Treehouse Writers

Apologies: I’m up against a deadline that will not budge, and so am posting an essay from about a decade ago. These days I spend more time than is healthy wondering what the era we are currently living through will be called, and how history will judge us. But that’s not what this is about.

We humans love our boundaries. Between nations, between states, between property. So important to know where you end and I begin, not?

But in history, maybe not so useful. When I was taking history classes, there was a tendency to teach historical periods and eras, as if the Plantagenets filed out in an orderly fashion one day, the Tudors clocked in, and everything–clothes, art, technology, politics–changed right then. But history isn’t a single timeline, there are huge overlaps, some of which can take me by surprise.

For instance the dapper fellow in the photo? That’s Wyatt Earp, of the O.K. Corral: major character in the American saga of The Wild West. After Tombstone he moved to California where, among other things, he was a consultant to the film industry; he and western star Tom Mix were great friends. Earp died in 1929, well into the era of electricity, cars, flight.

Sometimes I’m asked when the Regency was. There’s a simple and accurate answer: the Regency began in 1811, when Parliament enacted the Regency Bill and the Prince of Wales became a stand-in for his father George III. It ended in 1820, when George III died and the Prince of Wales became king.

But in discussing the Regency, particularly when talking about fiction, the period is a more squishy, pliable thing. For convenience’s sake, I’d say it was roughly 1795-1825, the era of England’s involvement with Napoleon; the point when the Empire style was at its height; the Romantic movement was in full blast; and technology was beginning to make serious inroads in daily life. But from another vantage point, the Regency is just a subset of the Georgian era, a blip on the way from the Enlightenment to the Victorians. It all depends where you draw the lines. And frankly, the lines didn’t matter as much if you were at the lower end of the economic spectrum: things don’t change as fast when you’re scrabbling for dinner and all your money goes for necessities rather than a new gown.

It’s easy to forget that while some people were living what we would consider a medieval life, others were smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance. To me one of the most arresting scenes in The Return of Martin Guerre (a lovely French film from a few decades ago) is at the trial, when there are the nice medieval peasants and the clergy and lawyers, all in their robes of office–and there in the audience are people who would not look out of place in the court of James I. My initial belief in my own historical knowledge (oh, I know when this is!) was knocked askew. In the same way, I love the film versions of Austen in which women are wearing clothes from several different eras–from the older woman who is still wearing a highly structured gown from 1795 to the young woman whose gown is the latest cry: high waisted, sheer fabric, Romantic draping. It reminds me that many women didn’t toss out the old gowns–they wore them, or tore them apart and remade them–because fabric and labor were not cheap. And that no one was sitting there thinking, “well, I’d better rethink my wardrobe, because we’re transitioning into the Regency, and these old rags will simply look like they belong to another era.”

My daughter has been watching Mad Men from the beginning of the series. I mentioned that (because my father worked on Madison Avenue in the 50s and 60s) it all looked rather familiar to me. And this launched us into a discussion about eras, and how you know when you’re in one. And of course, you don’t. At the time, it just seems like today is an extension of yesterday, and tomorrow will flow right out of today. At the time, even fringed suede vests might seem like the thing to do.

When I was 13 my family moved from New York City to a small town in Western Massachusetts: Sheffield.  For those unfamiliar with Western Massachusetts, it is beautiful, green, hilly and pleasant and quaint. Quaint as can be, with houses full of Colonial charm (which they come by honorably, as they date from the 1700s) and a thriving tourist economy that leans into the quaint. Along with skiing in the winter and summering outside the city in the summer, there is an opportunity for what you might call historical tourism, if you’re into that sort of thing.

At the time, I wasn’t. I was enrolled in the local high school, Mt. Everett Regional. I had come from a left-of-center progressive school in New York, which made for some pretty severe culture shock on my part (and possibly on the part of some of my classmates and teachers–but that might just have been because it was the late 60s and culture shock was everywhere) but I got a good, if somewhat less political, education at Mt. Everett, and I have nothing to say in its dispraise.

But there were things they didn’t teach. And last week I learned one of them.

An account on Threads called “History is Punk” posted a long thread about Elizabeth Freeman, who was directly responsible for the state of Massachusetts outlawing slavery. And this happened in Sheffield, and I had never heard of it until last Saturday, July 4th, when the thread posted. The New York Times Magazine had an article about Freeman this week too. Elizabeth Freeman is having a moment.

Freeman–originally known as Bett–was born in Claverack, NY, in the household of a well to do, slave-owning Dutch farmer. When she was young she was sent, along with various other household goods and chattels, to the new home of the farmer’s daughter Hannah. Hannah had married a prosperous gentleman-farmer and lawyer in Sheffield, Massachusetts, John Ashley. (The Ashley house is still there; I think I visited it once, but the emphasis at the time was all on Ashley’s place in the community and in the Revolution. I heard nothing at the time about Elizabeth Freeman). One can assume that, as a household servant, Bett did a lot of waiting on the gentlemen who came to talk with Ashley about politics–particularly about a document called The Sheffield Declaration, which is a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was a 1773 anti-British manifesto which Ashley–and another local lawyer, Theodore Sedgewick–were instrumental in drafting.

So there is Bett, in and out of rooms where phrases like “mankind in a state of nature are free, equal, and independent.” It is pretty clear that these ideas took root. Meanwhile, Bett continued to work for the Ashleys (she had no other choice; she was their slave). Anecdotally, it appears that John Ashley was a fairly reasonable guy, but his wife Hannah was not. She was hot-tempered and treated everyone, but particularly the slaves, badly. So badly that when someone in the kitchen (most likely Bett’s daughter) used some scraps to make herself a snack, Hannah tried to hit the girl with a red-hot iron shovel; Bett took the blow on her arm. It went to the bone, and while she was treated for the wound it never really healed well.

In 1781, when the states had ratified the Articles of Confederation, Sheffield held a celebration on July 4th in the town square. Again, if Bett was there, she would have heard that self-evident phrase “All men are created equal.” The next day Bett visited attorney Theodore Sedgewick and asked him to sue for her freedom. He agreed, filing a “writ of replevin,” which demanded that property improperly held by the Ashleys (that would Bett and another slave named Brom) be returned to the rightful owners: themselves. The case was heard in the neighboring town of Great Barrington, and after legal back and forth (offered the chance to simply free the two slaves, Ashley declined; he might have been reasonable compared to his wife, but…) Bett won her case. The case became the scaffolding on which Massachusetts built an affirmative declaration that slavery was “repugnant” to the terms of the State Constitution.

Bett lived a long life: she took the name Elizabeth Freeman. She worked for wages for the Sedgewick family for some years, bought a house, and amassed enough property to leave it, and many other things, to her descendants. When she died, she was buried in the Sedgewick’s burial plot, the only non-family member there.

And it kills me that I only learned about this last weekend.

I went to High School in Sheffield. The library in Great Barrington was one of my preferred hangs. We heard a great deal about the Berkshire’s role in the Revolutionary War. But in the late 1960s I heard nothing about Elizabeth Freeman. Fortunately, things have changed since I was graduated from Mt. Everett in 1971. Freeman’s story is known and embraced in the area; in 2022 a statue was erected to honor her.

My point (aside from my general crankiness about not having heard of this before) is that history is full of stories like this, stories that don’t get told or don’t get remembered. I believe firmly that if I had stumbled over Elizabeth Freeman’s story in high school and written a paper about it, I would have been congratulated for finding it–they weren’t burying anything, it wasn’t sinister. Just… if you don’t know, you don’t go looking.

The Current Powers That Be would likely be happy if we forgot about this sort of story. Which makes it all the more important that we keep looking for them.