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.
