Lectures on topics ranging from the American Revolution to 9 11. Lectures in history are also available as podcasts. Visit our website, cspan. Org history podcast or download them from itunes. Up next on American History tv, a columnist compares the lives and achievements of Frederick Douglass and terry at tubman. She examines how growing up in maryland impacted their lives and led to their work as abolitionist. The Georgetown Public Library sponsors this hourlong event. Good afternoon everyone. My name is jerry mcclory. Thank you for coming out on this illustrate washington, d. C. Day. On behalf of the public library, i would like to thank you for coming out today. The peabody room was named after george peabody. He was a merchant, finance year and philanthropist who got his start in business in georgetown in 1812. He was 17 years old. He came from massachusetts with his uncle and they opened a dry goods store on m street. This fight his third grade education, he was a financial genius. He moved on to baltimore where the action was in the early 19th century. He was there for 20 years. You have probably heard of the peabody conservatory of music. That was his namesake. Became a multimillionaire. He eventually moved to london and lived there for the remainder of his life. In his will of 1867, he gave his millions away to establish educational organizations. This was a generation before andrew card engaged at the same thing with his money. To the community of georgetown he left 8 15,000 to establish a library. This room was named in honor of him and serves as a repository for georgetown neighborhood history. For sound being the oldest neighborhood in washington, d. C. Founded a full 49 years before the Nations Capital was founded in 1800. Todays speaker is jamie stiehm. We welcome her back. This is her second top this year. The second saturday of each month she is giving a talk about individual american personages who really impacted American History. Jamie is a syndicated columnist and contributor to u. S. News. Com. Today, she is going to give a talk about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. How douglas worked by day and how. Tubman worked by night under the stars. Her talk next month will be about rachel carson. Saturday, march 12. Pick up a flyer on your way out. I also have nice jumbo postcards that lists her entire speaking schedule. Everyone must have these two pieces of paper before they leave today. Thank you so much for coming. And i turn the podium over to jamie. Thank you. [applause] ms. Stiehm thank you for hosting us in this amazing space. If we could put ourselves to the Eastern Shore of maryland, their Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, two most known africanamericans of the civil war era were born into slavery at about the same time. They did not know their birthdays. Their birth places about 20 miles apart. Perhaps because of hit its status, virulence slaveowning past is often forgotten today. As the lives and physical scars of these two figures of test, slavery in maryland was as oppressive as the cotton fields of the deep south. White owned farmland was worked by thousands of enslaved people who also worked on the water to bring back the catch of the chesapeake day. In no part of this date was slavery as brutal as the Eastern Shore. Conditions exposed by the oddly parallel lives of these two famous maryland residents. On his autobiographies first page, Frederick Douglass talked about the harsh land of talbot county. His boyhood. He said it was marked by the desert like appearance of its soil and the general dilapidation of the farms. The talk tank river was among the laziest and muddy us of streams. Surrounded by a white population of the lowest order. Indolence and drunk into a proverb. 20 miles away tubmans family lived in still deeper isolation near cambridge. In a hardscrabble part of the world, with very few fine indoor things. She had the chance to live with her closest family. Frederick douglass was separated from his mother and grandmother as a child. That was a cut that never healed. He also never knew who his father was. His father was white. At the same time, Frederick Douglass was a very bright boy who learned to read at a young age because of a kind mistress and his playmate who was the lord and master of the wealthy home. The two of them were very close. Frederick douglas hitchhiked on tommys privileged schooling. He got a lucky break in other words as a young slave and that is something that Harriet Tubman never got carried she never had any exceptional privilege. Like most people born into slavery, she remains illiterate her whole life. She signed her name with the x. Fortunately for both, the states Large Population of free blacks and the presence of sympathetic antes slavery lakers on the Eastern Shore made it easier to escape to freedom. Delaware, the neighboring state was a slave state also. The goal was to get to the masondixon line between maryland and pennsylvania. That was the border between slavery and freedom. Frederick douglass and tubman fled from bondage as young adults. He in 1838 and she in 1849. She walked and he took the train. Tubman soon became a legendary conductor on the underground railroad and was the first woman to later execute an armed expedition in the civil war. As her biographer Kate Clifford larson put it, she worked by night in secret, silent cells navigating by the north star in the light of the moon. During the 1850s, she led 13 groups of slaves to freedom. She returned to the egypt of the Eastern Shore time and again exposing the risk of capture. On the africanamerican underground network, she was known as moses. The spiritual leader of her people. Let my people go. Shes saying in her husky, haunting voice often in code. She let it be known that she carried a pistol inspiring fear in the hearts of slave catchers. Who never caught up with her although she was the most wanted fugitive. They did not even know what she looked like because she traveled in disguise. She let it be known that she would use her pistol on anyone who wanted to turn back. No one in her groups was allowed