Knox Trail Commemorations on 24–26 Jan.

By this date 250 years ago, Col. Henry Knox had checked in with his commander, Gen. George Washington, in Cambridge.

The artillery that Knox had moved from Fort Ticonderoga was, Gen. William Heath wrote, “ordered to be stopped at Framingham.”

Those guns needed to be mounted and equipped for use, a process that would take a few more weeks.

This weekend, the commemoration of Knox’s artillery train will continue with events in several Massachusetts towns.

Saturday, 24 January, noon to 2 P.M.
Demonstration of Knox’s Noble Train
Bidwell Park, Stockbridge

This display of costumed educators from Fort Ticonderoga, a non-firing reproduction cannon, and two friendly oxen is part of “A Day In Revolutionary Stockbridge (1775-1783),” which runs from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. and marks several moments during the war.

The Mission House will be set up as a tavern with tea, hot chocolate, and baked goods. At the town library, Dennis Picard will discuss eighteenth-century food. Outside the library, Prado del Lana will show her Lincoln Longwool sheep. At the Bidwell Museum and Procter Gallery, museum staff will discuss cooking and other domestic tasks.

Multiple first-person historic interpretations are scheduled from 10 A.M to 1:30 P.M.:

• Theodore Sedgwick preparing for the Elizabeth Freeman case (Bement Room)
• Anna Bingham and Abigail Dwight discussing taverns and doing business as women (Red Lion Inn small parlor)
• Thomas Williams, highest-ranking military officer from Stockbridge to die during the war, recounting the siege of Boston (various locales)
• Timothy and Rhoda Edwards, storekeepers, community leaders, and relatives of Col. Aaron Burr (Mission House)
• Members of the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment (various locales)

The afternoon will bring two larger presentations:

• Stockbridge Committee of Safety court scenario (2 to 3 P.M. in the library lobby)
• Gregg Duffek and JoAnn Schedler on Mohican Veterans (3 to 4 P.M. in the Bement Room)

Cards with a map and a list of programs will be available at the Stockbridge library and Red Lion Inn. For what’s currently planned, see this page.

Saturday, 24 January, 11 A.M.
Noble Train of Artillery: The Knox Expedition
Bartlett Park and Jacobs Hall Masonic Lodge, Marlborough

The Marlborough Historical Society commemorates Knox’s mission with the town’s own newly acquired cannon and J. Archer O’Reilly III portraying the general and secretary of war. Organizers ask attendees to register in advance so there will be enough refreshments for all.

Sunday, 25 January, 1:30 to 3 P.M.
“Were so lucky as to get the Cannon out of the River”: Henry Knox and His Noble Train of Artillery
Westford Museum

Alexander Cain will discuss Knox’s journey and its impact on the Continental Army’s firepower and the American cause. At Fort Ticonderoga, the colonel selected 58 artillery pieces, including immense 12-, 18-, and 24-pounders. Once they were ready, some of that artillery was positioned on Dorchester Heights, forcing the British evacuation of Boston. Cain explores Knox’s mission transformed the Continental Army’s firepower while embodying the ingenuity and determination that defined the American cause. Learn more about this presentation.

Sunday, 25 January, 4 to 6 P.M.
Henry Knox: Presentation and Cannon Firing
Martha Mary Chapel, Wayside Inn, Sudbury

Local writer Steven Glovsky explores the improbabilities and inconsistencies of Henry Knox’s story, leading up to his undertaking the transport of urgently needed cannon in the winter of 1775–76. The presentation will be followed by cannon fire from Crane’s Third Artillery.

Monday, 26 January, 7 to 8:30 P.M.
Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold and the Gibraltar of North America
Aeronaut Brewing Company, Somerville

The Somerville Museum presents the first of two talks by Dan Breen on the subject of “Henry Knox and His Noble Train of Artillery” in the sociable space of a brew pub. This evening will cover the story of Fort Carillon/Ticonderoga, its improbable capture, and Col. Knox’s arrival six months later. The second installment, scheduled for 9 February, will complete the tale with “The Noble Train Arrives: Knox, Washington and the End of the Siege.”

Tesiero on Elizabeth Freeman, 4 Dec.

On Wednesday, 4 December, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a virtual program with Donna Tesiero speaking on “A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman & the Abolition of Slavery in the North.”

The event description says:

At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians.

