Stirring language about liberty, equality, and freedom that inspired revolutionaries in the 1770s appeared in many state constitutions in the 1780s. Yet unfree people, held as property, had little recourse to challenge their status.

Massachusetts law, however, had long recognized slaves as persons with legal standing to bring lawsuits against whites. Less than 2 percent of the state’s population consisted of slaves, who numbered under four thousand. Before 1780, some thirty Massachusetts slaves had sued for freedom, but their cases had turned on individual circumstances, such as an owner’s unfulfilled promise to emancipate. In 1780, a new state constitution boldly declared that “all men are born free and equal,” opening the door to lawsuits based on a broad right to freedom. The first such case was brought by Bett, a slave living in the Massachusetts town of Sheffield.

Born of African parents in the early 1740s, Bett and her sister Lizzie grew up as slaves in Claverack, New York, in the wealthy Dutch American family of Pieter Hogeboom. When Hogeboom died, Bett and Lizzie were transported twenty-four miles east into Massachusetts, where Hogeboom’s daughter lived with her husband, Colonel John Ashley. A town tax list of 1771 shows Ashley as the richest man in Sheffield and owner of five slaves. He was known as a kind and gentle man, but as one account suggests, his wife was “a shrew untamable” and “the most despotic of mistresses.” One day, Mrs. Ashley became enraged with Lizzie and heaved a hot kitchen shovel at her. Bett interceded and sustained a burn on her arm that left a lifelong scar.

On another occasion, in 1773, Bett was, in her own words, “keepin’ still and mindin’ things” while she served refreshments to a dozen men meeting with Colonel Ashley to draft anti-British resolutions. The first read, “Resolved, That mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Bett well noted the import of their discussion.

In the fall of 1780, Bett overheard conversations at the Ashleys’ about the new Massachusetts state constitution proclaiming equality and reasonably concluded that they applied to her. So she contacted Theodore Sedgwick, Sheffield’s representative in the state legislature, who filed a writ in April 1781 requesting the recovery of unlawfully held property—in this case, the human property of Bett and a second plaintiff owned by Ashley, a man identified only as Brom. Ashley contested the writ, and the case, officially called Brom and Bett v. J. Ashley, Esq., went to trial. The jury agreed that Bett and Brom were entitled to freedom and ordered Ashley to pay each plaintiff damages as well as court costs. The brief court records do not reveal the legal arguments presented, but Sedgwick descendants later boasted that Theodore Sedgwick invoked the Massachusetts constitution to argue that slavery could not exist in the state.

Bett chose a new name to go with her new status: Elizabeth Freeman. She left Colonel Ashley’s and became a paid housekeeper in the Sedgwick family, raising the children when their mother became incapacitated by illness. “Her spirit spurned slavery,” a Sedgwick daughter wrote, offering this quotation from Bett as evidence: “Anytime, anytime while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman—I would.”

The Sedgwicks were especially grateful to Freeman for her commanding presence of mind during Shays’s Rebellion in 1786 (see “The Requisition of 1785 and Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787”). Because Sedgwick represented the legal elite of the county, he was a target of hostile crowd action. Freeman was home alone when insurgents, searching for Sedgwick and for valuables to plunder, demanded entry. Unable to block them, Freeman let the dissidents in but followed them around with a large shovel, threatening to flatten anyone who damaged property. When Freeman died in 1829, she was buried in the Sedgwick family plot, with a gravestone inscription supplied by the Sedgwicks that ended “Good mother, farewell.”

Freeman’s lawsuit of 1781 inspired others to sue, and in a case in 1783 the judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that “slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges” in the state constitution. It took several more legal challenges and additional time for that news to trickle out, but the erosion of slavery in Massachusetts gradually picked up speed as blacks demanded manumission or wages for work, or simply walked away from their masters. In 1790, the federal census listed 5,369 “other free persons” (that is, nonwhites) in the state and not a single slave.

Questions for Consideration

Connect to the Big Idea

In what way was Elizabeth Freeman’s desire for freedom similar to and different from those of white revolutionaries who sought freedom from being “enslaved” by Britain?