A Massachusetts woman who had been enslaved for nearly three decades successfully sued her enslaver for freedom in 1781 under the state’s new constitution, becoming the first African American woman to win her liberty in that way. Born into slavery in colonial New York in the mid-1740s, Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, was sent as a young girl to the household of Colonel John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts. She could neither read nor write, and her early life was one of hard manual labor. Later accounts described Hannah Ashley as harsh.
One famous story claims that when Hannah raised a heated shovel to strike Bett’s sister, Bett blocked the blow and suffered a deep wound that left a lasting scar. She reportedly displayed the scar openly as proof of her enslaver’s cruelty. In January 1773, a group of landholders gathered at the Ashley house to draft the Sheffield Declaration, which proclaimed that all people were equal and had a right to liberty. A young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick drafted most of the document.
Thomas Jefferson later paraphrased its language in the Declaration of Independence. By 1781, after Massachusetts adopted a constitution declaring that all men are born free and equal, Bett approached Sedgwick and asked whether the law could give her freedom. She reportedly told him she was not a dumb creature. Sedgwick agreed to take her case.
He filed a lawsuit on behalf of Bett and a fellow enslaved man named Brom. In August 1781, the County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington ruled in their favor, ordering Colonel Ashley to release them and pay compensation for their years of labor. After winning her freedom, Bett declined an offer to remain at the Ashley house as a paid servant. Instead, she went to work for the Sedgwick family, where she spent more than 25 years as a nanny and became a close member of the household.
She adopted the surname Freeman following her victory. Her case was one of several in the early 1780s that challenged slavery under the new Massachusetts Constitution. By 1783, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court declared slavery incompatible with the constitution, and the 1790 federal census recorded no enslaved people in Massachusetts, making it one of the first free states in the new nation. Freeman also worked as a healer, nurse, and midwife.
In the early 19th century, she bought her own home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she lived near her daughter and grandchildren. She died in December 1829 at about age 85. She was buried in the Sedgwick family plot, the only non-Sedgwick interred there. An inscription on her grave praised her character and called her a good mother.
In August 2022, the Sheffield Historical Society unveiled a statue in her honor. Another enslaved woman, Julia Chinn, ran the Kentucky plantation of a future U. S. vice president yet was never freed during her lifetime.
Born in the 1790s, Chinn was sent as a teenager to the household of Richard Mentor Johnson, a rising Kentucky politician. Johnson, who never married, took her as his concubine, a relationship that was deeply unequal and legally complex. Chinn gave birth to two daughters, Imogene and Adeline, both acknowledged by Johnson as his children. While he was away in Washington, D.
C. , for months each year, she managed Blue Spring Farm, oversaw contractors, organized social functions, and was reportedly trusted with his cash. She also ran the Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Native American boys built on the farm. A local minister was employed to educate her daughters and later taught at the school, whose stone shell still stands today.
Despite the apparent closeness of the relationship, Johnson legally owned Chinn after inheriting the family estate in 1815. He never emancipated her. At the time, Kentucky law banned interracial marriage, so even if she had been freed, they could not legally wed. In the summer of 1833, cholera swept through the region, and many students at the academy became ill.
Chinn nursed them for weeks but contracted the disease herself and died. Her burial place is unknown. After her death, Johnson entered relationships with other enslaved women on the plantation. During the 1836 presidential campaign, his relationship with Chinn was used against him publicly, including in cartoons that darkened her skin tone to heighten the stigma.
Johnson was still elected vice president on Martin Van Buren’s ticket. When Johnson died in 1850, his brothers destroyed many of his papers and ensured that his estate passed to them rather than to Imogene, his surviving daughter. A court declared that he left no widow or children, allowing the falsified will to enter the official record. For decades, Chinn’s story was largely erased.
In recent years, historians have published research and a full biography restoring her place in history. Another enslaved woman became a sensation in 1835 when she was exhibited as George Washington’s 161-year-old wet nurse, but the showman behind her later admitted the episode was a dark part of his past. P. T.
Barnum, then in his mid-20s and unknown to the public, exhibited an elderly, blind enslaved woman named Joyce Heth across New England and New York. She told stories of raising little Georgie Washington in Virginia a century earlier. Heth was said to have been born in 1674. Records suggest she was actually born in the 1750s and had been enslaved in Kentucky.
Barnum rented her from her Kentucky owner and removed her teeth to make her appear older, though whether that story is true remains unclear. She was exhibited six days a week for more than 12 hours a day for seven or eight months. Visitors could touch her and take her pulse, and Barnum kept all the profits, believed to have been over $1,500 at the time. Heth died in New York City in February 1836.
