How Elizabeth Freeman Sued for Her Freedom—and Won

Nearly eighty years before the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, an enslaved midwife in western Massachusetts used the language of the American Revolution against the institution that held her in bondage. Elizabeth Freeman, known for most of her life only as “Bett,” heard the newly ratified Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 read aloud in the town square of Sheffield—and she understood immediately that its promise of liberty had to include her. Her subsequent lawsuit, Bett v. Ashley (1781), became one of the most consequential legal challenges to slavery in the new United States. This is the record of how one woman’s reading of a single sentence—“all men are born free and equal”—helped set in motion the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, the first state to end the practice comprehensively through its courts. Her story belongs not to ornament but to the documented legal and social history of the early republic.

Origins of Systems That Elizabeth Freeman Confronted

To understand the weight of Freeman’s act, one must understand the strange legal position slavery occupied in colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts. The first Africans forcibly brought to the English colonies arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 aboard a Dutch vessel—a date often cited as the seedbed of North American chattel slavery. Massachusetts, however, moved early and aggressively into the institution: in 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first British colony in North America to legally recognize slavery through the Body of Liberties. Its merchants, shipowners, and ports were deeply entangled in the transatlantic slave trade, and Boston served simultaneously as a hub of both commerce in human beings and, later, of abolitionist organizing.

What distinguished Massachusetts was a legal paradox. Colonial law treated enslaved people as both property and persons—a contradiction that opened a narrow door. Because an enslaved person was legally recognized as a person, they could sue. Because they were treated as property, responsibility for proving lawful ownership fell on the enslaver. By 1780, close to thirty enslaved individuals had petitioned for freedom on technical grounds: a broken promise of manumission, an unlawful sale, or disputed inheritance. These were not isolated acts of desperation. They were the accumulation of a legal strategy.

The Sheffield Declaration and the Language of Liberty

In January 1773, eleven of Sheffield’s most prominent men gathered in an upstairs room of the Ashley house to draft a formal protest against British tyranny. The document they produced, the Sheffield Declaration, declared that all men are “equal, free, and independent, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty, and their property.” The man chosen to write it was Theodore Sedgwick, a rising local lawyer who would later represent Elizabeth Freeman in court—and who would go on to serve as a United States Senator, Speaker of the House, and a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

By some accounts, Freeman was in that house as the men drafted their grievances, serving them as they imagined liberty. She later recalled, “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 airth a free woman—I would.”

It is worth noting that Seminole and other Indigenous nations in the Southeast were at that same time developing their own distinct relationships with slavery and freedom, frequently offering refuge to those escaping the plantation system—a reminder that the early republic’s contests over liberty were never confined to white society alone. For readers exploring how revolutionary ideals collided with Indigenous sovereignty, see our chronicle of how the Proclamation of 1763 blocked colonial expansion and helped ignite the Revolution.

The Ashley Household: Cruelty, Resistance, and Witness

Elizabeth Freeman was enslaved in the household of John Ashley, a prominent Sheffield judge, from approximately 1746 until the eve of her 1781 court case. Ashley was a man of his time in every compromising sense: he agitated publicly for American liberty from British rule while holding human beings as property. His wife, Hannah, was remembered by contemporaries for extraordinary cruelty.

The most documented episode is brutally specific. When Mrs. Ashley’s anger at an enslaved girl named Lizzie—whom many historians believe was either Freeman’s daughter or her sister—erupted, she seized a heated iron shovel from the oven and swung it toward the child. Freeman threw herself between them and took the blow. The shovel, still glowing from the coals, cut to the bone of her arm, leaving a scar she carried for life. Catharine Sedgwick, Theodore Sedgwick’s daughter, later recorded that after this act, “Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzie.” The account survives because it was told repeatedly—a woman’s body used as a shield, and remembered as a barrier that held.

Bett v. Ashley: The Legal Strategy and the Verdict of 1781

When Freeman walked to Theodore Sedgwick’s house and demanded representation, she invoked the constitution directly: “I heard that paper read yesterday, that says all men are born equal and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?” Sedgwick agreed.

His motives, as biographers have long noted, were not primarily moral. Sedgwick himself enslaved workers. He opposed slavery chiefly because he believed it was a politically divisive force that could fracture the colonies in their fight for independence—a threat to unity at the moment unity was most needed. That does not diminish what his representation achieved; it complicates how we read the motives behind landmark legal victories.

Freeman’s case was joined with that of Brom, another enslaved man in the Ashley household, in what became known as the Bett v. Ashley and Brom v. Ashley suits. Heard in the Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington in August 1781, the case was argued by Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve, a founding instructor of the Litchfield Law School. Their argument was not a technicality. It was constitutional: the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 had declared all men free and equal, and therefore no person could lawfully be held as property within the state.

A jury of twelve local farmers—all white men—ruled in Freeman’s favor, granting her freedom and awarding her thirty shillings in damages. The case did not end slavery by statute; that came later, through a series of related decisions and the 1783 case Commonwealth v. Walker, involving the enslaved man Quock Walker, which held that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the Massachusetts Constitution. Together, these cases dismantled the legal foundation of slavery in the state. By the 1790 federal census, Massachusetts reported no enslaved people—making it the first state to abolish slavery comprehensively.

The long arc from these Massachusetts courtrooms to the national struggle over slavery eventually intersected with the histories of many other subjugated peoples. For a broader view of how emancipation and expropriation occurred simultaneously in American law, see our analysis of Abraham Lincoln and Native Americans: the Dakota 38 and tribal land policies.

Freedom, Name, and Property: The Later Life of Elizabeth Freeman

The first act after the verdict was symbolic and profound: she renamed herself. She discarded the name “Bett”—a name assigned to her by slaveholders—and took the name Elizabeth Freeman, embedding her new legal status in her identity. Naming, in an era when enslaved people could not legally own their own names, was a declaration.

