She Took the Blow — Elizabeth Freeman
The shovel comes off the hearth red-hot. The mistress of the house is reaching for her sister, and there is a moment — a fraction of a second — when a woman who has been enslaved in this household for thirty years steps between them and takes the burn on her own forearm. She wears the scar for the rest of her life. When lawyers later ask her how she came to believe she had a right to be free, she shows it to them.
It is 1780.
She does not just hear the words. She hears the Massachusetts Constitution read aloud in the Ashley parlor — all men are born free and equal — and she understands that the men who wrote those words did not mean her, and she decides that they should have.
She does not just think about it. She walks out of the Ashley household, walks to the office of the attorney Theodore Sedgwick in Sheffield, and asks him whether those words apply to her — knowing that no enslaved person in Massachusetts has yet asked a court that question and received an answer.
She does not just file a lawsuit. She goes into the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas as co-plaintiff alongside a man named Brom, faces the man who has owned her for thirty years across a courtroom, and on August 21, 1781, the jury rules that the Constitution of Massachusetts ends his claim on both of them, and awards each of them thirty shillings damages.
She does not just win her freedom. She works for forty-six more years as a paid housekeeper in the Sedgwick household, raises her daughter, saves her wages, and when she dies in 1829, the family buries her inside the Sedgwick family plot, the only person there who is not a Sedgwick by blood — a statement, in stone, about what they believed she was worth.
Her Spark of Liberty was the decision to make the words mean what they said.
She could not read. She could not write. She had heard the Constitution once, in a parlor where she was not supposed to matter, and she knew immediately that it was either a promise or a lie, and she went to find out which.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born around 1744, enslaved from childhood in the household of Colonel John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts, she was known as Bett, and later as Mum Bett — Mum being a Massachusetts honorific, the community’s mark of respect for an older woman, not a diminutive and not a slave name. According to the Sedgwick family account, she intervened when Mrs. Ashley raised a heated kitchen shovel toward her younger sister, taking the burn on her own forearm. She engaged attorney Theodore Sedgwick and co-counsel Tapping Reeve, joined a co-plaintiff named Brom in the case that bore both their names, and won her freedom in Berkshire County Court in August 1781. The 1783 ruling in Commonwealth v. Jennison by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court formally ended slavery throughout the state, building on the foundation her case had laid. After her freedom she chose the name Elizabeth Freeman. She died on December 28, 1829, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Her name was Elizabeth Freeman.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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