Em agosto de 1781, uma mulher escravizada chamada Elizabeth Freeman dirigiu-se a um escritório de advocacia perto de sua casa em Sheffield, Massachusetts.
Ela tinha uma questão urgente.
A Guerra da Independência estava chegando ao fim, e as cerca de 700 mil pessoas escravizadas nas colônias ansiavam por testar até onde os ideais dos patriotas poderiam levá-las em direção à liberdade.
Durante décadas, Freeman fora mantida como propriedade de John Ashley, um rico proprietário de terras e oficial da milícia local.
Em 1773, ele havia recebido alguns dos homens mais proeminentes da cidade para redigir um manifesto chamado Declaração de Sheffield.
Seu apelo pela liberdade antecipava a Declaração de Independência.
Muito provavelmente, Freeman ouvira falar em "direitos naturais" na casa de Ashley enquanto recolhia casacos e capas, servia refrescos e avivava o fogo.
Aos domingos, no banco reservado aos negros na igreja, os fiéis cochichavam sobre a possibilidade de que libertar seus senhores da tirania pudesse libertá-los também.
O escritório de advocacia que Freeman procurou naquele dia pertencia a Theodore Sedgwick, que estivera entre os homens reunidos na casa de Ashley para redigir a Declaração de Sheffield.
Ao encontrar Sedgwick, Freeman explicou que queria abrir um processo contra seu proprietário para obrigá-lo a conceder-lhe a liberdade. Ela perguntou: "A lei não me dará a minha liberdade?"
Sedgwick concordou em assumir o caso de Freeman — era hora de testar o alcance dos princípios mais elevados da Revolução.
Freeman foi a primeira mulher escravizada a usar a nova Constituição Estadual como base para reivindicar sua liberdade na justiça.
Martha S. Jones
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| Ilustração de Tim McDonagh |
Perto do fim da Revolução Americana, a nova nação já apresentava sinais da divisão que acabaria levando à guerra civil. As colônias de plantation do Sul abrigavam cerca de 660.000 pessoas escravizadas, enquanto no Norte havia aproximadamente 40.000. Mudanças estavam em curso. Novos ideais levaram ao fim da escravidão em alguns estados do Norte. Em Vermont, a escravidão foi abolida logo na fundação do estado, em 1777, embora as pessoas já escravizadas no local permanecessem nessa condição até o início da vida adulta. Em 1780, os legisladores da Pensilvânia aprovaram a "Lei para a Abolição Gradual da Escravidão", que proibia a importação de pessoas escravizadas para o estado e declarava livres todas as crianças ali nascidas — mesmo aquelas filhas de mães escravizadas —, embora elas permanecessem obrigadas a trabalhar sob contrato de servidão temporária até os 28 anos de idade.
As pessoas escravizadas não assistiram a essas transformações como meras espectadoras. Pelo contrário, empenharam-se em conquistar a liberdade, aproveitando as novas oportunidades que surgiram com uma guerra fundamentada em princípios de liberdade e igualdade. Muitos fizeram ouvir suas vozes, escrevendo petições e panfletos que transformavam os princípios de direitos naturais em reivindicações formais pelo fim da escravidão. Outros fugiram do cativeiro, tirando proveito do caos e dos deslocamentos populacionais provocados pela guerra.
Elizabeth Freeman, uma das 5.000 pessoas escravizadas em Massachusetts, estava entre aquelas que decidiram buscar a liberdade. Nascida escravizada em Nova York por volta de 1744, ela foi posteriormente herdada por uma mulher chamada Hannah, após a morte de seu proprietário em 1758. Hannah, esposa de John Ashley, vivia em Sheffield e acabou chamando Freeman para ir até lá. Assim como Hannah fizera anos antes, Freeman deixava Nova York e o único lar que conhecera. É muito provável que Hannah tenha levado consigo para Sheffield um enxoval completo, utensílios domésticos e objetos de valor sentimental. Freeman, embora considerada propriedade de outrem, também carregava suas próprias lembranças — dois vestidos que ganhara de seus pais —, recordações dos entes queridos de quem seria separada para sempre.
O marido de Hannah, John Ashley, era um rico proprietário de terras e comerciante, dono de uma loja de variedades, uma serraria, rebanhos e outros empreendimentos. Ele também era legislador e oficial da milícia colonial, além de um dos homens locais atraídos para a política à medida que as tensões aumentavam entre os colonos e a Coroa, o Parlamento e o exército.
