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Questions to Consider: 1. What challenge/injury did Elizabeth face early in life? Did this stop her?

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Questions to Consider: 1. What challenge/injury did Elizabeth face early in life? Did this stop her?

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Question to Consider 2: What precedent did Elizabeth's case set and how did it affect the push for abolition in Massachusetts? (check vocab!)

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Question to Consider 2: What precedent did Elizabeth's case set and how did it affect the push for abolition in Massachusetts? (check vocab!)

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Women & the American Story: Elizabeth Freeman, Abolition Pioneer

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Question to Answer: Why is it important that a court of law proved Elizabeth Key should be free? What do courts represent?

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Question to Answer: Why is it important that a court of law proved Elizabeth Key should be free? What do courts represent?

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Question to Answer: How did Wheatley's writing push back against racist ideas about black people in colonial America?

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Question to Answer: How did Wheatley's writing push back against racist ideas about black people in colonial America?

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Question to Answer: How did Banneker's accomplishments push back against racist ideas about black people in colonial America?

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Question to Answer: How did Banneker's accomplishments push back against racist ideas about black people in colonial America?

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The last paragraph will be helpful for your "why" section

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The last paragraph will be helpful for your "why" section

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley.

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Despite spending much of her life enslaved, Phillis Wheatley was the first African American woman to publish a book of poems.

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Question to Consider: Why is a lodge that provides job and education opportunities important to recently free black Americans living in Virginia?

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Question to Consider: Why is a lodge that provides job and education opportunities important to recently free black Americans living in Virginia?

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Question You Should Answer: How is Ottobah different than many other abolitionists? Why is this important?

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Question You Should Answer: How is Ottobah different than many other abolitionists? Why is this important?

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Question You Should Have Answered in your Packet: Why was Paul Cuffe's school different than other school's of this time?

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Question You Should Have Answered in your Packet: Why was Paul Cuffe's school different than other school's of this time?

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The exceptional life of Benjamin Banneker - Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua

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Good Background Video. Source: Crash Course Black American History

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Good Background Video. Source: Crash Course Black American History

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Elizabeth Key: Crash Course Black American History #3

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Source: Crash Course Black American History 

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Source: Crash Course Black American History 

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Phillis Wheatley: Crash Course Black American History #7

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John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

In 1780, the proclamation "all men are born free and equal," rang out from the central square in the small town of Sheffield in western Massachusetts. The line was from the state's newly ratified constitution, read aloud for a proud public to hear. America's war for independence was raging and, like the rest of the burgeoning country, the town was gripped by revolutionary fever.

But one woman who heard it wasn't inspired-she was enraged. Elizabeth Freeman, then known only as "Bett," was an enslaved woman who understood the irony in the declaration right away. As she watched the men around her declare freedom from oppressive rule, it only stood to reason that she should do the same.

Freeman marched, by some accounts immediately, to the house of Theodore Sedgwick, a prominent local lawyer, and demanded a dramatic accounting for the hypocrisy: she wanted to sue the state of Massachusetts for her freedom.

"I heard that paper read yesterday, that says all men are born equal and that every man has a right to freedom," she said, "I am not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?"

Perhaps surprisingly, Sedgwick agreed to represent her. Her trial the following year became what has been called "the trial of the century," rocking not only Massachusetts but the entire institution of slavery.

"She was kind of the Rosa Parks of her time," says David Levinson, author along with Emilie Piper of One Minute a Free Woman, a book about Freeman.

Massachusetts occupied an odd place in the history of slavery. It was the first colony to legalize the practice and its residents were active in the slave trade.
What made it different, however, was that state law recognized enslaved people as both property and as persons- which meant they could prosecute the men who owned them, requiring they prove lawful ownership. By 1780, nearly 30 enslaved people had sued for their freedom on the basis of a variety of technicalities, such as a reneged promise of freedom or an illegal purchase.

Freeman's case, however, was different. She didn't seek her freedom through a loophole but instead called into account the existence of slavery, which affected an estimated 2.2 percent of Massachusetts' population.

"If we can imagine this woman, this slave woman, reading a constitution and saying, 'Well, if everybody is created equal, then that includes me, too,' and challenging the state government on this issue-it was acts like that, that forced the Massachusetts legislature to look long and hard at the whole contagion of liberty," Margaret Washington, Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, told PBS.

