Freeman, Elizabeth

Source:

 African American National Biography

Freeman, Elizabeth

(c. 1744–28 Dec. 1829),

civil rights litigant, known as Mum Bett, was born a slave in Claverack, New York, most likely to African parents. Mum Bett and her sister were owned by the Dutch Hogeboom family in Claverack. At an uncertain date, the sisters were sold to the family of John Ashley, a judge in the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas and a prominent citizen of Sheffield, Massachusetts. Little is known about Mum Bett's life with the Ashleys, but it probably resembled the life of many northern slaves during the eighteenth century. Most slaves lived in small households in close proximity to their owners and performed a wide range of tasks to support the North's diversified economy.

Mum Bett's decision to sue for freedom was sparked by an incident of cruelty that is prominent in accounts of her life. When her mistress, Hannah Ashley, struck Mum Bett's sister “in a fit of passion” with a heated shovel, Mum Bett interposed and was struck instead. She “received the blow; and bore the honorable scar it left to the day of her death” (Swan, 52). After the incident, Mum Bett left the Ashleys and refused to return. John Ashley—who had, ironically, chaired the committee that drafted the 1773 Sheffield Declaration, which resolved that “Mankind in a State of Nature are equal, free and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed Enjoyment of their lives, their Liberty and Property”—appealed to the law for the return of his slave, Mum Bett.

Elizabeth Freeman. Watercolor portrait on ivory by Susan Anne Sedgwick, 1811. Sedgwick was a daughter of the lawyer who represented Freeman before the Massachusetts state supreme court in a case that significantly diminished the practice and effects of slavery in Massachusetts. (Massachusetts Historical Society.)

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Instead of returning to the Ashleys, Mum Bett approached Theodore Sedgwick Sr., a lawyer she may have first met when he was working with Ashley on the Sheffield Declaration. Mum Bett convinced Sedgwick to represent her in suing for her freedom. Massachusetts's newly enacted 1780 state constitution had declared all men born free and equal, Mum Bett reasoned, and so her bondage must be illegal. Sedgwick agreed to take the case, which was joined by a man named Brom, another of Ashley's slaves. When curious interviewers subsequently asked her how she had arrived at that premise, perhaps presuming wrongly that an illiterate slave would not have any legal knowledge, she is reported to have said, “By keepin' still and mindin' things.” By this she meant “when she was waiting at table, she heard gentlemen talking over the Bill of Rights and the new constitution of Massachusetts; and in all they said she never heard but that all people were born free and equal, and she thought long about it, and resolved she would try whether she did not come in among them” (Kaplan, 244). In this way Mum Bett, like many African Americans, was capitalizing on the hard-won knowledge she acquired as an exploited worker. On her own initiative, this northern workingwoman tested Massachusetts's state constitution by claiming that its theory of men's equality made slavery illegal.

Sedgwick won the case, Brom and Bett v. J. Ashley Esq., in 1781. A state court granted Mum Bett and Brom their freedom and required Ashley to pay them thirty shillings in damages. The case was subsequently hailed as a precedent-setting, landmark civil rights decision that helped diminish the practice and effects of slavery in Massachusetts, though scholars are quick to point out that technically speaking, slavery was not abolished in the state until 1866. At the time of the suit, Mum Bett is believed to have been the widow of a Revolutionary War veteran and the mother of one daughter, called Little Bett. After gaining her freedom, Mum Bett gave herself the surname “Freeman.” The case brought Freeman and Sedgwick, who later became a judge and a senator, notoriety in their day and linked their names for posterity.

After the ruling, Freeman went to work for the Sedgwicks. Consequently, the most documented period of her life is the time she worked for this prominent New England family. Freeman was remembered fondly, if somewhat paternalistically, by the Sedgwick children, Theodore Sedgwick Jr. and his sister, the writer Catherine Maria Sedgwick, for her skilled nursing, her long tenure as the family's loyal and faithful servant, and her spirited defense of the family's property during Shays's Rebellion in 1786. Freeman is buried in the Sedgwick family plot. Her tombstone reads, “She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell.” Freeman inspired admiration from the family for her independent spirit. As Theodore Sedgwick Jr. related during an 1831 abolitionist speech in which he invoked Freeman's experience, “If there could be a practical refutation of the imagined superiority of our race to hers, the life and character of this woman would afford that refutation…. She had nothing of the submissive or subdued character, which succumbs to superior force…. On the contrary, … she uniformly … obtained an ascendancy over all those with whom she was associated in service” (Kaplan, 246).

Freeman is one of the most visible exemplars of often invisible, illiterate African Americans who contributed to black communities' challenges to racial inequality in the early republic. Their courageous efforts occurred well before the more famous ones of nineteenth-century black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Though relatively little is known about Elizabeth Freeman, parallels exist between her life and that of Truth, another northern black workingwoman. As an impecunious former slave, before becoming renowned as an abolitionist, Truth did not hesitate to appeal to the courts for the return of her illegally sold son, despite her unlettered and lowly social status. In this way, Truth followed in Freeman's footsteps, both of them exemplifying a tradition of overlooked African American women who fearlessly claimed their inheritance of liberty as civic participants and contributors to national life.

Freeman eventually left the Sedgwicks' employ and became a sought-after nurse and midwife. She lived with her daughter in a house next door to the Revolutionary War veteran Agrippa Hull. Elizabeth Freeman died a freewoman in 1829. Nearly forty years after Freeman's death, W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the town where Mum Bett's historic case was argued. Indeed, Mum Bett was the the second wife of Du Bois's great-grandfather, Jacob Burghardt. Du Bois's direct line of descent was through Jacob's first wife Violet.

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