Mum Bett, born a slave around 1748, was owned by Dutchman Pieter Hogeboom in Claverack, New York. In 1781, while the American Revolution was still being fought, Bett was a domestic slave in the household of Hogeboom's daughter, who had married John Ashley, a prominent judgeand patriot in Sheffield, Massachusetts. While working in the Ashley house and serving refreshments at political meetings held there, Bett was moved by the principles of the equality of man she heard the patriots discussing.
One day early in 1781,Bett left the Ashley home and went to the office of Theodore Sedgwiick, a young lawyer whom she had seen at many of the meetings. Bett asked him to sue for her freedom. Since Bett could neither read or write, Sedgwick asked her how she came to believe she should be free. She replied, "By keepin' still and mindin' things." When Bett was waiting on tables, she had overheard gentlemen discussing the Bill of Rights and the new constitution of Massachusetts. In all they said she "never heard but that all people were born equal, and she thought long about it, and resolved she would try whether she did not come in among them."
Even though Sedgwick and Ashley were friends, and Sedgwick argued cases in Ashley's court, Sedgwick took Bett's case. His suit was reported to have been based on two arguments: that there was no Massachusetts law that ever established slavery; and "that such laws, even if they had existed, were annulled by the new Constitution." The jury found in favor of Bett, andf she was given her freedom. Ashley appealed but dropped the appeal a few months later when the supreme court ruled in another case that slavery was unconstitutional in Massachusetts.
Bet changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman and worked for the rest of her life as a paid domestic in Sedgwick's household, where she was a beloved member of the family. They moved to Stockbridge in 1785, and it was there she died, to be buried in the innermost circle of the Sedgwick plot, the only black person in the Stockbridge cemetery.
"Civil War Cards", Stephen T. Foster, 1963 Atlas Editions, USA
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