Publicações como o *The Massachusetts Spy* levavam a eles notícias de eventos ocorridos a dias de distância, em Boston — incluindo o Massacre de Boston, em 1770, cuja memória perdurou. Quando Samuel Adams e outros publicaram um manifesto de queixas em 1772, Ashley e outros homens de Sheffield abraçaram a causa. No ano seguinte, redigiram a Declaração de Sheffield e a publicaram no *The Spy*, proclamando: “Decidiu-se que a humanidade, em estado de natureza, é igual, livre e independente, e tem direito ao usufruto tranquilo de suas vidas, de sua liberdade e de sua propriedade.”
Os princípios elevados de John Ashley não se refletiam no cotidiano das pessoas escravizadas em sua casa. Embora Freeman considerasse o Sr. Ashley alguém com quem — quando necessário — podia argumentar, o mesmo não se podia dizer de sua esposa. A senhora da casa tinha um temperamento difícil e podia ser cruel. Certa tarde, no final da década de 1770, em meio à guerra, Freeman e sua filha pequena, Lizzie, trabalhavam na cozinha dos Ashley. A Sra. Ashley entrou e notou que Lizzie havia feito um bolo de trigo aproveitando os restos da massa que sobrara na tigela onde fora preparada a porção da família Ashley. Furiosa, a Sra. Ashley chamou Lizzie de ladra e avançou para agredir a menina com uma grande pá de ferro, que estava em brasa após ser usada no forno. Hannah ergueu a pá sobre a cabeça de Lizzie, pronta para golpeá-la, quando Freeman interveio. Seu braço recebeu o impacto, poupando Lizzie, mas o golpe cortou a carne de Freeman até o osso — um ferimento que a atormentaria por muitos anos.
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| Uma pintura de Elizabeth Freeman do início do século XIX. Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick; cortesia da coleção da Massachusetts Historical Society. |
Freeman waited for her opportunity to break the bonds that tied her and her daughter to the Ashley household. By summer 1781, the states had ratified the Articles of Confederation, heralding the new federal government but making no provisions to abolish slavery. Freeman and other residents of Sheffield took to the public square for a celebration that included a reading of the Declaration of Independence. She would have heard its most famous passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The next day, she went to the law office of Theodore Sedgwick. Freedom was on her mind.
***
Sedgwick, who was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature, agreed to take on Freeman’s case. He filed suit on her behalf — naming her in documents as “Bett,” the diminutive by which she was sometimes referred. Also party to the case was a man known as “Brom,” held enslaved in John Ashley’s household. Sedgwick’s approach was a writ of replevin, which demanded that property improperly held by the Ashleys — Freeman and Brom — be returned to the rightful owners, in this case the enslaved people themselves. The court gave Ashley a chance to voluntarily free Freeman and Brom, and when he declined to do so, all parties were ordered to meet for a trial.
In August 1781, a couple of months before the end of the war, Sedgwick and his co-counsel, a law professor named Tapping Reeve, appeared in the Great Barrington Inferior Court of Common Pleas, a small wooden building where a jury would decide the destinies of Freeman and Brom. The future of slavery in Massachusetts was about to go on trial.
As was typical of law practice at the time, the attorneys arguing Brom and Bett v. J. Ashley Esq. did so on behalf of their clients, who were not present in court. Sedgwick and Reeves made the case that the new Massachusetts State Constitution, adopted just a year earlier, posed a question of far-reaching consequence: Was holding people enslaved consistent with the State Constitution’s promise 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 seeing and obtaining their safety and happiness”? In the new self-governed Commonwealth of Massachusetts, could any person be held as property by another?
Sedgwick pressed the view that slavery in the state was extinguished with the adoption of the new State Constitution. The jury listened to the argument and agreed: Freeman and Brom were free.
The original verdict of Brom and Bett v. Ashley from 1781, which held that under the new Massachusetts State Constitution people could not be held as property. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives
The verdict marked the start of a new chapter in their lives, and also for Massachusetts. The case would come to stand for the principle that slavery was contrary to the ideal of liberty — a view that would be echoed for generations to come by Americans in antislavery and abolitionist movements. But because the case was decided in a local court, it did not generally free others enslaved in Massachusetts or elsewhere.
Freeman and Brom had set a change in motion; a man named Quock Walker, held enslaved in Barre, less than 100 miles east of Sheffield, would carry it forward. He brought a subsequent case in the state’s highest court that would ultimately see the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts through to its end.
