By 1781, Elizabeth Freeman found herself in an extraordinary position. Enslaved for nearly thirty years in the household of Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, she could not read or write. Yet she had heard the words of the Massachusetts Constitution, adopted just the year before, declaring that all people are born free and equal. She decided to test whether those words meant anything.
Elizabeth, known as Bett, had spent most of her life in Ashley’s home, a grand two-and-a-half-story house that still stands today as a museum. Born into slavery in colonial New York around 1744, she had been sent to the Ashley household as a child of seven or eight to serve as a domestic servant. Her duties involved the endless, exhausting manual labor of maintaining an eighteenth-century home. Accounts describe Hannah Ashley, the colonel’s wife, as cruel.
In one famous incident, Hannah grabbed a heated shovel to strike Bett’s sister, Lizzie. Bett intervened, taking a deep wound that left a permanent scar. Rather than hiding it, she displayed it openly to visitors, a silent statement about her mistress’s brutality. During these decades, Bett also became a mother.
The identity of her child’s father remains uncertain; accounts say he left to serve in the American Revolution and never returned. While men marched off to fight for liberty, Bett remained in bondage, raising a child in a world that denied her freedom. But in Sheffield, words were being written that would soon make this contradiction impossible to ignore. In January 1773, as tensions with Britain mounted, a gathering of Massachusetts landowners met at the Ashley house to draft what became known as the Sheffield Declaration.
It proclaimed that mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent, with the right to enjoy their lives, liberties, and property. The document was largely drafted by a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick. Three years later, Thomas Jefferson would echo these phrases in the Declaration of Independence. Bett lived under that same roof, listening to talk of liberty while remaining enchained.
By 1781, she had had enough. Learning of the new Massachusetts Constitution, she sought out Sedgwick, who had drafted the Sheffield Declaration. According to a later account, she told him that she had read a document saying all people were created equal and that every person had a right to freedom, asking whether the law would grant her liberty. Sedgwick, who believed slavery contradicted the state’s new constitution, agreed to take her case.
He filed suit on behalf of Bett and a fellow enslaved man named Brom, whose inclusion strengthened the case given the limited legal rights of women at the time. The case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, opened in Great Barrington in August 1781. Sedgwick was joined by Tapping Reeve, founder of one of America’s earliest law schools.
Together, they were among the most prominent lawyers in Massachusetts. They argued that the state constitution made slavery illegal. John Ashley responded that Bett and Brom were not slaves but homeless servants, a common argument in such cases. The court ruled in favor of Bett and Brom, ordering Ashley not only to free them but to pay compensation for years of unpaid labor.
Bett achieved what once seemed impossible. She became the first African American woman to gain her freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution, transforming its promise of equality into a binding reality. Afterward, both she and Brom were offered paid positions in the Ashley household. Bett refused, choosing instead to work for Theodore Sedgwick.
She spent more than a quarter century in his home as a beloved family member and governess to his children, earning the nickname Mum Bett. She adopted the surname Freeman, becoming Elizabeth Freeman. One of Sedgwick’s daughters, Catharine, later became a famous author and provided the most detailed account of Bett’s life in an 1853 essay. The case’s impact reached far beyond one woman’s freedom.
It was one of several suits in the early 1780s arguing that slavery had become unconstitutional under the new Massachusetts Constitution. By 1783, the state’s highest court declared that slavery was incompatible with the constitution. When the first federal census was taken in 1790, no enslaved persons were recorded in Massachusetts. The state became one of the first in America to end slavery, helping change the course of history.
In her later years, Elizabeth Freeman worked as a healer, nurse, and midwife. She saved enough money to buy her own home in Stockbridge, near her daughter and grandchildren. She died in December 1829 at approximately eighty-five years old. She is buried in the Sedgwick family plot, the only non-family member interred there.
Her tombstone reads: “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 or equal. ” In 2022, the Sheffield Historical Society unveiled a statue in her honor. Julia Chinn’s story took a very different path.
Born into slavery in Kentucky in the 1790s, she was sent to the household of Richard Mentor Johnson, an ambitious politician who would one day become Vice President of the United States. Johnson never married. He took Julia as his concubine, a relationship that grew complex over time. She bore him two daughters, Imogene and Adaline, and he openly acknowledged them as his children, giving them his surname.
He referred to Julia as his wife, though their relationship existed outside the bounds of legal marriage, which was prohibited between races in Kentucky at the time. While Johnson spent roughly six months of each year in Washington serving in Congress, Julia managed Blue Spring Farm, a large estate with numerous enslaved workers. She dealt with contractors, purchased supplies, and organized social events. She played piano and reportedly created the refined atmosphere expected at such gatherings.
She even founded the Choctaw Academy, a boarding school on the farm for Native American children, and arranged for a local minister to educate her daughters. Decades later, the stone building still stands in a Kentucky field, a visible remnant of her life. Yet the relationship was far from equal. In 1815, after his father’s death, Johnson became Julia’s legal owner.
