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19th Century · Labor

John Tubman

c. 1818 – 1867

Free Black laborer on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, first husband of Harriet Tubman. His killing in 1867, and his killer’s acquittal, marked the limits of freedom after emancipation.

John Tubman was a free Black man on Maryland’s Eastern Shore who married an enslaved woman, Araminta Ross, around 1844. She took his surname and became Harriet Tubman. When she fled slavery in 1849 he stayed behind, and when she returned for him in 1851 he had married another woman. Most of what is known about him survives only because of her. His life, and his death at the hands of a white neighbor two years after the Civil War, show what freedom meant for a Black man in a slave state and what it still failed to protect after emancipation.

At a Glance

Born
c. 1818, Dorchester County, Maryland (approximate)
Died
1867, Dorchester County, Maryland
Known for
Marriage to Harriet Tubman (c. 1844–1851); his 1867 killing in Dorchester County and the acquittal of the white man who shot him
Fields
Labor · Law
Era
19th Century

Early Life

Little documentation of John Tubman’s early life survives. He was a free Black man who lived and worked in Dorchester County, Maryland, near the farms where Araminta Ross’s family labored. A Dorchester County certificate of freedom issued in January 1850 to a “John Tubman,” described as about thirty-two years old, “born free” and raised in the county, is likely his, which would place his birth around 1818. The certificate does not name a wife, so the identification rests on the name and place.

Certificates like this one were part of how Maryland policed its large free Black population. On the eve of the Civil War, Maryland had the largest free Black population of any state, nearly half of its Black residents, and they lived alongside enslaved neighbors and relatives. Free Black Marylanders had to be able to prove their status, could be jailed or sold if they could not, and lived under laws that restricted their movement, assembly, and testimony in court. Free Black men commonly worked as farm laborers, watermen, and timber hands, often on the same farms as enslaved people.

Life and Work

Around 1844 John Tubman married Araminta Ross, who was enslaved by Edward Brodess. Franklin B. Sanborn, writing in 1863 from what Harriet told him, recorded that “Harriet was married somewhere about 1844, to a free colored man named John Tubman, but she had no children.” About the time of the marriage she began to use the name Harriet, after her mother, Harriet “Rit” Green, and took her husband’s surname. The Maryland State Archives suggests the couple likely hoped one day to buy her freedom from Brodess.

A marriage between a free man and an enslaved woman had no standing in Maryland law. Brodess remained Harriet’s owner and could hire her out or sell her at will; under the rule that a child followed the condition of its mother, any child they had would have been born enslaved and owned by Brodess. John’s freedom gave him no legal power to protect his wife.

Brodess died in March 1849, and Harriet feared that she would be sold to settle his debts. That fall she escaped to Philadelphia. John did not go with her. The National Park Service records that he “refused to join Harriet in freedom in the north.”

In the fall of 1851, after earning money in Philadelphia and making her first rescue missions, Harriet returned to Dorchester County to bring her husband north. She found, in Sanborn’s words, “him married to another woman, and no longer caring to live with her.” His new wife, Caroline, was also free. According to Sanborn, Harriet “did not give way to rage or grief”; instead she gathered a party of people seeking freedom and led them to Philadelphia. The Maryland State Archives describes the news as a shock that left her deeply hurt. She did not try to bring John north again.

John Tubman remained in Dorchester County with Caroline through the Civil War and Maryland’s abolition of slavery in November 1864. Harriet, meanwhile, became the most celebrated conductor on the Underground Railroad and served the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse, scout, and spy.

Legacy

In 1867 John Tubman was shot and killed in Dorchester County by Robert Vincent, a white man, after a dispute between them earlier the same day. Vincent was arrested that November and tried in Dorchester County. He claimed self-defense, saying that Tubman had threatened him, and an all-white jury acquitted him; a contemporary newspaper report recorded that the jury was out only ten minutes. No one was ever convicted of John Tubman’s death.

The killing was one of many acts of violence against Black people in the former slave states in the years after emancipation, when white defendants were rarely convicted of harming Black victims. Two years after his death, Harriet Tubman married Nelson Davis, a Union Army veteran, in Auburn, New York.

John Tubman is remembered chiefly through his wife, and the sources for his life are thin: a certificate of freedom, two brief accounts from Harriet’s first biographers, and the record of his death. They describe a free man whose choice to stay behind shaped Harriet Tubman’s life, and whose killing showed that legal freedom in Maryland did not bring equal protection of the law.

For Educators

Freedom on paper did not mean equal protection: a free Black man in Maryland could not protect his enslaved wife before the Civil War, and the law did not protect him after it. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. c. 1818 Born free; raised in Dorchester County, Maryland.
  2. c. 1844 Marries Araminta Ross, who takes the name Harriet Tubman.
  3. Fall 1849 Harriet Tubman escapes to Philadelphia; John stays in Maryland.
  4. 4 January 1850 A certificate of freedom is issued in Dorchester County to a John Tubman, about thirty-two, “born free.”
  5. Fall 1851 Harriet returns for him and finds he has married another free woman, Caroline.
  6. 1 November 1864 Maryland’s new constitution abolishes slavery in the state.
  7. 1867 Shot and killed in Dorchester County by Robert Vincent, a white man, who is later acquitted.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Maryland State Archives, “Harriet Ross Tubman Davis (b. circa 1822 – d. 1913),” Archives of Maryland Biographical Series (SC 3520-13562). Link
  2. National Park Service, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, “People.” Link
  3. Certificates of Freedom, Dorchester County, Maryland, 1806–1864, record for “Negro John Tubman,” 4 January 1850. Edward H. Nabb Research Center, Salisbury University, Enduring Connections. Link
  4. Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: Geo. R. Lockwood & Son, 1886), reprinting Franklin B. Sanborn’s 1863 account from the Boston Commonwealth. Link
  5. Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).
  6. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

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Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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