The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick pursued would bring freedom to her and her daughter, as well as thousands of other enslaved people. Freeman left her enslaver to be employed by Sedgwick. After Sedgwick's wife, Pamela, became a chronic invalid, Freeman effectively became the foster mother to his seven children, enabling him to pursue a political career.

Donna Tesiero is the author of A Revolutionary Woman, published by McFarland this year. Trained as an attorney, she has studied history and government and also writes historical fiction for young people.

This free event is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. To register and receive a link for logging on, go to this page.

Elizabeth Freeman and the Talk of Liberty

In 1781 Elizabeth Freeman initiated a freedom suit, suing to be released from bondage to John and Hannah Ashley.

(Though John was Freeman’s legal owner, she spoke fondly of him in later years. She described Hannah, on the other hand, as tyrannical, violent, and cold-hearted to others.)

As I quoted on Tuesday, in 1838 Harriet Martineau wrote that Elizabeth Freeman filed her suit after hearing people discuss the Massachusetts constitution of 1780.

In 1853 Catharine Maria Sedgwick wrote that Freeman took action after hearing the Declaration of Independence. Sedgwick also said this happened “soon after the close of the revolutionary war,” which doesn’t match the timing of the lawsuit.

Our most recent tradition says that Freeman heard John Ashley, Theodore Sedgewick, and other Sheffield men discussing natural rights in January 1773 as they formulated resolutions for the town meeting to adopt.

So which statement of natural liberty prompted Elizabeth Freeman to act?

I think all of them did. Or to put it differently, over the years she heard many conversations in which men like Sedgewick and Ashley proclaimed their belief in liberty for all people. She may have figured out that the Massachusetts constitution had more legal weight than a town resolution and the Congress’s Declaration. But I doubt she would have gambled based on overhearing one discussion.

As many contemporaries described, and the printed record bears out, there was a lot of talk about liberty and injustice in those years. Ebenezer Fox was a farmboy in Roxbury in 1775, and in his memoir he described how he and other working boys saw parallels between the colonies’ complaints and their own:

Almost all the conversation that came to my ears related to the injustice of England and the tyranny of government. It is perfectly natural that the spirit of insubordination, that prevailed, should spread among the younger members of the community; that they, who were continually hearing complaints, should themselves become complainants. I, and other boys situated similarly to myself, thought we had wrongs to be redressed; rights to be maintained; and, as no one appeared disposed to act the part of a redresser, it was our duty and our privilege to assert our own rights. We made a direct application of the doctrines we daily heard, in relation to the oppression of the mother country, to our own circumstances; and through that we were more opposed than our fathers were.

I thought that I was doing myself great injustice by remaining in bondage, when I ought to go free; and that the time was come, when I should liberate myself from the thraldom of others, and set up a government of my own; or, in other words, do what was right in the sight of my own eyes.

Fox grabbed freedom by running away to Rhode Island. Freeman sought legal help from Sedgewick—a process that took longer but was more permanent and had far-reaching consequences.

One detail of Freeman’s story appears in both Martineau’s and Sedgwick’s accounts: she felt she had to argue for her very humanity.

• Martineau: “She replied that the ‘Bill o’ Rights’ said that all were born free and equal, and that as she was not a dumb beast, she was certainly one of the nation.”
• Sedgwick (published version): “‘I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?’”

The Sheffield town meeting, and even Ebenezer Fox and his chums, didn’t have to start there.

The town of Sheffield has just recognized Elizabeth Freeman’s move toward freedom by unveiling a bronze statue of her, shown above, along with a college scholarship in her name. I understand the statue, by artist Brian Hanlon, stands on land owned by the church where the town meetings of 1773 occurred, bringing the conversation about natural liberties full circle.

The Sites of the Sheffield Resolves

It’s become common to call the Sheffield town meeting resolves of January 1773 the “Sheffield Declaration,” as a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence. Wikipedia does so.

Wikipedia’s entry also says that document was written “in the Colonel John Ashley House, a registered National Historic Landmark in Ashley Falls, a neighborhood of Sheffield, Massachusetts.”

The Ashley House, built in 1735 and moved in 1930, has been owned for the last half-century by the Trustees of Reservations. Its own website now emphasizes the paradox of John Ashley owning slaves while signing onto natural-rights rhetoric, and Elizabeth Freeman’s enslavement in the house.

The link between the Sheffield resolves and the Ashley house is actually quite thin, apparently based on the idea that Ashley was “moderator” of the committee to draft the resolutions.

