quakers and others. In contrast, the development of a cotton-based economy expanded and reinforced the grip of the slavery system upon all aspects of the culture of the Southern states. When Tubman was a child in Maryland in the 1820s and 1830s, the slave-owning elite of the South were closing ranks to defend the institution, in response both to the threat of slave insurrection and to a newly militant antislavery movement in the United States, represented in the pages of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper the Liberator, which thundered out an uncompromising fire-and-brimstone message about the evils of slave ownership and called for immediate emancipation. The proslavery ideology of the Southern states deepened as she grew into womanhood, and there was less and less room for dissenting voices among Southern whites—even though only a small minority of the residents of Southern states were themselves slave owners, with a strong economic interest in keeping slavery intact. Tubman experienced the particular slave system of the border state of Maryland, where the geographical proximity to the free states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey allowed more opportunities to flee successfully than in the states of the Deep South, and the Underground Railroad developed many stations. Yet she did not escape the profound psychologically and 11 the sl avery years spiritually shaping effects of a plantation slave culture during her childhood and young womanhood, as is evident from some of the stories she later told about her youth.2 She testified in later years that she had been born in Cambridge, Maryland, in Dorchester County (Tubman, 1894b). She did not know the exact date of her birth. The best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later.3 The documentary record is contradictory about her lineage: her earliest biographer says that she was a “grand-daughter of a slave imported from Africa, and has not a drop of white blood in her veins” (Sanborn, 1863).4 Another, much later sketch asserts: “She knows that her mother’s mother was brought in a slave-ship from Africa, that her mother was the daughter of a white man, an American, and her father a full-blooded Negro” (Miller, 1912).5 We do know that her maternal grandmother’s name was Modesty and that her parents’ names were Benjamin Ross and Harriet (Rittia, Ritta, Rit, or Ritty) Green (Sanborn, 1863). Her own name in the South is said by various sources to have been Araminta Ross, and she is listed in one important early document as Minty (Thompson, 1853). In affidavits later in life she testified both that her “maiden name was Aramitta Ross” and that she was known as Harriet Ross before her marriage to John Tubman.6 She lived for most of her young life with her family on a plantation owned by the Brodess family near the town of Bucktown, not far from Cambridge, in Dorchester County, Maryland.7 Her mother worked as a cook for the Brodess family. Her father was owned by Anthony Thompson until 1840, when he was legally freed.8 Fifteen years later, in 1855, Benjamin Ross was able to purchase his wife from Eliza Ann Brodess, presumably through savings accumulated over the years of toil. The two white slaveholding families that controlled the lives of Tubman’s parents and siblings intermarried, and the resulting “blended family” relationships have bedeviled her biographers and are still confusing to explain. Her mother had become the property of Mary Pattison at the death of Mary’s grandfather Athow Pattison. Mary Pattison married Joseph Brodess, March 19, 1800, but Joseph Brodess died in 1803, leaving Mary with a two-year-old son, Edward (b. June 1801). Mary Pattison Brodess then married a neighboring widower, Anthony Thompson (October 11, 1803), who also had a son, then ten-year-old Anthony C. Thompson. Very likely it was at this time, when the Brodess and Thompson households were united by marriage, that Benjamin...

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