A dirt road cuts through the Vermont hills, and a woman stands before a panel of men who own the language of the law. She has come to argue.
It is 1785.
She does not just recall a night of terror. She holds in memory the raid at Deerfield in 1746, when Abenaki fighters struck the meadow and killed her neighbors, and she shapes that memory into verse that outlasts every official record of the day.
She does not just marry a free Black man in colonial Massachusetts. She joins her life to a landholder, moves with him to a frontier town in what would become Vermont, and builds a household on ground where few expected a Black family to hold title at all.
She does not just quarrel with a hostile neighbor over a boundary. She carries the dispute forward when a powerful local family tried to seize the family’s land, pressing the matter until it reached, by accounts long repeated, the highest court she could reach.
She does not just speak for herself before authority. She reportedly argued a case before the United States Supreme Court, or before its justices riding circuit, and, by a story long told though not fully documented, out-reasoned the trained attorney set against her.
Her Spark of Liberty was a voice that refused the boundary drawn around it.
The land quarrels of her later years were not abstractions. They were fences, deeds, and men who assumed a Black woman would yield. She did not yield. Whether every detail of the courtroom legend holds up under scrutiny is uncertain, and honest history admits as much. What is not uncertain is that she spent decades insisting her family’s claim was as real as any white neighbor’s, and that she made her insistence heard in rooms built to exclude her.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
She was born around 1730 in West Africa and carried into slavery as a child. She was brought to Rhode Island and then to Deerfield, Massachusetts, where a man named Ebenezer Wells held her in bondage. She was baptized in 1735 during the religious revivals of that era. In 1746 she witnessed the aftermath of an Abenaki raid on Deerfield, and she composed a ballad about it titled “Bars Fight,” a poem describing the killing of settlers in a meadow section locals called “the bars.” The poem survived by oral transmission for roughly a century before it was printed in 1855, and it is often cited as the earliest known work of literature by an African American.
She gained her freedom and, in 1756, married a free Black man who owned property. The couple settled in Guilford, Vermont, and later in Sunderland. They raised a large family. Records indicate the household faced repeated hostility from white neighbors, including one incident in which their farm was attacked. She is said to have appealed directly to Vermont’s governor and council when the courts moved too slowly for her.
She became known for a land dispute against a neighboring family, the Nobles, over property lines. According to accounts repeated by later writers, the matter reached the courts and she argued it herself. A separate and much-repeated tradition holds that she petitioned Williams College to admit her son and was refused, and that she later argued a land case before the United States Supreme Court, where a justice praised her argument above that of the opposing lawyer. These claims rest largely on nineteenth-century recollection rather than on surviving court transcripts, and scholars have cautioned that some details may be embellished. What the documentary record does support is a woman who repeatedly entered legal and public arenas to defend her family and her property in an age that granted her almost no standing.
She lived into old age in Vermont. Her husband died in 1794. She reportedly rode on horseback each year to visit his grave. She died in 1821, and a local paper noted her passing with unusual respect for a Black woman of that time.
Her name was Lucy Terry Prince.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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