The series of legal challenges to slave owners is evidence that a battle was brewing and that Freeman may not have been acting in isolation. Some historians believe she was deliberately selected as a sympathetic test case for ending slavery in Massachusetts. According to Levinson, Freeman was a nurse and a midwife who was well-known and respected throughout the area. Because of her work, Freeman traveled widely and came into regular contact with white people, unusual for an enslaved woman at the time.

Details about Freeman, who could not read or write, are hard to come by. "We're writing the life of a woman who left no written word. Her only writing was an 'X' mark on her deed," says Levinson. But the documentation that does exists, he adds, shows she was spoken of in glowing terms by the people she worked for or interacted with, who described her as trustworthy, honest, hardworking, and loyal.

"She was the perfect person to be the plaintiff," says Levinson. "If anyone should be free it should be her."

Levinson adds that Sedgwick didn't oppose slavery because he thought it was wrong-in fact, Sedgwick himself owned enslaved workers. He opposed it because he worried it could affect the colonies' fight for independence from Britain. While Massachusetts was a center of the early slave trade, Boston was a hub of abolitionist organizing-a source of tension at a time when Sedgwick feared any lack of cohesion could disrupt independence.

"Slavery was a very contentious issue in Massachusetts and he felt it was it causing political problems-it was a divisive force and he wanted unity," says Levinson.
READ MORE: 6 Early Abolitionists

Daderot/Wikimedia Commons

Enslaved for decades in service to a judge

Freeman was enslaved in the house of John Ashley, a prominent judge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, from 1746 to the years leading up to her 1781 court case. Like Sedgwick and many men of his time, Ashley spent his days agitating for freedom from British rule while participating in history's most naked manifestation of one human's subjugation of another.

John Ashley's wife had a reputation for extraordinary cruelty and one day, her anger at an enslaved girl named Lizzie boiled over. She ripped an iron shovel out of the oven and raised it above her head, poised to bring it crashing down upon Lizzie, who most historians believe was either Freeman's daughter or her sister. Freeman threw herself in front of Lizzie, absorbing the blow. Red hot from the coals, the shovel sliced so deep into Freeman's arm it hit bone.

She would carry the scar for the rest of her life but would later point out, "Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzie," according to accounts from Sedgwick's daughter, Catharine.

Being enslaved in the Ashley household meant Freeman had a front row seat to the revolution, which likely informed her own rebellion early on.

In early 1773, about eight years before Freeman's court case, eleven of Sheffield's wealthiest and most influential residents gathered in one of the Ashley's upstairs' rooms to draft their grievances and decry British tyranny. Resentment against British rule had begun to bubble over and by the end of the year, American colonists would hurl 342 chests of tea into the harbor to protest "taxation without representation." The Boston Tea Party, as it would come to be known, would galvanize the fight for independence.

The man chosen to pen the statement was Sedgwick, who would go on not only to represent Freeman but to become a senator, the Speaker of the House, and a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

The Sheffield Declaration outlined grievances like unfair taxation but it also painted a sweeping portrait of autonomy that would shape the language of the Declaration of Independence three years later, including that all men are "equal, free, and independent, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty, and their property."

Library of Congress

Freeman's case ends slavery in Massachusetts

By some accounts, Freeman was in the very room where the documents were being drafted, serving the men as they dreamed of freedom.

"Any time, any time 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," Freeman would later say. "Just to stand one minute on god' airth a free woman-I would."

Freeman was poetic about freedom but she was also active in its pursuit, which was less unusual at the time than documented history often suggests. While Freeman's case was one of the most consequential, it certainly wasn't the only case of an enslaved person using the legal system to resist.

One enslaved man, Quock Walker, was already in the throes of a legal battle when Freeman was gearing up for her suit. Walker had been inherited by Nathaniel Jennison after the first man who owned him, James Caldwell, died and Jennison married his widow. Walker claimed that Caldwell had promised him freedom when he turned 25 and, as he was already 28, fled. Jennison caught him and beat him.

Walker responded by suing him for assault and battery, claiming that Jennison didn't own him. Walker would eventually win and Jennison would be forced to pay him damages.