Barnum hired a doctor to perform a public autopsy, charging spectators for admission, and the doctor concluded she was likely in her late 70s or early 80s. Barnum responded by spreading claims that the autopsy had been performed on a different person and that Heth was alive and touring Europe. The episode helped launch Barnum’s career as a showman, leading to his later museum exhibits and the circus empire that made him famous. In his 1869 memoir, he called the Heth exhibit the least deserving of all his efforts and said he had initially believed the claims were genuine.
Scholars have since highlighted how Heth was exploited, particularly in works on medical experimentation and race in 19th-century entertainment. Biddy Mason, born into slavery in Georgia in 1818, became one of California’s wealthiest women after winning her freedom in court at age 38. As a child, Mason was separated from her parents and sold to a Georgia plantation owner. She learned agriculture, folk medicine, and midwifery.
In 1836, she was given or sold to Robert and Rebecca Smith, who moved her to Mississippi, where she gave birth to three daughters. In 1847, Robert Smith converted to the newly established Mormon faith and decided to move to Utah. He took his family and enslaved people, including Mason and her daughters, on the journey west. Along the way, Mason’s medical skills made her an integral member of the wagon train.
In 1851, Brigham Young dispatched a mission to San Bernardino, California, where slavery had been banned when the territory became a state in 1850. Robert Smith joined the mission but did not free his enslaved people, and many were unaware that California law entitled them to freedom. In 1855, Mason learned from a free Black man named Charles Owens that she could legally challenge her enslavement. She filed a petition in Los Angeles County Court.
When Robert Smith failed to appear, the court granted Mason and her daughters their freedom in January 1856. After winning her freedom, Mason worked as a nurse and midwife, saving her earnings carefully. By 1866, she bought a house on Spring Street in Los Angeles for $250, becoming one of the first Black women to own property in California. She went on to buy and sell real estate as the city expanded, and by the late 1880s, she had accumulated a fortune estimated at about $300,000, roughly $10 million today.
In 1872, she co-founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, donating the land for its construction. She also helped establish the first elementary school in the city for African American children and was known for visiting jail inmates and opening grocery store accounts to feed flood victims. Known in her community as Grandma Mason, she died on January 15, 1891, at age 73. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen Cemetery until 1988, when a large tombstone was erected in her honor.
A year later, the California African-American Museum held an exhibit honoring her life, and the city declared November 16, 1989, Biddy Mason Day. In the mid-1850s, a photograph of a young girl who appeared entirely white became a powerful abolitionist tool after she was freed from slavery in Virginia. Mary Mildred Williams was born into slavery near Washington, Virginia, in 1847. Her mother, Elizabeth Nelson, was the daughter of her enslaver and was herself very light-skinned.
Mary and her sister Adelaide both looked white, leading to questions about their paternity and rumors about who their biological father was. Mary’s father, Seth Botts, was also a mixed-race enslaved man, the illegitimate son of a free white man. He could not be certain whether the girls were his biological daughters, given their appearance and the timing of his visits. In 1846, Elizabeth and her children passed into the ownership of her father’s brother-in-law, J.
C. Weedon. While the family remained in legal limbo over questions of ownership, Mary and Adelaide were born, both light-skinned enough to pass for white. In 1850, Seth Botts forged freedom papers with the help of a freed Black man named Henry Williams and escaped via the Underground Railroad to Boston.
He worked to raise money to buy his family’s freedom and succeeded by early 1855. The family took the surname Williams, after the name on the forged papers. Senator Charles Sumner, a founding member of the Republican Party, arranged for a daguerreotype photograph of Mary to be taken. The image was published in Boston and New York newspapers, stunning readers who could not reconcile the girl’s white appearance with her history of enslavement.
Sumner took Mary on a speaking tour across the North, using her story to highlight how slavery had blurred racial lines through generations of sexual exploitation. She became one of America’s first poster children of abolition. The controversy surrounding her case contributed to the growing national divide. On May 22, 1856, Sumner was attacked on the floor of the U.
S. Senate by Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery advocate, and nearly beaten to death. The attack is widely seen as a pivotal moment leading toward the Civil War. After the war, Mary lived quietly in Boston, working as a clerk in a deeds office from 1882 until her retirement.
She never married and had no children. She chose to identify as white in her adult life, and census records from 1900 show her living with a female partner, Mary Maynard. Mary Mildred Williams died in Boston in 1921, in her mid-70s, having long since faded from public view.
