In the summer of 1781, a woman who could not read a single word of the Massachusetts Constitution stood before a lawyer and demanded to know if its promises applied to her. She had heard that a paper had been written declaring all men born free and equal, and she wanted to know whether the law would give her freedom. The lawyer was Theodore Sedgwick, a young man who had once drafted a declaration of natural rights in the very house where she was enslaved. The woman was Elizabeth Freeman, known to most as Bett, and she was about to do something no enslaved woman in Massachusetts had ever dared.
She was going to sue her master. Born into slavery in the mid-1740s, possibly in the spring of 1744, Elizabeth Freeman entered a world that had no place for her in its records. Her exact birthplace is uncertain, though some suggest she was born in New York State. She grew up on the plantation farm of Peter Hogeboom at Claverack, in what is now Columbia County.
Hogeboom belonged to a Dutch family that had settled in the region during the mid-17th century, when New York was still the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In those early years she was called Bett, almost certainly a shortening of Elizabeth. The farm was home to many enslaved people, including her sister Lizzie. Like most enslaved children of the eighteenth century, Bett never knew the identities of her parents, and it is unclear whether they remained on the same estate.
She never learned to read or write, and the early years of her life left no written record. All that is known of her story comes from later years, after she forced herself into the public eye through a legal battle that would change the laws of her state. In the early 1750s, Peter Hogeboom’s daughter Hannah married Colonel John Ashley, a prominent figure in the town of Sheffield, Massachusetts. Bett was sent to live with Hannah as a household slave.
She may have been only seven or eight years old. The world she entered can still be seen today, because the house Colonel Ashley built in 1735 survives and is now a museum. It is a two-and-a-half-story building with many rooms, considered a very large country house by the standards of the mid-eighteenth century. Bett’s life there centered on keeping the house clean, washing clothes, and performing the arduous manual labor that consumed far more time in an age before washing machines and other modern conveniences.
In the Ashley household, Bett quickly proved she was not intimidated by those who held her in bondage. Later accounts describe Hannah Ashley as harsh. One famous story claims that Hannah grabbed a heated shovel to strike Bett’s sister Lizzie, who had also been sent to live in the Ashley house. Before the blow could land, Bett stepped in and blocked it.
The heated metal inflicted a deep wound that left a sizable scar. Rather than hiding it, Bett displayed it openly for the rest of her life, a silent accusation to every visitor that Mrs. Ashley was cruel to her slaves. During those years, Bett also became a mother.
The identity of her child’s father remains uncertain, but tradition holds that he left to serve in the American Revolutionary War and never returned. While men marched to fight for liberty, Bett remained in bondage, raising a child in a world that denied her even the most basic claim to freedom. But in Sheffield, words were being written that would soon make that contradiction impossible to ignore. Bett grew to adulthood in an era of immense change across North America.
While living in the Ashley household, she would have heard constant talk of the long war with the French that raged from 1754 to 1763. That conflict ended with Britain seizing control of New France, the territory now known as Canada, while Massachusetts remained under British rule. She would also have heard the growing anger voiced by John Ashley and the guests who gathered in his home as they complained about the rising taxes imposed by the British Crown on Massachusetts and the other twelve colonies stretching from New Hampshire to Georgia. In January 1773, when Bett was probably nearing her thirtieth year, a large group of Massachusetts landholders gathered at the Ashley house in Sheffield.
They met to draft what became known as the Sheffield Declaration. Each protested against what they saw as growing British tyranny in the colonies and stated 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. Thomas Jefferson would later paraphrase those words when he wrote the Declaration of Independence three years afterward. In a significant development, it appears that a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick drafted most of the Sheffield Declaration during the meeting at the Ashley house.
He would feature again in Bett’s story before long. If Bett heard anything about the declaration drafted in the Ashley house, she could not have missed the irony. Men who claimed all were entitled to liberty and natural rights wrote those soaring phrases while keeping her in chains beneath the same roof. The language of freedom echoed through the halls, but it did not include her.
Not yet. The Sheffield Declaration was a major event in the lead-up to the American Revolutionary War. The Boston Tea Party took place on the other side of Massachusetts in December 1773. A deteriorating political situation followed, leading to the outbreak of war in the spring of 1775.
The Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, and a bitter war followed. The Americans had won by 1781, and Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States of America in 1783. As part of the creation of the new federal state, Massachusetts drew up its own state constitution in 1780. Within it was a passage that echoed both the Sheffield Declaration and the Declaration of Independence.
It proclaimed that all men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. All of it was building toward a reckoning. Bett would soon turn those lofty promises into a weapon, confront her enslaver, and demand the freedom she had been denied her entire life. In 1781, aware of the wording of the Massachusetts Constitution, Bett sought to petition for her freedom on the basis that the Constitution effectively forbade slavery in the state.
According to a later account, she approached Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who had drafted the Sheffield Declaration back in 1773, and told him that she had heard that paper that very day, which said all men are created equal and that every man has a right to freedom. She insisted she was not a dumb critter, and asked whether the law would give her freedom. Sedgwick’s legacy in the abolitionist movement is mixed, but he did believe that slavery was incompatible with the principles of the new Massachusetts Constitution, and he agreed to take the case. It was not long before he submitted the paperwork on behalf of Bett and another enslaved man in the Ashley household named Brom.