Freeman's case was more radical than that. She wasn't only saying that her enslavement was unjust, she was saying that all enslavement was unjust.

It wasn't just radical, it was effective. A jury of twelve local farmers, all men and all white according to Levinson, ruled in favor of Freeman in 1781, giving her freedom and awarding her 30 shillings in damages.

The first thing she did was change her name, casting off her slave name in favor of one that celebrated her new status.

Her case, along with Walkers, was the death knell for slavery in Massachusetts. In 1790, according to the the federal census, Massachusetts no longer had any slaves which made it the first state to comprehensively abolish slavery.

Freeman went on to work for the Sedgwicks, becoming, by their own accounts, a trusted member of the family. Her prominence in the community as a midwife grew and her achievements, outlined in a will, included owning a house, 20 acres, 300 dollars, and a long list of possessions. To say this was unusual for a Black woman at the time would be an understatement. When she died in 1829, around the age of 85, hundreds attended her funeral.

Her gravestone, still present today in the Sedgwick family cemetery, was inscribed with the message, "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."
READ MORE: How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox

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Meet Elizabeth Freeman, the First Enslaved Woman to Sue for Her Freedom-and Win

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In 1780, the proclamation "all men are born free and equal," rang out from the central square in the small town of Sheffield in western Massachusetts. The line was from the state's newly ratified constitution, read aloud for a proud public to hear.

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Ottobah Cugoano | Author and anti-slavery campaigner | Blue Plaques | English Heritage

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Ottobah Cugoano was an anti-slavery campaigner and one of the first formerly enslaved peoples to write and publish a text in the English language. He is commemorated with a blue plaque at Schomberg House on Pall Mall, where from about 1784 until 1791 he worked as a servant while writing and campaign…

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5 Major Accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker - HRF

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Benjamin Banneker was an astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac maker and a vocal critic of slavery. His stand against racial discrimination is well documented but some of the other Benjamin Banneker major accomplishments are disputed. There are many who accept the accomplishments at their fac…

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First African Woman to Win Her Freedom in Court

Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African ancestry in the American colonies to sue for her freedom from slavery and win. Elizabeth Key won her freedom and that of her infant son on July 21, 1656 in the colony of Virginia, in one of the earliest freedom suits in the colonies. She sued based on the fact that her father was an Englishman and that she was a baptized Christian.

Born in Warwick County, Virginia in 1630, Elizabeth Key was the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved black mother and a white English planter father, Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. She spent the first several years of her life with her mother.

Before moving back to England in 1636, Thomas Key made arrangements for Elizabeth's godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. It stipulated that Higginson would be Elizabeth's guardian, that she would be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen.

Thomas Key died later that year, and Higginson sold Elizabeth to Colonel John Mottram, for whom she was required to serve another nine years before being released from bondage. Mottram took her to Northumberland County, where he built a plantation, Coan Hall.

There Elizabeth remained until 1650, when Colonel Mottram brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. Under the English law of primogeniture, only the eldest son could inherit the father's real property, so many younger sons crossed the Atlantic to seek their lives in the American colonies.

During this time, William and Elizabeth fell in love, and had a son together, whom they named John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture, and Elizabeth Key's future was uncertain.

After Mottram's death in 1655, Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom after the executors of her late master's estate classified her and her infant son as Negroes (and part of the property assets of the estate) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth Key petitioned the court for her freedom. By that time, she had already served as an indentured servant for nineteen years.

Key's lawsuit was one of the earliest freedom suits in the American colonies filed by a person of African ancestry. With Grinstead acting as her lawyer, Key asked the court to free her based on an English law that stated that if a child's father was a free man, then the child should be free. The court gave Elizabeth her freedom:

We whose names are underwritten being impaneled upon a Jury to try a difference between Elizabeth pretended slave to the Estate of Colonel John Mottram deceased and the overseers of the said Estate do find that the said Elizabeth ought to be free...

Unfortunately, the decision was later overturned by a higher court that ruled that Key was a slave, but she did not stop there. She appealed to Virginia's General Assembly. This excerpt is from the General Assembly's report:

It appears to us that she is the daughter of Thomas Key by several Evidences... That she hath been by verdict of a Jury impaneled 20th January 1655 in the County of Northumberland found to be free by several oaths which the Jury desired might be Recorded. That by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to be free. That she hath been long since Christened... That Thomas Key sold her only for nine Years to Higginson with several conditions to use her more Respectfully than a Common servant or slave... For these Reasons we conceive the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corn and Clothes and give her satisfaction for the time she hath served longer than She ought to have done.