In a first, a second and finally a third case, lawyers for Walker argued that the Constitution guaranteed his freedom. William Cushing, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, presided in the last of those proceedings and instructed the jury on the relevant law: Colonial Massachusetts had once countenanced holding “Africans in perpetual servitude,” treated “as we do our horses and cattle,” but things had changed since the Revolution. “A different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind.” He invoked universal rights including “that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion or shape of noses [or] features) has inspired all the human race.” The Massachusetts Constitution was “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.” Ultimately, during the court’s April 1783 term, a jury rendered a verdict consistent with Cushing’s reasoning: Walker was not and could not be, by the terms of the State Constitution, a slave.
Sedgwick, who was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature, agreed to take on Freeman’s case. He filed suit on her behalf — naming her in documents as “Bett,” the diminutive by which she was sometimes referred. Also party to the case was a man known as “Brom,” held enslaved in John Ashley’s household. Sedgwick’s approach was a writ of replevin, which demanded that property improperly held by the Ashleys — Freeman and Brom — be returned to the rightful owners, in this case the enslaved people themselves. The court gave Ashley a chance to voluntarily free Freeman and Brom, and when he declined to do so, all parties were ordered to meet for a trial.
In August 1781, a couple of months before the end of the war, Sedgwick and his co-counsel, a law professor named Tapping Reeve, appeared in the Great Barrington Inferior Court of Common Pleas, a small wooden building where a jury would decide the destinies of Freeman and Brom. The future of slavery in Massachusetts was about to go on trial.
As was typical of law practice at the time, the attorneys arguing Brom and Bett v. J. Ashley Esq. did so on behalf of their clients, who were not present in court. Sedgwick and Reeves made the case that the new Massachusetts State Constitution, adopted just a year earlier, posed a question of far-reaching consequence: Was holding people enslaved consistent with the State Constitution’s promise 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 seeing and obtaining their safety and happiness”? In the new self-governed Commonwealth of Massachusetts, could any person be held as property by another?
Sedgwick pressed the view that slavery in the state was extinguished with the adoption of the new State Constitution. The jury listened to the argument and agreed: Freeman and Brom were free.
The original verdict of Brom and Bett v. Ashley from 1781, which held that under the new Massachusetts State Constitution people could not be held as property. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives
The verdict marked the start of a new chapter in their lives, and also for Massachusetts. The case would come to stand for the principle that slavery was contrary to the ideal of liberty — a view that would be echoed for generations to come by Americans in antislavery and abolitionist movements. But because the case was decided in a local court, it did not generally free others enslaved in Massachusetts or elsewhere.
Freeman and Brom had set a change in motion; a man named Quock Walker, held enslaved in Barre, less than 100 miles east of Sheffield, would carry it forward. He brought a subsequent case in the state’s highest court that would ultimately see the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts through to its end.
In a first, a second and finally a third case, lawyers for Walker argued that the Constitution guaranteed his freedom. William Cushing, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, presided in the last of those proceedings and instructed the jury on the relevant law: Colonial Massachusetts had once countenanced holding “Africans in perpetual servitude,” treated “as we do our horses and cattle,” but things had changed since the Revolution. “A different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind.” He invoked universal rights including “that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion or shape of noses [or] features) has inspired all the human race.” The Massachusetts Constitution was “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.” Ultimately, during the court’s April 1783 term, a jury rendered a verdict consistent with Cushing’s reasoning: Walker was not and could not be, by the terms of the State Constitution, a slave.
***
By the time of the 1790 United States census, not one Massachusetts resident reported holding a slave. Freeman had exposed the faulty terms of America’s fundamental contradiction: enslaving people in a nation founded to ensure liberty and equality. Her case did not resolve that contradiction, but it did reveal it to be such. When courts in Massachusetts deemed slavery contrary to law, they lent important legitimacy to the claims that enslaved people would make countless times — in courts, in legislatures and with their words and their deeds — over the next 75 years.
Going forward, efforts to abolish slavery in the new United States often were driven by the initiative and insistence of enslaved people themselves. They seized the promise of liberty, bringing freedom suits, petitioning legislatures and escaping to free soil when they saw an opening. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and later New York and New Jersey, put enslavement on the road to extinction early on. But many others did not. In Virginia, slavery remained firmly rooted in law and culture for decades to come. Still, by the 1830s, Elizabeth Freeman’s challenge to slavery as an anathema to liberty was a potent idea. Theodore Sedgwick Jr., the son of Freeman’s lawyer, introduced her story in a speech in 1831, to a new, radical abolitionist movement that understood Freeman and others like her to have been the foundation of their efforts.