When Boston newspapers reported that Ashley had been “chosen moderator,” that meant he moderated the 5 January town meeting that appointed the committee, not that he was moderator of the committee. He was just one of eleven men named to that subgroup. 

Committees had chairmen, not moderators, and the chairman was almost always the first man named in the record—in this case, young attorney Theodore Sedgewick. Towns often appointed a lawyer, schoolteacher, or other educated man to head such committees when they wanted some fancy words.

Sedgewick probably drafted the resolutions at his own home, which still stands in Sheffield but has been greatly modified. It also appears to be in private hands, thus not open to tourists.

The town committee probably met to go over Sedgewick’s draft in advance of the follow-up town meeting—whether a couple of days before or one hour before we don’t know. Did the committee meet at Ashley’s house? It’s possible, depending on whether that house was conveniently located and people liked the colonel’s hospitality. If he had a tavern license, the odds go up. But there’s nothing in the historical record to say the committee met there, much less that most of the drafting was done there.

Sheffield held its town meetings in its religious meetinghouse. That church still stands as well, moved back from the road and with a steeple added in 1819, and still has an active congregation. In that building the town formally adopted the resolves with a unanimous vote. That vote gave Sedgewick’s words official standing.

Nonetheless, the “Sheffield Declaration” gets associated with the Ashley House.

Historic houses benefit from having stories attached to them, preferably stories carrying emotional and historical weight. Stories benefit from having concrete settings, especially those people can visit. Thus, there’s a natural gravitation of stories to sites.

TOMORROW: A new statue in Sheffield.

The Memory of “Mumbett”

In 1853 Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867, shown here), one of America’s most popular novelists, published an article in Bentley’s Miscellany titled “Slavery in New England.”

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds Sedgwick’s manuscript of that article, titled “Mumbett,” and has made it available in digital form.

Describing Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman (d. 1829), the black woman who helped to raise her, Sedgwick wrote:

It was soon after the close of the revolutionary war that she chanced, at the village “meeting-house” in Sheffield, to hear the declaration of Independence read. She went the next day to the Office of Mr Theodore Sedgwick then in the beginning of his honorable political & legal career.

“Sir” said she “I heard that paper read yesterday that says ‘all men are born equal &, that every man has a right to freedom’ — I am not a dumb Critter, wont the law give me my freedom’?

I can imagine her upright form as she stood dilating with her fresh hope based on the declaration of her intrinsic inalienable right.

At another point in the manuscript, Sedgwick wrote and crossed out these words:

The reader will be prepared for the intelligence & decision which led Mumbet on the very day after hearing the declaration of Independence read in Church to apply to Theodore Sedgwick then at the beginning of his honorable legal & political career to institute a suit for her freedom

The documentary record shows that Theodore Sedgwick, the novelist’s father, took the case of this woman, then called only Elizabeth, though the Hampshire County court in 1781. She won her freedom, took the surname Freeman, and went to work for the Sedgwick family.

That lawsuit produced one of the precedents that led the Massachusetts Superior Court to rule slavery unenforceable in the state in 1783.

Catharine Sedgwick wrote of the Declaration of Independence setting off those events. The Declaration was of course more resonant with a national audience in 1853. And that might well have been what she remembered from hearing the story as a girl.

Authors have discussed two other documents as triggering or contributing to Elizabeth Freeman’s suit. Citing conversations with the Sedgwicks, the British author Harriet Martineau tied Freeman’s request for freedom to having “heard gentlemen talking over the Bill of Rights and the new constitution of Massachusetts” in her Retrospect of Western Travel (1838).

The first article of the Massachusetts state constitution of 1780 says:

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

That fits with the date of Freeman’s lawsuit, and, unlike the other documents spelling out ideals, the state constitution had legal force.

The other document latterly linked to Elizabeth Freeman’s suit for freedom is the Sheffield resolutions of January 1773, as I quoted yesterday.

Freeman’s enslavers were Hannah and John Ashley, and their house was supposedly where a town committee met to discuss Theodore Sedgwick’s draft of those resolutions. Had Elizabeth overheard? 

TOMORROW: Evidence and tradition.

Sheffield and the State of Nature

In January 1773, the town meeting of Sheffield named a large committee “to take into consideration the grievances which Americans in general, and the inhabitants of this province in particular, labour under; and to make a draught of such proceedings as they think are necessary for this town, in these critical circumstances, to enter into.”