The committee sent the case back to the courts to be retried, and Elizabeth finally won her freedomin 1656. After winning the case, Elizabeth and William were married, and they had another son together, William.

William Grinstead died early in 1661. The widow Elizabeth Grinstead later remarried, to the widower John Parse. Upon his death, she and her sons John and William Grinstead II inherited 500 acres, helping to secure their future.

In 1662, Virginia reacted to lawsuits like Key's by passing a law to clarify the status of the children of women of African descent. This statute imposed lifetime hereditary bondage on Africans, and stated that a child would be "bond or free according to the condition of the mother," rather than the father, as was the case in England.

This legislation ensured that all children of women slaves would be kept as slaves for labor unless explicitly freed. It also freed the fathers from acknowledging the children as theirs, providing support or arranging for apprenticeships, or emancipating them. Some white fathers did take an interest in their mixed-race children and gave them an education or land; many others abandoned them.

Whatever their origins, free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia seem to have formed a larger share of the total black population than at any other time during slavery. In some counties, perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s. And these free blacks interacted with their white neighbors basically as equals.

SOURCES
Africans in Court
The Invention of the White Race
Wikipedia: Elizabeth Key Grinstead

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Elizabeth Key | History of American Women

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First African Woman to Win Her Freedom in Court Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African ancestry in the American colonies to sue for her freedom from slavery and win. Elizabeth Key won her freedom and that of her infant son on July 21, 1656 in the colony of Virginia, in one of the earliest freedom suits in the colonies.

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Prince Hall, one of Boston's most prominent citizens during the revolutionary period, was the founder of the African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons of Boston, the world's first lodge of black Freemasonry and the first society in American history devoted to social, political, and economic improvement.

Not much is known of Hall's life before the Revolution. He was born in 1735 and was the slave of William Hall of Boston. His son, Primus, was born in 1756 to Delia, a servant in another household. In 1762, at the age of 27, Hall joined the Congregational Church, and soon after, married an enslaved woman named Sarah Ritchie. Eight years later, after Sarah's death, he married Flora Gibbs of Gloucester.

A month after the Boston Massacre, William Hall freed Prince; his certificate of manumission read that he was "no longer Reckoned a slave, but [had] always accounted as a free man." Hall made his living as a huckster (peddler), caterer and leather dresser, and was listed as a voter and a taxpayer. He owned a small house and leather workshop in Boston.

It is believed that he was one of the six black men of Massachusetts named Prince Hall listed in military records of the Revolution, and he may well have fought at Bunker Hill. A bill he sent to a Colonel Crafts indicates that he crafted five leather drumheads for the Boston Regiment of Artillery in April, 1777.

In 1775, Hall and fourteen other free blacks joined a British army lodge of Masons who were stationed in Boston. After the British departed, they formed their own lodge, African Lodge No. 1, though it would be twelve years before they received a permanent charter. Hall became the lodge's first Grand Master.

Hall was active in the affairs of Boston's black community, using his position as "Worshipful Master" of the black Masons to speak out against slavery and the denial of black rights. For years, he protested the lack of schools for black children and finally established one in his own home.

In his last published speech, his charge to the African Lodge in June 1797, Hall spoke of mob violence against blacks: "Patience, I say; for were we not possessed of a great measure of it, we could not bear up under the daily insults we meet with in the streets of Boston, much more on public days of recreation. How, at such times, are we shamefully abused, and that to such a degree, that we may truly be said to carry our lives in our hands, and the arrows of death are flying about our heads....tis not for want of courage in you, for they know that they dare not face you man for man, but in a mob, which we despise..."

Prince Hall died in 1807 at the age of 72. A year later, his lodge honored him by changing its name to Prince Hall Grand Lodge.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives

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Prince Hall, one of Boston's most prominent citizens during the revolutionary period, was the founder of the African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons of Boston, the world's first lodge of black Freemasonry and the first society in American history devoted to social, political, and economic improvement.