Born into slavery in colonial New York, Elizabeth Freeman was never expected to leave a mark on history. Poor, illiterate, and enslaved, she lived in a world where men demanded liberty for themselves while denying it to her. Yet she did the unthinkable: she sued her enslaver for her freedom, and she won. Elizabeth Freeman, later known as Mum Bett, was born into slavery in the mid-1740s, possibly in the spring of 1744.
Her exact birthplace is uncertain, though some suggest it was in New York state, where she grew up on the 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 her early years, she was known as Bett, almost certainly a shortened form of Elizabeth. She grew up in a household where many people were enslaved, including her sister Lizzie.
As was common for enslaved people in the 18th century, the identities of her parents are unknown, and it is unclear if they remained on the same estate. Bett never learned to read or write, and the early years of her life remain largely undocumented, as she left behind no written accounts. What is known of her story emerges only later, after she forced her way into the public eye through a bold and unprecedented legal battle. 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, possibly at only seven or eight years old. The house Colonel Ashley built in 1735 still stands today and is now a museum, offering a glimpse into the world she inhabited for nearly three decades. Bett’s life focused on cleaning, washing clothes, and carrying out arduous manual labor, tasks that consumed far more time in an age before modern appliances. In the Ashley household, she quickly established herself as a woman who was not intimidated by her enslavers.
Later accounts describe Hannah Ashley as harsh, and one famous story claims she once grabbed a heated shovel to strike Bett’s sister, Lizzie. Before Hannah could hit Lizzie, Bett stepped in and blocked the blows. The blow left a deep wound and a sizable scar on Bett, but rather than covering it up, she displayed it openly thereafter, a silent message to visitors about the cruelty she endured. During these 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 lived through an era of great change in North America.
She would have heard constant talk of the long war with the French that raged from 1754 to 1763, which ended with Britain seizing control of New France, now known as Canada. She would also have heard the growing anger voiced by John Ashley and the guests who gathered in his home, complaining about rising taxes imposed by the British Crown on Massachusetts and the other 12 colonies. In January 1773, when she was probably nearing her 30th year, a large group of Massachusetts landholders gathered at the Ashley house to draft what became known as the Sheffield Declaration. The document protested against growing British tyranny and stated: “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 paraphrase these words when he wrote the Declaration of Independence three years later. A young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick appears to have drafted most of the Sheffield Declaration during that meeting at the Ashley house. He would feature again in Bett’s story before long. For Bett, if she heard anything about the declaration drafted under the same roof, she could not have missed the irony.
Men who claimed that all were entitled to liberty and natural rights wrote those soaring phrases while keeping her in chains beneath their 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 in December 1773, followed by a deteriorating political situation that led to war in the spring of 1775. The Declaration of Independence was issued in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, and a bitter war followed with Britain, ending with British acknowledgment of American independence in 1783. As part of the creation of the new federal state, Massachusetts drew up its own state constitution in 1780. It included a passage that echoed both the Sheffield Declaration and the Declaration of Independence: “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.
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All of it was building toward a reckoning. Bett would soon turn these lofty promises into a weapon, confronting her enslaver and demanding 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 based on the argument that the Constitution essentially forbade slavery in the state. According to a later account, she approached Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who had drafted the Sheffield Declaration, and said: “I heard that paper read today that says all men are created equal and that every man has a right to freedom.
I’m not a dumb critter. Won’t the law give me my freedom? ”
Sedgwick believed that slavery was incompatible with the principles of the new Massachusetts Constitution, and he agreed to take the case. It wasn’t long before he submitted the paperwork on behalf of Bett and another enslaved man in the Ashley household named Brom, who was reportedly added to the case to strengthen it, as women had limited legal rights at the time.
In 1781, Brom and Bett versus Ashley was launched as a legal case in the hopes of obtaining their freedom. 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, they were considered two of the most formidable lawyers in Massachusetts.
They argued that the wording of the new Massachusetts State Constitution effectively rendered the institution of 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 18th century. The court ruled in favor of Brom and Bett, ordering Ashley to release them from bondage and 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. 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 at the time, with many simply swapping enslavement for household service with a small wage.
However, Bett turned the offer down and instead 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 a 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, becoming known forevermore as Elizabeth Freeman.
It is from Catherine Sedgwick, one of Theodore’s daughters who later became a well-known author, that we have the most detailed accounts of Mum Bett’s life. In 1853, Catherine wrote a book entitled Slavery in New England, published in Bentley’s Miscellany, which remains a valuable source for Bett’s life and how she won her freedom. While Bett was beginning a new life as a free woman within the Sedgwick household, Massachusetts law was being impacted by her actions. Her case was one of several early 1780s lawsuits arguing that slavery had become illegal under the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
The others were three separate court cases, collectively known as the Quock Walker cases, all involving an enslaved man called Quock 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 had abolished slavery upon its foundation in 1777, and Pennsylvania, which had abolished slavery in 1780. Some northern states like New York would not abolish slavery until well into the 19th century. 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 18th century. During the years Elizabeth worked at the Sedgwick house, she also served as a local healer, nurse, and midwife.
In the early 19th century, she acquired enough money to buy her own house. By then, the Sedgwick children were grown up, and she retired, moving 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 would spend her later years near her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She lived a long life, dying in Stockbridge in December 1829.
Because her precise date of birth is unknown, her exact age cannot be confirmed, but she was around 85 years old at the time of her passing and had spent more of her life as a free woman than as a slave. Reflecting on what liberty meant to her, she once declared: “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. ”
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 reading: “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.
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Around 1812, one of Theodore’s daughters-in-law, Susan Ridley Sedgwick, painted a delicate watercolor on ivory miniature of Bett when she was about 70 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.