In 1865, more than eight decades after Elizabeth Freeman defeated slavery in Massachusetts, the practice was finally abolished throughout the United States, though only after a civil war that cleaved the young nation and cost more than 600,000 lives. As Freeman had done in her time, enslaved people of the 1860s forced the hand of authorities: They ran away from Southern plantations, they joined Union forces as laborers and later as soldiers, they brought their insistence upon freedom to the Lincoln administration’s door, swelling the numbers at refugee camps in Washington and Virginia.
A result was the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The amendment, though tragically late in coming, resolved the nation’s founding contradiction and would surely have met with approval from Revolutionary-era freedom seekers like Freeman. And still, as Reconstruction’s grand though also short-lived effort to establish an interracial democracy was wantonly undone, the contradiction’s legacy lived on.
Elizabeth Freeman’s story did not end with her freedom suit. She remained in Sheffield and maintained close ties to the Sedgwick family, working for wages in their home and, later in life, recounting her story to the daughter of the lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, Catharine Sedgwick, who wrote an 1853 article titled “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Freeman had accomplished more than protecting her daughter from Hannah Ashley’s blow and, with perseverance, succeeded in getting herself and Lizzie out from under the Ashleys’ dominion. In her own words, recorded in a last will and testament, Freeman recounted what freedom meant. She had accumulated real estate and personal goods, enough to bequeath a legacy: a coat, three caps, a pair of blue stockings, earrings and the precious robes gifted by her own parents were passed down to Freeman’s daughter and grandchildren. Liberty in its highest form, for Elizabeth Freeman, was ensuring that her dearest ones would always be safe, well provisioned and well loved.
By the time of the 1790 United States census, not one Massachusetts resident reported holding a slave. Freeman had exposed the faulty terms of America’s fundamental contradiction: enslaving people in a nation founded to ensure liberty and equality. Her case did not resolve that contradiction, but it did reveal it to be such. When courts in Massachusetts deemed slavery contrary to law, they lent important legitimacy to the claims that enslaved people would make countless times — in courts, in legislatures and with their words and their deeds — over the next 75 years.
Going forward, efforts to abolish slavery in the new United States often were driven by the initiative and insistence of enslaved people themselves. They seized the promise of liberty, bringing freedom suits, petitioning legislatures and escaping to free soil when they saw an opening. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and later New York and New Jersey, put enslavement on the road to extinction early on. But many others did not. In Virginia, slavery remained firmly rooted in law and culture for decades to come. Still, by the 1830s, Elizabeth Freeman’s challenge to slavery as an anathema to liberty was a potent idea. Theodore Sedgwick Jr., the son of Freeman’s lawyer, introduced her story in a speech in 1831, to a new, radical abolitionist movement that understood Freeman and others like her to have been the foundation of their efforts.
In 1865, more than eight decades after Elizabeth Freeman defeated slavery in Massachusetts, the practice was finally abolished throughout the United States, though only after a civil war that cleaved the young nation and cost more than 600,000 lives. As Freeman had done in her time, enslaved people of the 1860s forced the hand of authorities: They ran away from Southern plantations, they joined Union forces as laborers and later as soldiers, they brought their insistence upon freedom to the Lincoln administration’s door, swelling the numbers at refugee camps in Washington and Virginia.
A result was the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The amendment, though tragically late in coming, resolved the nation’s founding contradiction and would surely have met with approval from Revolutionary-era freedom seekers like Freeman. And still, as Reconstruction’s grand though also short-lived effort to establish an interracial democracy was wantonly undone, the contradiction’s legacy lived on.
Elizabeth Freeman’s story did not end with her freedom suit. She remained in Sheffield and maintained close ties to the Sedgwick family, working for wages in their home and, later in life, recounting her story to the daughter of the lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, Catharine Sedgwick, who wrote an 1853 article titled “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Freeman had accomplished more than protecting her daughter from Hannah Ashley’s blow and, with perseverance, succeeded in getting herself and Lizzie out from under the Ashleys’ dominion. In her own words, recorded in a last will and testament, Freeman recounted what freedom meant. She had accumulated real estate and personal goods, enough to bequeath a legacy: a coat, three caps, a pair of blue stockings, earrings and the precious robes gifted by her own parents were passed down to Freeman’s daughter and grandchildren. Liberty in its highest form, for Elizabeth Freeman, was ensuring that her dearest ones would always be safe, well provisioned and well loved.
Martha S. Jones é escritora, historiadora e jurista autora de “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir”. Storyboards de ilustração de Anthony Liberatore.
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