It is said Brom was added to the case to strengthen it, as women had limited legal rights at the time. Thus, in 1781, the case of Brom and Bett versus Ashley was launched in the hope of obtaining their freedom. It would have a huge bearing on Massachusetts law. Proceedings began in the County Court of Common Pleas in the town of Great Barrington in August 1781.
Sedgwick’s co-counsel was Tapping Reeve, founder of the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, one of the earliest law schools in America. Together, the two were considered among the most formidable lawyers in Massachusetts. They argued that the wording of the new state constitution effectively rendered slavery illegal in the state, and that Brom and Bett had to be set free. John Ashley responded that the pair were not slaves but household servants with nowhere else to go, a common argument in cases of this kind in the late eighteenth century.
The court ruled in favor of Brom and Bett. It ordered Ashley not only to release them from bondage but also to pay them compensation for their years of free labor. Bett had done the unthinkable. She had won.
In that moment, she became the first African-American woman to secure her freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution, turning its promise of equality into a living, undeniable fact. After she and Brom won their freedom, they were offered paid positions working in the Ashley house. This was a common situation for many freed slaves in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a great proportion simply swapped being a slave for being a household servant with a small wage. Bett turned the offer down.
Instead, she went to work for Theodore Sedgwick. She would spend over a quarter of a century in the Sedgwick household, becoming a close member of the family and acting as nanny to Theodore and his wife Pamela’s children. It was during this time that the name Mum Bett stuck to her. After winning her freedom in the 1781 court case, she adopted the surname Freeman, and became known forevermore as Elizabeth Freeman.
The use of the name Mum Bett by the Sedgwick children gives a clear idea of how integral a part of the family she became. It is from Catherine Sedgwick, one of Theodore’s daughters who later became a well-known author, that we have received the most detailed accounts of Mum Bett’s life. In 1853, when she was an old woman herself, Catherine wrote a book entitled Slavery in New England, published in Bentley’s Miscellany. Although it cast the institution of slavery in Massachusetts and other northern states in a mild light, it remains a very valuable source for Bett’s life and how she won her freedom.
While Bett was beginning a new life as a free woman in the Sedgwick household, Massachusetts law was being reshaped by her actions. Her case, brought alongside Brom in 1781, was one of several early 1780s lawsuits arguing that slavery had become illegal under the new state constitution of 1780. The others were three separate court cases collectively known as the Quock Walker cases, all involving the same enslaved man called Quackin or Quack Walker. As a result, it became clear even to those who still hoped to preserve slavery in Massachusetts that the institution was living on borrowed time.
In 1783, just two years after Elizabeth’s victory, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared slavery incompatible with the state constitution. When the first federal census was taken in 1790, not a single enslaved person was listed in Massachusetts. Massachusetts thus became one of the first parts of the United States to become a free state, following the Vermont Republic, which as an independent state in 1777 had abolished slavery upon its foundation, and Pennsylvania, which had abolished slavery in 1780. On the other hand, it would be well into the nineteenth century before some northern states like New York abolished slavery.
With her victory, Elizabeth Freeman helped tip the balance of history, turning Massachusetts into one of the only places in the United States where slavery was driven into extinction in the eighteenth century. During the years Elizabeth worked at the Sedgwick house, she had a second profession as a local healer, nurse, and midwife. In the early nineteenth century, she eventually acquired enough money to buy her own house. By then, the Sedgwick children were grown and no longer needed a nanny.
She retired and moved into her own home on Cherry Hill in the town of Stockbridge. Her daughter, who by then had her own children, lived nearby, and Bett spent her later years near to her grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. She lived a long life, dying in Stockbridge in December 1829. Because her exact date of birth is unknown, her precise age cannot be stated, but she was around eighty-five years old at the time of her passing.
She had spent more of her life as a free woman than as a slave. Reflecting on what liberty meant to her, she once declared that anytime while she was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to her and she had been told she must die at the end of that minute, she would have taken it, just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman. She was laid to rest in the Sedgwick family plot in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the only non-Sedgwick buried there, a testament to the place she had earned within the household that once helped her secure her freedom. The family marked her grave with an inscription that read: Elizabeth Freeman, also known by the name of Bett, died December 28th, 1829.
Her supposed age was 85. She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly 30 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. Around the year 1812, one of Theodore’s daughters-in-law, Susan Ridley Sedgwick, painted a delicate watercolor on ivory miniature of Bett when she was about seventy years old.
Preserved today by the Massachusetts Historical Society, it is widely regarded as her only known surviving portrait. In the two centuries since her death, her story has become central to the history of abolition in the United States, a reminder that the promise of freedom was not merely written into law but claimed by those bold enough to demand it. In August 2022, the Sheffield Historical Society unveiled a statue in her honor, recognizing her role in the long march toward freedom. Often described as the Rosa Parks of her time, Elizabeth Freeman’s courage did more than win her own liberty.
It helped ignite a movement that would reshape the nation.