The head of that committee, and thus the person entrusted with the primary responsibility for drafting its report, was the lawyer Theodore Sedgewick, then still in his twenties.

Later accounts say the committee met at the house of John Ashley (1709–1802), a local militia colonel, judge, and town officeholder.

On 12 January, one week after receiving their charge, the committee presented a series of resolutions to the town meeting. The voters approved that document unanimously. A copy went to the town’s representative in the Massachusetts General Court. The text appeared in the 15 February Boston Evening-Post and other newspapers.

Most of those resolutions were a protest against Parliament taxing people in the colony to fund salaries for the royal governor, judges, and other appointed figures—taxes that the men of Massachusetts never voted on to pay officials they never voted on, either.

The town also complained about New York claiming land between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers, an episode I hope to discuss later.

But the eventually most famous of the Sheffield resolutions was the first, laying out the philosophical basis for the complaints that followed:

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.

When the men in Ashley’s house discussed their draft, they surely thought of that as a truism that strengthened their tax protest, with no broader implications.

However, Ashley was also a slaveholder.

TOMORROW: A new statue in Sheffield.

Lexington Lectures, 22-24 April

The Lexington Historical Society isn’t resting after a busy Patriots Day weekend. It’s offering four online presentations this week.

Thursday, 22 April, 7:00 P.M.
The Will of the People
Prof. T.H. Breen delivers a special Cronin lecture discussing how the ordinary people of New England reacted to war in their backyards. Based on his book The Will of the People, Breen’s talk will explore how debates raged throughout the country about the fate of the new nation when the outcome of the war was far from certain, while fiery Patriots like the Rev. Jonas Clarke continued to keep the dream alive.

Friday, 23 April, 10:00 A.M.
The Right to Liberty
African-Americans, both enslaved and free, grappled with what becoming part of a nation where all men were theoretically created equal meant, and often took matters into their own hands when the liberties they were owed did not come to fruition. Professional storyteller Valerie Tutson shares the heroic tales of James Forten, who as a teenager fought against the British navy and later worked to abolish slavery, and Elizabeth Freeman, who in 1781 successfully sued for her freedom, citing the Massachusetts constitution. This program is suitable for all ages.

Friday, 23 April, 2:00 P.M.
April 19th Collections Spotlight
The Lexington Historical Society’s museums hold many relics of the first day of the Revolution. Objects that witnessed bloody battle live in situ in our historic houses or rest in exhibit cases, and still more spend their time behind closed doors in our archives. Join Collections and Outreach Manager Stacey Fraser for a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most treasured, but least seen, relics of the Revolution in our museum collection.

Saturday, 24 April, 4:00 P.M.
Noble Volunteers
Author Don Hagist has spent years studying the demographics and personal stories of British soldiers. Far from nameless killing machines, these men came from a variety of ages, ethnicities, and occupations. Many had far more in common with the Americans than we remember, and most never expected to one day be waging war with their own people when they took the King’s shilling. Hagist shares surprising insights from his latest book.

Workshop on New England Slavery and Freedom, 26-27 Mar.

The Center for Reconciliation has announced a two-day workshop on “Interpreting Slavery and Freedom in New England,” to be held in Providence, Rhode Island, on 26-27 March.

The organization says this event is designed to let participants:

• Explore the history of African and Indigenous/Native American peoples in New England.
• Be able to distinguish between different forms of forced labor, and how and when they were used.
• Discuss the history and usage of America’s most important and problematic race-related terminology. This includes how to use these terms appropriately in programs and exhibit labels.
• Learn about the development of racial ideologies in America and how that impacts the work of front-line interpreters and museums as a whole today.
• Gain or refine race dialogue strategies with colleagues from around New England.
• Draft and practice leading a brief tour or program on the racial history of your site. Receive real-time feedback on your draft.
• Receive immediate feedback on your ideas or current projects from local experts and new colleagues during the unconference.
• Locate local resources including interpreters, trainers, scholars, and books to help you or your organization progress in your work interpreting the racial history of New England.

The conference program is still in development. The host committee invites proposals for panels and sessions that address these topics:

• Creating or leading programs on slavery or local racial narratives for kids and teens
• Exhibiting artifacts related to the slave trade
• Strategies for partnering with descendants, local communities, neighbors/property owners, other institutions or across racial lines
• Attracting new audiences
• Other ways to help museums, historic houses or independent tour guides improve the way they engage New England’s history of slavery and/or Black and Indigenous narratives

The deadline for making a proposal is 20 February. Submit proposals through this site or by email to info@cfrri.org. Panelists will receive half-off admission to the workshop.

