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 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.