"Minty" Ross, Her Family, and Slave

Life in Antebellum Maryland

"[I]f her weary head dropped, and her head ceased to rock the cradle, the child would cry out and then down would come the whip upon the face and neck of the poor weary creature. The scars are still plainly visible where they cut into the flesh."

— SARAH H. BRADFORD Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman

IN 2005, TWO GREAT-GRANDNIECES OF HARRIET TUBMAN had an opportunity to travel to Ghana, West Africa, where they believe the seed of their genealogy in America was sown. Here they would complete the circle that started in the early to mid-1700s when Modesty, an Ashanti girl, was ripped from her tribe in or near Accra, Ghana, and brought to the American colonies. She was eventually purchased by Atthow Pattison, a successful landowner and slaveholder in southeast Maryland's Dorchester County. Records indicate that Modesty was the mother of Harriet "Rit" Green, who would become the mother of Harriet Tubman.

Geography is always important in understanding the course of history and, in this case, the struggles that precipitated the decisions made by the enslaved and slave owners. Here the setting is southeastern Maryland and the land settled and owned by white slaveholding families. Maryland's proximity to the North — the Mason-Dixon Line formed its border with Pennsylvania beginning in the 1760s — made the structure of slavery in that colony different from most others, particularly those farther south that relied on labor-intensive cotton.

Landowners in the Dorchester region appeared to have a simple formula for growth that turned into an unwritten rule: marry within the area to amass wealth. As a way of increasing their property holdings and status, white landed gentry would intermarry with other estate owners in the region. Over the generations, the leading families on Maryland's Eastern Shore consolidated control over vast expanses of rich farmland, forests, and marsh areas.

Harriet's family from the time of Modesty was intricately involved with four white families in the Dorchester region: the Pattisons, the Thompsons, the Brodesses, and the Stewarts. As the landed white families merged, shifted, and expanded their estates, African American slave families were moved around the regional network. By the 19th century, black family units were interwoven among Dorchester's landed white families, creating a large network of interaction and communication throughout the area. Enslaved blacks often worked alongside free black men at the docks or in skilled labor markets, sharing information and extending the network over time.

The interrelations among blacks and white, and the relationships among the area's white families, created the setting and cast of characters for the drama that was to come.

Pattisons and Brodesses

In 1776, the year the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence less than 150 miles to the north, Atthow Pattison's 265-acre estate in Dorchester County included five slaves. Modesty, the grandmother of Harriet Tubman, is believed to be one of them. By 1790 the number enslaved had increased to seven; Rit, Tubman's mother, was born into the household sometime between 1785 and 1789. Upon Pattison's death in 1797, ownership of Rit passed to his granddaughter, Mary Pattison. Three years later, Mary went on to marry Joseph Brodess, a local farmer in the central Dorchester town of Bucktown. On June 14, 1801, Mary gave birth to Edward Brodess; a little more than a year later, Joseph Brodess died.

The Thompsons

Anthony Thompson was a moderately successful and respected businessman and landowner whose family lineage went back to the founders of Dorchester County. He considered himself a benevolent caretaker because of his promise of manumission for the loyalty and good behavior of those he held in bondage. His wife, Polly King, died between 1800 and 1803, leaving him with three sons under the age of 15 — Edward, Anthony, and Absalom. Thompson owned nine slaves; one of them was Ben Ross, who was to become the father of Harriet Tubman.

MANUMISSION: the act of freeing enslaved persons voluntarily, or the document that legally granted freedom. The motivations for freeing the enslaved were varied — inability to support them, arrangements for the enslaved to "purchase themselves," or, in rare instances, benevolence.

In keeping with the unwritten formula for regional expansion, the recently widowed Anthony Thompson and the recently widowed Mary Brodess married in 1803 and consolidated their assets. Mary Brodess brought her son, Edward, and her personal slave, Rit, along with four enslaved males that had belonged to her deceased husband.

The Stewarts

The Stewarts appeared to be a family of mixed ideals. Joseph Stewart, Anthony Thompson, and Robert Tubman were among the county commissioners who oversaw the operations of the Black Water and Parsons Creek Canal Company, set up to expand the shipment of goods across the area's extensive waterways. The project was completed in the 1830s after twenty years of effort and named the Stewart Canal. Joseph's son, James A. Stewart, was the Pattison family attorney, a businessman, and later a US congressman. He was a major slaveholder and is not recorded as having manumitted any of them. (His brother, John T. Stewart, later hired a teenaged Harriet Tubman.) Joseph's brother Levin, however, went to court and turned in documents to manumit all of his enslaved at specified ages. Levin's friend James Pattison did the same a year later. These and other manumissions during the 1850s helped develop a free black community in Dorchester County.

To be clear, Levin's actions were hardly the norm. Even though he had less need for slaves than area farmers because he was going into the shipbuilding and trading business with his brother in Georgetown, he could have sold his slaves for top dollar to a Baltimore or New Orleans trader. Instead, he sold or gave them to his brothers, who honored the manumission schedules after his death in 1825.

Masters and the Enslaved

The master-slave relationship may have seemed complicated on one level, but it was quite simple on another.

While it appears that a few slave owners were moved by the soaring sermons of Quakers and preachers to appease their consciences by promising manumission to their human chattel, more were motivated to do so by the shifting tide from agriculture to industry on the Eastern Shore. Most, however, kept their enslaved despite declining need. Owners often found they could make more money on a slave by hiring him or her out to local farmers and businessmen than they could by selling them to a New Orleans or Mississippi slave trader. It also...