There will also be “unconference” sessions in the afternoons. Those are scheduled but informal discussions on such topics as “frustrating visitor comments, problematic objects, confusing terminology, thorny questions, ‘Aha’ moments, big discoveries and fresh research.” A week before the event, registered attendees will be invited by email to propose topics for an unconference session.

The scheduled speakers include:

• Elon Cook Lee, Program Director and curator for the Center for Reconciliation, a consultant on interpreting slavery and race for historic sites around the country.
• Joanne Pope Melish, Ph.D., author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. 
• Marjory O’Toole, Managing Director of the Little Compton Historical Society.
• Maria Madison, Ph.D., Board President and co-founder of the Robbins House in Concord, Massachusetts, and Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at Brandeis University.

The workshops will take place inside the Cathedral of St. John on North Main Street in Providence. A box lunch option will be available. Additional information about the event, including information on scholarships for people who could not attend otherwise, can be found on the Eventbrite page.

(The picture above shows Elizabeth Freeman, also called “Mumbet,” a crucial figure in the ending of legal slavery in Massachusetts.)

Reviews of American Revolutions

Probably the biggest Revolutionary War book out this year, in terms of its scope and the professional status of its author, is Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. Here are extracts from four reviews I’ve seen.

Matthew Price in the Boston Globe:

Stretching from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, Taylor’s account proceeds chronologically through a series of themed chapters (“Colonies,” “Partisans,” “Slaves,” and so on) showcasing the author’s mastery of the period. He has synthesized work old and new, especially scholarship from the last 30 years that reflects his interest in Native American history and the role of slaves and women in the period. . . .

The last third of Taylor’s book details the political maneuvering that followed the peace settlements of 1783. There was little unanimity in what course to follow, and the new nation’s leaders were bedeviled by the same problems that proved unmanageable to British authorities. For one, to pay off war debts, they had to enforce higher taxes. (Loyalists, the so-called losers of the war, enjoyed lighter taxes in Canada, where the British instituted reforms to show up the upstart republic to the south. There is a suggestion throughout that the empire, typically caricatured as tyrannical, was more enlightened than its rebel offspring.)

Eric Herschthal at Slate:

As long ago as the Progressive era, historians argued that the Founding Fathers’ war against Britain was waged not for lofty democratic ideals but rather to suit their own material interests. In recent decades, academic historians have exposed the critical role women, blacks, and Native Americans played in the War of Independence, as well as the larger imperial struggles of which the Revolution was just a bit part. In American Revolutions Taylor synthesizes this more recent scholarship but astutely combines it with the Progressive-era argument about the way the Founding Fathers manipulated populist anger to their own ends. Written with remarkable clarity and finesse, this will be the gold standard by which all future histories of the period will be compared. . . .

Taylor rightly underscores that slavery—its protection and extension—was a central fact of the Revolution and its aftermath. But he tends to downplay the simultaneous restructuring of black life that happened in the war’s wake. As he notes, enslaved blacks in the North, often with the help of white allies, petitioned their new state governments to ban slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, enslaved in Massachusetts, used the new state constitution’s language, which stated that “All men are born free and equal,” to sue for and win her freedom in 1781. Her victory set the precedent that abolished slavery in Massachusetts, and by the end of the century, all the Northern states would abolish slavery. In focusing on the contradictions, indeed the hypocrisies, of the white Patriot elite, Taylor inadvertently overshadows this quieter revolution in freedom that that was growing up alongside it. The truth is that when we talk about liberty and equality for all today, we mean it in the way these black founders meant it, not the Patriot elite. It is a point worth emphasizing.

Brendan Simms in the Wall Street Journal:

Britain’s attempt to tax the North American settlers without their consent did indeed play a major role in the rise of a revolutionary spirit, but so did the western question, too often overlooked in its full significance. Building on recent work by historians such as François Furstenberg and Paul Mapp, Mr. Taylor places the 13 colonies within a “continental” context, in which the French most of all—but also the Spanish, the Russians (briefly) and of course Native American tribes—battled with British colonists for supremacy in the vast territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. . . .

