Read Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Eighty years before the Emancipation Proclamation freed American slaves, a Massachusetts woman helped free the slaves of that state…just by going to court
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RAVE WORDS
In 1773 the leading citizens of Sheffield, Massachusetts, met in the home of Colonel John Ashley and drafted the document that some historians have called America’s first Declaration of Independence, the Sheffield Declaration. “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other,” it stated, “and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”
Ironically, as the men toiled over the document, which protested English tyranny, they were waited on by Betty Freeman (also called Elizabeth, or Bett), Colonel Ashley’s slave. He’d bought several slaves when they were only babies, and they’d been held in involuntary servitude ever since.
Freeman overheard the repeated talk of liberty as the men drafted the Sheffield Declaration. She heard more of the same three years later, when Ashley and his associates discussed the Declaration of Independence, which stated, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She got another earful in 1780, when Ashley and his friends mulled over the new Massachusetts constitution, which proclaimed that “all men are born free and equal, and have the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.”
ALL TALK
These were noble words, but none of them were meant to apply to Freeman—not even after her husband, also a slave, gave his life fighting on the American side during the Revolutionary War. Born into slavery, Betty, her sister, and all their descendants would live in slavery forever if Colonel Ashley and others like him had their way.
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THE “LADY” OF THE HOUSE
As deeply as she resented her lack of freedom, Betty got along with Colonel Ashley. Not so with his wife, Hannah, a petty tyrant who cruelly beat her slaves over the tiniest transgression. Once, when she had caught Betty’s sister, Lizzie, eating leftover scraps of bread dough, Mrs. Ashley accused her of “stealing” food and swung at her with a hot shovel pulled from the fireplace. Betty blocked the blow intended for her sister and received a gash on her arm that cut all the way to the bone. She carried that scar for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t long after that incident that Freeman happened to visit the village meeting house while the Declaration of Independence was being read aloud. Maybe it was the fresh wound on her arm, maybe it was hearing the words of equality and freedom spoken one more time…whatever it was, something clicked inside her. The next day, she left the Ashleys and walked over to the offices of Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer and vocal opponent of slavery. Freeman knew him because he was one of the people who had helped draft the Sheffield Declaration.
“Sir,” she asked, “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?”
EQUAL = EQUAL
Wouldn’t it? How could a state that proclaimed “all men are born free and equal,” and was part of a country that believed “all men are created equal” reconcile these statements with the institution of slavery? Sedgwick agreed with Freeman: It couldn’t. He decided to help her by filing a lawsuit to win her freedom, on the grounds that the language of the new state constitution made slavery illegal.
The laws of Massachusetts at the end of the 18th century were quite peculiar by modern standards: They defined slaves as property, but also recognized that they were human beings, which meant that they had legal standing in state courts and could file lawsuits. In recent years a number of slaves had sued for their freedom and won, but not by challenging the legality of slavery directly. If a slave could prove that their mother had been born free, they could regain their freedom. Likewise, if a slave owner had made a promise to free a slave and then reneged, the slave could sue on grounds of breach of promise. Freeman’s lawsuit was different: It would be the first to challenge the legality of slavery itself.
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SEE YOU IN COURT
The new state constitution had been in effect for less than a year when Sedgwick went to court in May 1781 and filed what is called a “writ of replevin.” The writ ordered Colonel Ashley to surrender property—Betty and another slave, Brom, who had joined in the suit—that wasn’t rightfully his. When Ashley refused to obey the writ, a trial was scheduled for the following August.
Colonel Ashley probably didn’t realize it at the time, but the odds were against him from the start. Although slavery was still legal in Massachusetts, it had become very unpopular. The case was going to be tried before a jury, at a time when citizens of Massachusetts were still fighting in the Revolutionary War. These people took their freedoms seriously. And sure enough, when the trial was over, the jury decided in favor of Betty and Brom. The court set both of them free and ordered Ashley to pay them 30 shillings in damages, plus court costs.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Brom and Bett v. Ashley
was a lower court case and did not set much of a precedent—Brom and Bett were the only slaves freed by the decision. But it did set a precedent of another kind, demonstrating that if slaves went to court to win their freedom, juries were very likely to give it to them. Slavery began to die a death of a thousand cuts in Massachusetts as other slaves filed lawsuits or just walked away from their owners, knowing that the owners couldn’t turn to the law for assistance. Owning slaves in the state had suddenly become a very risky business.
Another nail in slavery’s coffin came as a result of a second lawsuit, filed in 1781 by a slave named Quock Walker, who sued his owner in civil court for assault and battery after the owner beat him for trying to escape. Walker not only won the case and £50 in damages, but the attorney general prosecuted his owner on
criminal
charges of assault and battery. That case went all the way to the Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court. Once again the jury sided with the slave, by finding his owner guilty and fining him 40 shillings.
