An enslaved woman in Massachusetts heard words of freedom read aloud, walked to a lawyer, and changed the law.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
She could not read the words. She heard them.
It was 1780. A public official in Sheffield, Massachusetts, stood in the town square and read aloud from the new state constitution. Among the gathered was an enslaved woman named Bett — property of Colonel John Ashley. She had worked in the Ashley house for nearly thirty years. She cleaned and cooked and sewed and served. She had raised the Ashley children, nursed their ailing mother, and trained the younger slaves who came after her. She heard everything that was said in that house. She had been hearing it for decades.
What she heard that day in the square changed the course of Massachusetts law.
THE PERSON
Bett was born around 1744 in Claverack, New York, to enslaved parents on the farm of Pieter Hogeboom. When Hogeboom’s daughter Hannah married Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Bett and her younger sister Lizzie were given to the couple as wedding property. Ashley was a man of standing — a judge of the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas, a civic figure whose dinner table drew the prominent minds of western Massachusetts.
Hannah Ashley was another matter. She was hard, impatient, quick to rage. In 1780, she reached for a heated kitchen shovel to strike a younger servant girl. Bett stepped in front of the blow. The shovel cut her arm to the bone. The wound never fully healed.
Bett left it uncovered. All winter. Wherever she went in the Ashley house, the scar was visible. When guests asked how she had been hurt, she did not look away. “Ask missus,” she said.
This was a woman who understood evidence.
THE CONTEXT
The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 opened with a declaration that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” The framers wrote it as a repudiation of British tyranny. They did not write it as an end to slavery. But the words were the words.
There was an irony working in the Ashley household that is almost too neat to be believed, and it is entirely true. Colonel Ashley had moderated the local committee that drafted the Sheffield Declaration of 1773 — a precursor document with nearly identical language: “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent.” That language migrated into the Declaration of Independence and then into the Massachusetts Constitution. Bett had listened to those men argue over those words in the rooms she cleaned and the meals she served.
She was not literate. She was not ignorant.
THE DECISION
The day after she heard the constitution read aloud in the square, Bett walked to the office of Theodore Sedgwick, a Stockbridge attorney who had attended Ashley’s meetings and helped draft the Sheffield Declaration himself. She told him what she had heard. She told him what she understood.
“I heard that paper read yesterday, that says all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom,” she said. “I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?”
Sedgwick took the case. He enlisted Tapping Reeve, founder of what would become the first law school in America, at Litchfield, Connecticut. He added another Ashley slave, a man named Brom, to strengthen the suit — women had limited legal standing, and he knew it. Together they filed Brom and Bett v. Ashley in the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas in May 1781. The argument was not complicated. It was radical.
Thirty prior freedom suits in Massachusetts had argued on technicalities — a mother’s ambiguous legal status, a broken promise of manumission. Sedgwick’s argument was simpler and more devastating: Bett and Brom were owed freedom because the constitution said all people were free. Not free people. Not certain people. All people.
Colonel Ashley refused to comply with the initial court order. The case advanced to the County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington. On August 21, 1781, both sides argued before a jury of white male landowners. The jury deliberated one day.
On August 22, 1781, they agreed with Bett.
THE AFTERMATH
Colonel Ashley appealed the verdict. Then he dropped the appeal. Two months after Bett’s ruling, a freedom suit in Worcester County cited her case as precedent. Chief Justice William Cushing, presiding over the Quock Walker appeals in 1783, charged the jury that the Massachusetts Constitution had made slavery unconstitutional from the moment of its ratification. No court in the Commonwealth would thereafter defend a slaveholder’s claim. By 1790, the federal census recorded no enslaved people in Massachusetts.
Bett did not wait to see any of that. She had already made two decisions. The first was to sue. The second was what to do after she won.
Colonel Ashley offered her paid work in his household. She refused. She took paid work in the Sedgwick home instead, and she brought her daughter with her. She chose a new name: Elizabeth Freeman. The name she had been born with had been property. She would have one she had earned.
She became the senior servant in the Sedgwick house — governess, nurse, keeper of the household. Catharine Sedgwick, Theodore’s daughter and later a prominent novelist, grew up in Freeman’s care. She wrote that Freeman was “the main pillar of the household” and the only person capable of calming Pamela Sedgwick in her worst hours of mental illness — treating her, Catharine noted, with the same dignity she showed when Pamela was well. Freeman had learned folk medicine in the Ashley house. She carried it forward.
In 1786, followers of Shays’ Rebellion came to the Sedgwick home in Stockbridge. Theodore was away. Freeman took the family silver and locked it in her own chest of drawers. She led the men from room to room until they reached her chest. She dared them to open it. “Ah, Sam Cooper,” she told the leader — a man she recognized — “you and your fellows are no better than I thought you. You call me ‘wench’ and ‘nigger,’ and you are not above rummaging my chest.” The man, Catharine Sedgwick later wrote, “turned and slunk away like a whipped cur.”
After twenty-two years of saving, Freeman purchased her own house and land. She worked as a midwife and healer throughout Stockbridge. At her death on December 28, 1829, she was the second-wealthiest Black landowner in the area, leaving an estate of nineteen acres, furniture, jewelry, and fine clothing. She was buried in the inner circle of the Sedgwick family plot — the only non-family member accorded that place. Her gravestone was marble.
She dictated her will before she died. She could not write her name. She signed it with a cross.
THE MEANING
The gravestone reads: “She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal.” It was written by people who loved her, and it is true as far as it goes. But there is something more precise to say.
Elizabeth Freeman was illiterate. She was not uninformed. She had spent thirty years in a house where powerful men argued about the meaning of freedom, and she had listened to every word. When she walked to Sedgwick’s office, she did not ask for charity. She did not ask for mercy. She asked for the law to mean what it said.
That is a different kind of literacy.
The Massachusetts Constitution did not mention slavery. Its framers did not intend the equal-rights clause to abolish the institution. But Bett heard the words and drew the conclusion the framers either could not see or would not say — and a court agreed. The precedent held. The institution fell. Not all at once, and not everywhere, but in Massachusetts it fell, and it fell on the argument that one enslaved woman carried from a public square to a lawyer’s door.
She could not read the document. She understood it better than the men who wrote it.
* * * * *
Sources: Brom and Bett v. Ashley (1781), court records available through Massachusetts Archives and Digital Commonwealth; Massachusetts Historical Society, “The Legal End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” including the Catharine Maria Sedgwick manuscript “Mumbett” (1853) and miniature portrait by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick (1811); National Women’s History Museum, “Elizabeth Freeman” (2019); National Constitution Center, “Elizabeth Freeman, Her Case for Freedom, and the Massachusetts Constitution”; Mass.gov, “Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery.”
Next in this series: Robert Yates & John Lansing Jr. — The Walkout Letter: We Lacked Authority for This
About the Author
Charles C. Jett is an author, executive coach, and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) based in Chicago. A Naval Academy graduate and Harvard MBA, he is the creator of the Eight Critical Skills framework and the Field Studies educational methodology endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor and Harvard. He has published six books and 800+ blog posts, and hosts three podcasts: Making a Great America, Jefferson-Adams Letters, and It’s All About Skills. His platforms are criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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