What infuriated the settlers, as much as London’s proposed taxes, was the British government’s determination not to provoke the French and Spanish or the Indians. The policy was encapsulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade the colonists to move beyond the Appalachians. The British settlers perceived that some of the money extracted from them by the crown would be used to enforce this line of demarcation.

Insult was added to injury when London tried to appease the Catholic French-speaking colonists of Canada by awarding them considerable autonomy through the Quebec Act of 1774. This law horrified the colonists not only because it promoted the toleration of Roman Catholicism (inherently tyrannical, in their view) but also because it awarded a vast tranche of the western lands to the province of Quebec. In effect, though Mr. Taylor does not quite put it this way, the colonists were threatened by ideological and geopolitical encirclement. Mr. Taylor rightly speaks of the revolution having “western roots”: The imperial crisis was a product of “western land as well as eastern taxes.”

The 1763 Proclamation was not a big issue here in New England because New York (and, for Connecticut, northern Pennsylvania) already claimed the land to the west. But the Quebec Act was a very big deal, given the region’s fundamental anti-Catholicism. Which makes the pivot to the French alliance all the more striking.

Gordon Wood in the New York Times Book Review:

In a prodigious display of historical research, Taylor has drawn on nearly a thousand books and articles, listed in his 55-page bibliography. Because he has expanded the chronology of the Revolution into the 19th century and has included so much beyond the well-known headline events, he has some difficulty fitting everything in. He often packs so many incidents into each paragraph, with actions succeeding and crowding in upon one another, that there is no space to expand and develop any one of them. Consequently, they tend to get bunched up and leveled, and the narrative often comes to seem unusually compressed and flattened.

Insofar as anything is highlighted in Taylor’s narrative, it is the many Patriot hypocrisies and contradictions. Southerners, Taylor suggests, engaged in the Revolution principally to protect their property in enslaved Africans, but “implausibly blamed the persistence of slavery on the British.” The Patriots’ talk of liberty was very limited. They “defended freedom for white men while asserting their domination over enslaved blacks.” Occasionally the Patriots were not very patriotic. Following the surrender of the American forces trying to take Quebec in 1775, “a quarter of the captured Patriots switched sides to enlist with the British.”

Sometimes Taylor’s emphasis on irony and contradiction slips into anachronism. Because the colonial legislatures denied women, free blacks and propertyless white males the vote, he concludes that “colonial America was a poor place to look for democracy.” But where in the 18th century was there a better place to look for democracy? Despite restrictions on the suffrage, the colonies still possessed the most democratic governments in the world at that time.

But isn’t the question whether the state and national governments that followed the American Revolution were more democratic? Or were they just better designed to serve the “ordinary white men” whose “bad behavior” Wood says Taylor emphasizes?

Mum Bett Presentations at Royall House, 31 May

On Saturday, 31 May, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford will host two performances of “One Minute’s Freedom: The Story of Mum Bett” by storyteller Tammy Denease.

This presentation introduces children aged seven and up to Elizabeth Freeman, a woman who helped end slavery in Massachusetts by suing for her freedom in 1781. Her lawyer was Theodore Sedgewick (1746-1813), and she worked for him after becoming free. In 1853 Bentley’s Miscellany published an essay by his daughter Catherine Sedgewick which described Freeman this way:

Mum-Bett’s character was composed of few but strong elements. Action was the law of her nature, and conscious of superiority to all around her, she felt servitude intolerable. It was not the work—work was play to her. Her power of execution was marvellous. Nor was it awe of her kind master, or fear of her despotic mistress, but it was the galling of the harness, the irresistible longing for liberty. I have heard her say, with an emphatic shake of the head peculiar to her: “Any time, any time 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 airth a free woman—I would.”

It was soon after the close of the revolutionary war, that she chanced at the village “meeting house,” in Sheffield, to hear the Declaration of Independence read. She went the next day to the office of Mr. Theodore Sedgewick, then in the beginning of his honourable political and legal career. “Sir,” said she, “I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, ‘all men are born equal,[’] and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?” I can imagine her upright form, as she stood dilating with her fresh hope based on the declaration of an intrinsic, inalienable right. Such a resolve as hers is like God’s messengers—wind, snow, and hail— irresistible.

This program about Freeman is supported by Historic New England and the Medford Arts Council. The performances will start at 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. and last about 45 minutes. The mansion and slave quarters will be open to visitors in between. Admission is free, but registration is required; email Programs@RoyallHouse.org for tickets.