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Chief Justice William Cushing’s instructions to the jury turned out to be even more important than their decision. He stated that “perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government; and…liberty can be only forfeited by criminal conduct or relinquished by personal consent.” Cushing’s words weren’t legally binding but they might as well have been—they made it clear that the court was against slavery. Without the protection of the law, slavery was doomed in Massachusetts.
AFTERMATH
Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who had helped Betty Freeman, went on to an illustrious career in politics and law. He served in both houses of state government, as well as in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, where he was Speaker of the House from 1799 to 1801. In 1802 he became a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and served there until his death in 1813.
What happened to Brom is unknown; after the case ended he disappeared into history. We do know what happened to Betty, however. After Colonel Ashley lost the case, he asked Betty to come back and work for wages. Would you have accepted such an offer? Neither did Betty—she went to work for Theodore Sedgwick instead. After many years, she saved enough money to buy her own house and retire. When she died in 1829 at about the age of 85, she was buried in the Sedgwick family plot in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where her grave can still be seen today. One of her great-grandchildren was W.E.B. DuBois, one of the most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century.
THE MEANING OF FREEDOM
Many years after Betty’s death, Theodore Sedgwick’s daughter Catherine recounted Betty’s explanation of what freedom meant to her: “Any time while I was a slave,” she said, “if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman.”
Philadelphia was the first U.S. city to have a public water system.
Booker T. Washington is one of the most important figures in African-American history. He was born into slavery in 1856, but went on to found the Tuskegee Institute and improve race relations in America—decades before the civil rights movement of the 1960s
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“Never be ashamed to ask for information. The ignorant man will always be ignorant if he fears that by asking he will display ignorance.”
“It’s better to be alone than in bad company.”
“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
“I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.”
“No man who continues to add something to the well-being of the place in which he lives is left long without proper reward.”
“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”
“Success is to be measured not by the position that one has reached in life but by the obstacles which he has overcome.”
“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”
“Great men cultivate love.”
“The highest test of a civilization is its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. Like an individual, it lifts itself up by lifting others up.”
“We should never permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”
“Most leaders spend time trying to get others to think highly of them, when instead they should try to get their people to think more highly of themselves.”
“The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.”
Munchkin: Judy Garland was 16 when she played an 11-year-old in
The Wizard of Oz
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When this bizarre story surfaced a few years ago, it reminded us of this quote, attributed to Warren G. Harding: “I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends—they’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights.”
N
ORTHERN EXPOSURE
If you had to invade another country, how would you do it? Believe it or not, the United States military spent a lot of time pondering that question in the late 1920s, when it came up with a plan to invade its closest neighbor, Canada.
There was certainly a precedent for the two nations battling it out. The Continental Army invaded Canada during the American Revolution, and the U.S. Army made repeated incursions during the War of 1812. In 1839 the state of Maine only narrowly avoided a shooting war with the province of New Brunswick over a border dispute. Then, in 1866, about 800 Irish-American members of a group called the Fenian Brotherhood tried to occupy part of Canada for the purpose of using it as a bargaining chip to force Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland. (They were quickly driven back across the U.S. border.)
That last invasion had an upside for Canadians: It convinced the last holdouts in the independent provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec that they’d be better able to defend themselves against the
next
invasion if they banded together to form the Dominion of Canada, which they did on July 1, 1867.
TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Of course, these skirmishes paled in comparison to World War I, which raged from 1914 to 1918. That war, which was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, caught most of the belligerents by surprise. It also lasted longer and was far more costly in blood and treasure than anyone ever dreamed a war could be. None of the nations that fought in it wanted to be caught off guard again; many began planning for whatever war might be lurking around the corner. The American military drafted a whole series of color-coded war plans to cover just about every conceivable scenario: War Plan Black was a plan for war with Germany; War Plan Orange dealt with Japan, a rapidly growing power in the Pacific. Other colors included Green (Mexico), Gold (France), Brown (The Philippines), and Yellow (China). There was even a War Plan Indigo, in case the United States had to invade Iceland, and a War Plan White that dealt with civil unrest within America’s own borders.
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SEEING RED
War Plan Red was America’s plan for going to war with the British Empire, in the unlikely event that Britain (code name: Red) decided to “eliminate [the United States] as an economic and commercial rival.” Since Canada (code name: Crimson) was part of the Empire and shared a 5,527-mile border with the U.S., much of the plan dealt with invading Canada and knocking it out of action before the British could use it as a staging ground for attacks on the U.S.
Here’s how an invasion of Canada would have gone:
• The United States (code name: Blue) would attack and occupy Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada’s largest Atlantic port. The attack would deny Britain access to the rail and road links it would need to land troops in Canada and disperse them across the country.