Harriet Tubman's enslaver, Edward Brodess, was born in Dorchester County in June 1801, the son of Mary Pattison and Joseph Brodess. After Joseph died around 1802, Edward's mother married widower Anthony Thompson, the successful owner of a large plantation south of Woolford and Tobacco Stick in Dorchester County, Maryland. When Mary died around 1810, she left young Edward under the guardianship of his step-father. Raised in comfortable circumstances, provided amply for by Thompson and living the life of a middle-class young man until he reached the age of maturity in 1822, Brodess may have had little experience, and perhaps even little desire, to run the small plantation and care for the numerous slaves he inherited from his mother and father, Mary and Joseph Brodess, over in Bucktown. In fact, during the two years prior to his leaving Thompson’s guardianship, Edward’s expenses did not include expenditures for farm equipment or clothing appropriate for the life of a young planter. Rather, he made purchases of cashmere and silk clothing, numerous pairs of shoes, fancy pants, vests, coats and handkerchiefs, golden buttons, ribbons, and fine stockings.
After Edward married Eliza Ann Keene in 1824 and they settled on his farm in Bucktown, Brodess became an ordinary farmer, never attaining the economic or social status he enjoyed while living in the Thompson household. Perhaps Brodess became a resentful and bitter man, and in the end, his historical significance rests not with any great achievements of his own, but rather through his claim of ownership of Harriet Tubman, America's most famous runaway slave and Underground Railroad operator.
Harriet Tubman has provided us with few details about her owner, Edward Brodess, or the various masters to whom she was hired out for the nearly thirty years she spent in slavery. She told Ednah Cheney that she seldom lived with Brodess and his wife Eliza Ann. He was “never unnecessarily cruel; but as was common among slaveholders, he often hired out his slaves to others, some of whom proved to be tyrannical and brutal to the utmost limit of their power.” Harriet’s brothers, Ben and Robert, recalled harsher treatment at the hands of the Brodesses, however. Eliza Ann was “very devilish,” Ben claimed, and he and his siblings were forced to “work hard and fare meagerly” to support the Brodesses in “idleness and luxury.” Robert felt Edward Brodess “was not fit to own a dog.” Ben was more to the point: “Where I came from,” he later recalled, “it would make your flesh creep, and your hair stand on end, to know what they do to the slaves.”
Marker at former Brodess Farm site near Bucktown, Dorchester County, Maryland, honoring Harriet Tubman.
Sources:
Brodess vs. Thompson.
Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney, "Moses," Freedmen's Record, March 1865.
Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. (Auburn, New York: W.J. Moses, 1869). 9
William Still, The Underground Railroad. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., rpt. edition 1970). 307.
Interviews with “John Seward” [Robert Ross] and “James Seward” [Ben Ross], in Benjamin Drew, The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery rpt. 1969, Tilden G. Edelstein, ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1855). 27.
