Longing for liberty

In the years after the American Revolution, the words equality and liberty were on the lips of people everywhere as newly minted states wrote them large in their constitutions.

No one understood the words better than Mum Bett, a woman enslaved to a Massachusetts judge. She heard the judge and his friends discussing the new state constitution and she took note of their words: All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights. She took the words so seriously that in 1781 she walked out of her slaveholder’s home, and she took those words to court.

In what was to be the first legal test of slavery in America, Mum Bett and her attorney found the courts “willing to consider that …slaves might be free and thus entitled to the same legal rights as anyone else,” according to the book “Written out of history: The
forgotten founders who fought big government” by Mike Lee.

The jury of Massachusetts citizens agreed with Mum Bett.

Mum Bett won the case plus damages. She walked in the world as a free woman. She immediately changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman. She then accepted a paid position as a housekeeper and nanny for her lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, where she worked until she retired to her own home, bought and paid for with wages earned from her work.

Reflecting later on her life, Freeman said, “Anytime, anytime while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it, just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman, I would.”

In 1829, Elizabeth Freeman died free in her own home and was buried in the Sedgwick family plot.