Both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were born into slavery.
Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. She was given the name Araminta Ross at birth. Her father, Benjamin Ross, was a free black man who had purchased his own freedom from slavery. When he died in 1808, his wife Harriet – Tubman’s mother – was left to care for their six children. Thurston was born in 1823 but died of an illness when he was just two years old.
Although she was never sold as a slave; she did have to work for her owner’s family as a house servant and field worker from an early age. She said she loved being outdoors in the fields or woods, but hated working inside the house where it was hot and stuffy with no windows open or fresh air coming through them all day long!
When she was twenty-one years old she married John Tubman (1820–1913) who worked as a farmer and fisherman on nearby farms along with his brother Thomas (1814–1902). Together they had four children who were all born while they lived together between 1844 and 1851 before they.
