The enslaved man whose lawsuit removed the law from beneath slavery in Massachusetts.
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. Quock Walker needs to be remembered.
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On an April morning in 1781, a man walked off a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. He did not run. He walked. He was twenty-eight years old. His name, as the court would later write it, was Quock Walker.
He did not go to the fields of Nathaniel Jennison, who claimed to own him. He went to the farm of Seth and John Caldwell, who had known him since he was a boy. He went to work there for wages, as a free man.
He had been promised his freedom twice. The first promise was made by James Caldwell, who had bought him as an infant in 1754, along with his mother Dinah and his father Mingo. Caldwell said the boy would be free at twenty-five. In July 1763, Caldwell and Mingo were caught outdoors in a thunderstorm. They took shelter under a tree. Lightning struck the tree. The tree fell on both of them. Caldwell was killed. Mingo’s leg was broken. Two years later, Mingo ran. His advertisement for capture was printed in the Boston News-Letter. Quock was twelve.
The widow Isabel Caldwell inherited the family. She made the second promise: freedom at twenty-one. In 1769 she married Nathaniel Jennison. In 1774 she died — months before Quock’s twenty-first birthday. Jennison, who had made the same promise himself before the marriage, kept the boy.
Quock worked for Jennison for seven more years. Then he walked.
The Massachusetts Constitution had been ratified ten months before, in June 1780. John Adams had drafted most of it. Its first article opened with a sentence the framers understood as philosophy and the courts would be forced to read as law: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”
Nothing in the document said slavery was abolished. Nothing said it was permitted. Slavery in Massachusetts had never been enacted as law. It had simply been practiced. It survived as custom, as property claim, as old colonial tolerance. By 1780 it stood beside a constitution that declared the opposite. Someone would have to make the two face each other.
Jennison tracked Walker to the Caldwell farm the same day. He arrived with two other men, carrying a stick. He pinned Walker to the ground and beat him. One of the Caldwell brothers, working in a nearby field, heard what he later described as a screaming. He came out and found Walker held down. The men took Walker away and locked him in a sawmill. Hours later, Caldwell found him, insisted the promise of freedom had been made, and got him released.
Walker did not run again. He sued.
His attorneys were Levi Lincoln and Caleb Strong. Lincoln would later serve as Attorney General of the United States under Thomas Jefferson. Strong would later serve as Governor of Massachusetts. They filed an assault and battery suit in the Worcester County Court of Common Pleas. The question before the jury was not whether Walker had been beaten. Everyone agreed he had been beaten. The question was whether he could be beaten.
The jury answered in June 1781. Its verdict used three words that had never appeared together in a Massachusetts courtroom on behalf of a Black man held in bondage: “Quork is a Freeman.” Walker was awarded fifty pounds.
Jennison countersued the Caldwell brothers for enticing his property away. He won twenty-five pounds in the lower court. On appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court that September, Levi Lincoln spoke to the jury about natural law. “Is it not a law of nature that all men are equal and free? Is not the law of nature the law of God?” The jury reversed the verdict.
The third case was criminal. In September 1781 the Attorney General of Massachusetts, Robert Treat Paine — a signer of the Declaration of Independence — indicted Jennison for assault and battery on Quock Walker. The trial came before the Supreme Judicial Court in April 1783. The Chief Justice was William Cushing, who would later sit on the first United States Supreme Court.
Cushing’s charge to the jury has survived in his own handwriting, in a notebook now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. He told the jurors that the doctrine of slavery — “the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle” — had been countenanced by old provincial law, but had “nowhere” been expressly enacted. It was “a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations.” A different idea, he said, had taken hold in America. The Constitution of the Commonwealth, he read out, declared all men born free and equal, and was “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.”
Then he wrote the sentence that settled it. “There can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract.”
The jury convicted. Jennison was fined forty shillings.
No statute was passed. The Massachusetts legislature did not abolish slavery in 1783, or in 1784, or in any year after. It would not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1865. The Massachusetts Constitution itself was not amended. What the Walker cases did was quieter and more final than any of that. They made slavery unenforceable in court.
After 1783, a Massachusetts enslaver who tried to recover a runaway risked criminal prosecution for assault. A Massachusetts enslaver who sued for return of “property” risked a jury declaring the property a free man. The cases did not abolish slavery by proclamation. They removed the law from beneath it.
Elizabeth Freeman — Mum Bett — had won her own freedom suit in Great Barrington two months before Walker’s first verdict, on the same constitutional argument. Her enslaver, John Ashley, appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, then dropped the appeal shortly after the ruling in Jennison v. Caldwell. He had read the court. So had every other enslaver in the Commonwealth.
Slavery did not end that week, or that year. Some enslavers kept holding the people they had held, recast now as indentured servants. Some manumitted formally and paid wages. Some did nothing, and watched the people they claimed simply walk off. The 1790 federal census recorded zero enslaved persons in Massachusetts. It was the first state in the Union to return that count.
Of Walker himself, almost nothing is known after the trials. He worked, probably for the Caldwells, probably for wages. He died sometime before 1810. No portrait of him survives. No letters. No diary. The surviving record of his voice is the court papers and the words a jury wrote about him: Quork is a Freeman.
The case is one of the earliest American instances of a written constitution being applied by a court to strike at an established practice. It came twenty years before Marbury v. Madison. It came not from a legal theorist but from a man who had been beaten in a sawmill and refused to accept that the beating was lawful.
Slavery in Massachusetts had never been enacted. It had only been practiced. The Revolution produced a document that named the contradiction. Walker forced the court to face it. Cushing ruled that custom cannot outrank a constitution that says otherwise.
He was courageous not in the way of soldiers. He was courageous in the way of plaintiffs. He walked off a farm, took a beating, and made the Commonwealth of Massachusetts answer in open court whether its Revolution meant what it said.
It did.
Barely.
And only because he asked.
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Sources: Chief Justice William Cushing’s judicial notebook, circa 1783, held by the Massachusetts Historical Society; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 13 (1875); John D. Cushing, “The Cushing Court and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts: More Notes on the ‘Quock Walker Case,’” American Journal of Legal History 5, no. 2 (April 1961); Robert M. Spector, “The Quock Walker Cases (1781–83) — Slavery, its Abolition, and Negro Citizenship in Early Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History 53, no. 1 (January 1968); Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25 (1968); Massachusetts Historical Society, “African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts” digital collection.
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Next in this series: Phillis Wheatley — the enslaved poet who wrote to the Generalissimo.
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About the Author. Charles C. Jett is a writer, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach. He publishes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com, and hosts three podcast series: Making a Great America, Jefferson-Adams Letters, and It’s All About Skills. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke! and A Republic at Risk.
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