She went to work for the Sedgwick household, becoming, by their own written accounts, a trusted and essential member of the family. She became well-known throughout the region as a nurse and midwife—work that required travel, technical skill, and the trust of white households, an unusual degree of autonomy for an enslaved woman of her era. David Levinson, author with Emilie Piper of One Minute a Free Woman, has noted that the documentation on Freeman is thin precisely because she left almost no written record of her own: her only known writing was an “X” mark on her deed. Yet the written accounts of those who employed and knew her describe her as trustworthy, honest, hardworking, and loyal.

By the time of her death in 1829, at approximately eighty-five years of age, she owned a house, about twenty acres of land, savings of roughly three hundred dollars, and a substantial list of possessions recorded in her will. Her funeral drew hundreds of mourners. Her gravestone, still standing today in the Sedgwick family cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, bears this inscription: “She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal.”

Visitors can still see the marker today. The home where she lived after gaining freedom and the Sedgwick family cemetery remain among the few physical sites directly tied to her life—documented points on a historical landscape that has preserved far less about enslaved and free Black women than it should. For those interested in how the revolutionary era reshaped the physical and social geography of the Northeast, our piece on the long fight for citizenship and voting rights from the Snyder Act to the ballot box traces the parallel and intertwined struggles for legal personhood in American law.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

Central fact: Elizabeth Freeman’s 1781 lawsuit was not a symbolic protest but a successful legal action that extracted freedom and monetary damages from the Massachusetts courts. It grounded emancipation in the state’s own constitution—the same document that had inspired the Revolution.

• Legal precedent over rhetoric: By 1780, roughly thirty enslaved people in Massachusetts had sued for freedom using technical loopholes. Freeman’s case was different—it challenged the legitimacy of enslavement as such, not merely a specific transaction. That radicalism is what made it a turning point.
• The jury was ordinary: Twelve local white farmers decided the case. Emancipation, in this instance, was not handed down by elites but enforced by a community jury applying a constitutional text.
• Allyship was complicated: Theodore Sedgwick owned enslaved people himself. His decision to represent Freeman was driven by political calculation as much as conscience—a reminder that historical progress rarely comes from unblemished actors.
• Massachusetts was first: Although Vermont’s constitution (1777) declared slavery illegal in principle, Massachusetts became the first state to effectively abolish slavery through judicial decisions, with no enslaved persons recorded in the 1790 federal census.
• Resistance was networked: Freeman’s case and Quock Walker’s case were not isolated—they were part of a strategic wave of litigation by enslaved people using newly available legal language.
• Naming as sovereignty: Freeman’s renaming of herself after the verdict asserted the most personal dimension of freedom in a society that had denied enslaved people even the ownership of their names.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who was Elizabeth Freeman, and when did she live?
Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved African American woman born around 1742–1744 in Claverack, New York. She was enslaved from roughly 1746 in the household of John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts, until 1781, when she won her freedom through a lawsuit. She lived until approximately 1829, dying around the age of eighty-five.

Q: What was the legal basis of her lawsuit?
Freeman’s suit, filed with Brom (another enslaved man in the Ashley household), argued that the newly ratified Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 had declared “all men are born free and equal,” and therefore that no person could legally be held as property in Massachusetts. The case was heard in the Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington in August 1781. The jury found in her favor and awarded thirty shillings in damages.

Q: How did her case relate to the broader abolition of slavery in Massachusetts?
Her case, combined with the 1783 case Commonwealth v. Walker involving Quock Walker, dismantled the legal foundation of slavery in Massachusetts. By the 1790 federal census, the state reported no enslaved people, making it the first state to effectively abolish slavery through its judicial system. It is important to note that the 1780 constitution did not explicitly abolish slavery; the courts and juries did.

Q: Was Theodore Sedgwick an abolitionist?
No, not in the modern sense. Sedgwick himself enslaved workers. He opposed slavery primarily because he saw it as a politically divisive force threatening colonial unity during the Revolution, not because he believed it was morally wrong. His representation of Freeman was consequential despite these conflicted motives.

Q: What happened to Elizabeth Freeman after she won her case?
She renamed herself, worked as a nurse and midwife, and became a trusted member of the Sedgwick household. By the end of her life, she owned a house, roughly twenty acres of land, and about three hundred dollars in savings—rare for a Black woman of her era. Her funeral in 1829 was attended by hundreds of people, and her gravestone in the Sedgwick family cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, remains legible today.

Q: Where can visitors see sites associated with her life today?
The Ashley House in Sheffield, Massachusetts, still stands and is operated as a historic site (managed by The Trustees of Reservations). The Sedgwick family cemetery in Stockbridge preserves her gravestone. Both are open to visitors and interpret her history.

Legacy & Preservation

Elizabeth Freeman’s story survived through fragments: a single X mark on a deed, the recollections of the Sedgwick family, a handful of court documents, and a gravestone. That she is remembered at all is due to the persistence of local historians and the quiet power of the case itself. Yet her life reminds us how much of the history of enslaved and free Black women has not been preserved—and how much is at stake in the ongoing work of archival recovery. Scholars like David Levinson and Emilie Piper have reconstructed what they can from letters, wills, and court records. Civic memory efforts continue to expand.

Her case, Bett v. Ashley, remains a cornerstone of American legal history. It demonstrated that constitutional language, when read literally and courageously by those it excluded, could be turned into an instrument of liberation. That is a legacy not just of Massachusetts but of the entire nation’s unfinished reckoning with its founding contradictions—a reckoning Indigenous nations have experienced in their own distinct but related forms, from treaty violations to forced removal to ongoing battles for sovereignty and recognition.