Elizabeth “Mum Bett” Freeman, 1811

Bett, a slave, sued her owner John Ashley, Esq., for her freedom with the aid of lawyer Theodore Sedgwick. She may have been inspired to act by her mistress’s beating of her sister Lizzie or by overhearing conversations about the new Massachusetts state constitution, which declared “all men . . . free and equal.” A jury at the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas set her free in 1781, after which she worked for the Sedgwick family for three decades. This portrait was painted by Susan Anne Ridley Sedgwick, Theodore’s daughter-in-law, when Freeman, then known as Mum Bett, was sixty-nine years old.