Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. Harriet Ross Tubman and Frederick Douglass, two of the best-known African Americans of the Civil War era, were both born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, at roughly the same time. Perhaps because of its border-state decision to stay with the Union, Maryland and its slave-owning past are often forgotten today. And yet as the lives and scars of these two attested, slavery in rural Maryland could be as oppressive and isolated as the cotton fields of the Deep South. Swaths of white family-owned farmland were worked by thousands of enslaved people, who also worked on the water to bring back the rich catch of the Chesapeake Bay. And in no part of the state was slavery as brutal as the Eastern Shore — conditions exposed by the oddly parallel lives of these two famous Marylanders.  Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.  On his autobiography’s first page, Douglass described the harsh land of his boyhood, marked by “[the] desertlike appearance of its soil [and] the general dilapidation of its farms and fences.” The Choptank River, he wrote, was “among the laziest and muddiest of streams, surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb.” Twenty miles away, Tubman’s family lived in still deeper isolation, in a hardscrabble part of the world with few fine indoor things. But she had the luck to know and live with most of her close-knit family; Douglass was separated from his mother and grandmother as a child, a cut that never healed.  At the same time, Douglass was a bright boy who learned to read at a young age, because of a kind mistress and her son Thomas, his playmate in a wealthy home. Tubman never got an early break or exceptional privilege. Like most people born into slavery, she remained illiterate all her life and signed her name with an X.  Fortunately for both of them, the state’s large population of free blacks and the presence of sympathetic anti-slavery Quakers on the Eastern Shore made it easier to escape to freedom. Douglass and Tubman fled from bondage as young adults: he in 1838, she in 1849. She walked; he took the train.  Tubman soon became a legendary conductor on the Underground Railroad and was the first woman “to plan and execute an armed expedition in the Civil War,” as biographer Kate Clifford Larson put it. She worked by night in secret, silence and stealth, navigating by the North Star and the light of the moon. During the 1850s she led 13 groups of enslaved family members and kin to freedom this way, returning to the Egypt of the Eastern Shore slavery time and again. On the African-American underground network, she was known as “Moses,” the spiritual leader of her people. She sang in her husky, haunting voice, often in code. She let it be known she carried a pistol, inspiring fear in the hearts of slave catchers – who never caught up with her, their most wanted fugitive.  Douglass, of course, became a freedom fighter in a different sense: a brilliant voice, on the page and in person, for slave emancipation. Strikingly handsome, he made his debut on Nantucket Island and became a sensation almost overnight. In a way he took the path opposite Tubman’s, speaking in the sun of the 19th century public square. They were as night and day.  But their lives continued to run parallel. In 1859 Douglass and Tubman were both asked, independently, by John Brown to take part in his failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown regretted not having Tubman fighting on his side; not for nothing did he call her “General Tubman.” Both she and Douglass, who was close with some of the “secret six” who provided funds to Brown, refused his entreaties — and likely saved their own lives.  By this time, the two Marylanders knew each other, with mutual friends like the Bostonian abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and the Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights leader Lucretia Mott. Tubman once brought a group of 13 runaway slaves to the Douglass home in Rochester, N.Y., where he put them up in his barn before they went to Canada. Tubman also stayed as a houseguest at least once in the run-up to war, possibly to discuss Brown’s daring plan. But strangely, given their Chesapeake connection and their mutual regard, Tubman and Douglass never seemed that close in public.  Both continued to play important roles after the war began, advocating for blacks to serve as soldiers, for strategic as well as political reasons. Douglass met with President Lincoln for a frank exchange on enlisting African-American soldiers and paying them equal wages. (The latter never happened.) Tubman likewise urged legions of young men to enlist as “colored volunteers.” But she also fought herself, seeing military action as a Union spy and scout across enemy lines in South Carolina. When not sneaking across enemy lines, the plain, broad-shouldered woman, small but reportedly as strong as any man, worked as an army nurse and laundress.  An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.  Tubman’s most impressive mission was to guide Col. James Montgomery and about 300 black troops as they raided plantations, seized harvests and livestock and destroyed and burned a bridge along South Carolina’s Combahee River in June of 1863. The Civil War had gained new meaning with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that year, and along the way Montgomery and Tubman invited hundreds of slaves to climb aboard their Union steamboats for freedom. Tubman raised her voice, cutting the air as she sang with the escaping slaves — proof that she was no slouch as a public speaker herself. A Wisconsin State Journal reporter on the scene praised her singular “patriotism, sagacity, energy.”  In the end, Tubman’s critical role in Civil War-era events can’t be traced as clearly as that of the eloquent Douglass. In recent years, some grumbling has surfaced, on and beyond the Eastern Shore, that native son Douglass gets all the historical glory, much as he did in life, leaving Tubman’s character lost in the shadows. Douglass said it best in an 1868 letter to “Dear Harriet” Tubman, commenting on her nocturnal journeys:  The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public….I have wrought in the day — you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd…while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women….. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.  Yet Douglass did not give Tubman the light of day in his voluminous autobiography. Ironically, her name is missing from his magisterial life story. The few words he left for history, however, go a long way in telling her tale.  Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.  Sources: Kate Clifford Larson, “Bound for the Promised Land”; Frederick Douglass, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”; Fergus M. Bordewich, “Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad and America’s First Civil Rights Movement” Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; Karen Needles, Lincoln Archives Digital Project www.lincolnarchives.us; Catherine Clinton, “Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.”  Jamie Stiehm, a journalist, is writing a biography of Lucretia Mott.
Born just miles apart into slavery, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman led lives that were both parallel and, in other ways, radically different.