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Freedom Suits Facts and Outcomes (1656-1781)

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Freedom Suits Facts and Outcomes (1656-1781) ELIZABETH KEY Elizabeth Key was born in about 1630 or 1632, probably on the north side of the James River near its mouth. Her father, an English planter, resided there late in the 1620s and in 1630 when he was a burgess in the General Assembly. Her father claimed ownership of her mother, who was of African birth or descent. In the autumn of 1636 when her father and his wife were preparing to return to England, he transferred Elizabeth to Humphrey Higginson, later a member of the governor's Council, for a period of nine years. The transfer specified that she be treated well and given her freedom if Higginson returned to England or died before the end of nine years. Elizabeth remained in constant service much longer than the nine year period, until the winter of 1655-1656. Over that time period she passed from Higginson's service (he moved to England) into that of John Mottram, a prominent and relatively prosperous planter in Northumberland County, near the mouth of the Potomac River. By the summer of 1655 she and a white Englishman, William Grinstead, had a son and another child who died in infancy. Mottram died in 1655. The inventory of his estate, taken on July 4 of that year, separately identified six servants and five "Negroes." The estate inventory included "Elizabeth the Negro woman & her sonne." Under the English common law doctrine a father's status determined that of a newborn child. Her father was free, so his daughter should have been born free. Under another principle of English common law, Englishmen could not hold Christians in slavery, an important point because Elizabeth had been baptized and was a member of the Church of England. The administrators of Mottrom's estate appealed the verdict to the governor and members of the Council of State, which was the colony's only court of appeal. They heard the case on March 12, 1656. The court's records for the period are lost and the reasons for its decision are not known, but it is clear that the court ruled against her. Elizabeth and William appealed the court's decision to the General Assembly that first met on March 10, 1656. Elizabeth and Willaim, her English common-law husband, took to the courts to sue the administrators of Mottrom's estate to obtain Elizabeth’s freedom. On January 20, 1656 a Northumberland County jury decided that she should be free. ELIZABETH FREEMAN Elizabeth Freeman, known as Bett in early life and later as Mum Bett, was born to enslaved parents in 1742 at the farm of Dutchman Pieter Hogeboom in Claverack, New York, about twenty miles south of Albany. Bett and her younger sister Lizzie grew up as enslaved children. Hogeboom gave the two girls to John Ashley, of Sheffield, Massachusetts when John married Hogeboom's daughter Hannah. The Massachusetts Constitution was ratified on June 15, 1780. Article I included the following: "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; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness." In a fit of anger one day in 1780, Mrs. Ashley raised a red-hot kitchen shovel to strike Mum Bett's sister Lizzie. Mum Bett successfully blocked the blow, and received a deep wound in her arm, and remained scarred for life. When Mum Bett left and refused to return, John Ashley went to court to claim his property. Mum Bett had listened carefully while the wealthy men she served talked about the new state constitution, and she decided that if all people were born free and equal, then she must be, too. Around the time when John Ashley appealed to the court for Mum Bett's return, she went to attorney Theodore Sedgwick to help her sue for her freedom in court based on what she knew about the state constitution. Sedgwick willingly accepted her case, and would later say that there was nothing "submissive or subdued" about Mum Bett's character. But because women had such limited legal rights, the lawyers decided to add another of Ashley's slaves, a man called Brom, as a party to the suit. The case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley was heard in August 1781 before the County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Sedgwick and Reeve asserted that the constitutional provision that "all men are born free and equal" abolished slavery in the state. FREEDOM SUIT RESULTS RESULTS OF THE ELIZABETH KEY FREEDOM SUIT: The assembly referred the evidence to a committee of burgesses, who concluded that the Northumberland County jury had been correct and that "by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begott by a free-man ought to bee free." That appeared to confirm the enslaved status of Elizabeth Key's mother and that Elizabeth Key had been held in slavery, not as a servant for a limited specified time. The committee also noted that she had been christened, that Higginson had been her godfather, and that "by report shee is able to give a very good account of her fayth." The committee of burgesses therefore determined that under all the existing rules of law, even without any clear parliamentary or Virginia statutes and in spite of the General Court's verdict, she was entitled to her freedom and to her father's surname. The burgesses also stated that she was entitled to compensation for the time that she had been a servant or slave beyond the nine years specified in the agreement of 1636. Nevertheless, because nobody appeared at the assembly to argue the estate's side of the case, the burgesses recommended that the case be sent back to the county court. Early in the summer of 1656, one of the administrators of Mottrom's estate asked the governor to order the county court not to act until the General Court could again consider the case, and the governor complied, but the county court acted, anyway, perhaps before it received the governor's directive. On July 21, 1656, the justices of the peace in Northumberland County ruled that Elizabeth Key be free, that she be paid from Mottrom's estate the customary freedom allowance of corn and clothing that an indentured servant received at the end of his or her service, and also that she receive compensation for the additional years of her service as the burgesses had recommended. By those acts, the county court freed her from slavery according to the common law and also from any lesser service according to the law of master and servant as understood and administered in Virginia. RESULTS OF THE MUM BETT FREEDOM SUIT: On August 22, 1781, the jury ruled in Freeman's favor, and she became the first African American woman to be set free under the Massachusetts Constitution. The jury found that " ... Brom & Bett are not, nor were they at the time of the purchase of the original writ the legal Negro of the said John Ashley ... " The jury ordered Ashley to pay her damages of thirty shillings and the court costs. LONG TERM RESULTS LONG TERM RESULTS OF THE ELIZABETH KEY FREEDOM SUIT In 1662, the General Assembly passed an act to reverse the English Common Law doctrine of partus sequitur partem and replace it with partus sequitur ventrem, making the status of the infant depend on that of the mother rather than the father. The law was probably a reaction, directly or in part, to Elizabeth Key's successful suit to secure her freedom. Thereafter, at the time of their birth the children of white male Virginians and enslaved female laborers legally became somebody's slave property for life. In 1667 the assembly also changed the law to specify that conversion of an enslaved person to Christianity did not confer freedom on that person. The new laws were two among several instances in which the needs of Virginia tobacco planters for laborers and the practical consequences of managing enslaved workers led seventeenth-century legislators and judges to modify or reverse ancient rules of English law for the benefit of the planters. The unforeseen and unfortunate consequences of the laws that Virginia’s legislators passed after Elizabeth Key's freedom suit unfortunately influenced legal codes elsewhere in the English North American colonies. Ultimately, the Virginia Assembly's decision to close the loopholes to freedom that Elizabeth's suit exposed doomed hundreds of thousands of men and women to lifetime slavery, including a large portion of mixed-race men and women. LONG TERM RESULTS OF THE MUM BETT FREEDOM SUIT: Mum Bett’s county court case, decided in August 1781, was cited as a precedent in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court appeal review of the Quack Walker case. When the state Supreme Court upheld Walker's freedom under the constitution, it was considered to have informally ended slavery in Massachusetts..
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