He never freed her. Historians suggest he may have feared emancipation would weaken the bonds that tied her to him. Julia had influence within the household, arranging for her brother and his family to live on the farm, but in 1821 they were sold, likely due to Johnson’s mounting financial pressures. Despite being enslaved, Julia sometimes struggled to maintain order, and letters show Johnson instructing his white employees to obey her, though some enslaved workers ignored her commands.
In the summer of 1833, a cholera epidemic swept through the Midwest. Julia nursed sick students at the academy for weeks until she herself fell ill and died. Johnson was reportedly devastated. In later years, he entered relationships with other enslaved women on the farm, one of whom left him and was sold at public auction.
Julia’s story nearly vanished. During the 1836 presidential election, propaganda attacked Johnson for his relationship with an enslaved woman, and a political cartoon deliberately darkened the skin of Julia and her daughters to mock him. Yet Johnson was elected Vice President. After his death in 1850, his brothers destroyed his papers and records, likely to erase the memory of his controversial relationship and to secure his estate for themselves rather than allowing his mixed-race daughter, Imogene, to inherit.
A court declared he left no surviving widow or children. The forged will entered official records, and Julia Chinn faded from history. She was rediscovered in the late twentieth century, and her story has since been revived by historians and biographers. The story of Joyce Heth reveals a different kind of exploitation.
In the fall and early winter of 1835, a woman named Joyce Heth became the talk of New England and New York. She was the sole attraction in a traveling show run by Phineas T. Barnum, then a largely unknown impresario who would soon earn fame as the greatest showman on earth. Heth was extraordinarily old—so old, in fact, that she claimed to have nursed George Washington as an infant.
Barnum exaggerated further, declaring she was born in 1674 and was 161 years old. Visitors to Niblo’s Garden in New York City were fascinated by her stories about young Georgie, whom she claimed to have raised in Virginia a century earlier. For a time, Barnum profited handsomely. But on February 19, 1836, Heth died.
Afterward, Barnum staged a public autopsy, charging fifteen hundred people fifty cents each to attend. The examining physician concluded she was a woman in her late seventies or early eighties, not the ancient figure Barnum claimed. Ever the showman, Barnum spun the coverage, publishing odd stories that the doctor had examined a different body and that Heth was alive and touring Europe. The truth was far grimmer.
Joyce Heth appears to have been born in the 1750s, likely in Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia. No record connects her to the Washington plantation at Mount Vernon. She first appears in the historical record as an elderly enslaved woman in Kentucky. Barnum, unable to legally buy a slave in the free states, forged an eighteenth-century bill of sale linking her to the Washington family and rented her from her owner.
He displayed her six days a week for over twelve hours a day, allowing crowds to shake her hand, check her pulse, and touch her, treating her like an exhibit. He pocketed all proceeds, reportedly more than fifteen hundred dollars, a substantial sum at the time. Rumors circulated that he had gotten her drunk and pulled out her remaining teeth to make her look more convincingly ancient. Many blamed the exhausting schedule for her death.
Heth was buried in Bethel, Connecticut. Decades later, Barnum, who became a prominent abolitionist, acknowledged his exploitation of her as the least deserving of his efforts in an 1869 memoir, minimizing the episode. But her story has since been reclaimed, with historians highlighting how she fell victim to a man often celebrated as the greatest showman of his age, a man whose career of exploiting vulnerable people began with her. Biddy Mason’s life followed yet another arc.
Born into slavery in Georgia in 1818, she was separated from her parents as a child and sold to a plantation owner. In the 1830s, she was given or sold to Robert and Rebecca Smith, who moved their household west to Mississippi. Biddy learned animal husbandry, agriculture, folk medicine, and midwifery. In 1847, Mormon missionaries arrived in Mississippi, and Robert Smith converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The family, including their enslaved people, joined a caravan heading to Utah. Biddy’s medical skills proved invaluable on the journey, and she was an essential member of the expedition. In 1851, Brigham Young sent a mission to San Bernardino, California, informing participants that California was a free state and that bringing enslaved people there would free them. Robert Smith joined the mission but refused to emancipate his enslaved people.
Biddy and her daughters remained in bondage for several years, unaware of their rights under California law. In 1855, Biddy’s daughter Ellen began dating a free Black man named Charles Owens. Learning from him that slavery was illegal in California, Biddy filed a petition in the Los Angeles district court. Because her owner failed to appear, the court granted freedom to Biddy and her three daughters in January 1856.
She adopted the name Mason, the middle name of a Mormon man she respected. Working as a nurse and midwife, she prospered during a smallpox epidemic in the late 1850s and early 1860s. By 1866, she had saved $250 to buy a house on Spring Street in Los Angeles, becoming one of the first Black women to own property in California. She continued buying inexpensive land on the city’s outskirts, selling later at significant profit as property values rose.
By the late 1880s, she had accumulated an estate worth roughly $300,000, the equivalent of about $10 million today. Biddy co-founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in 1872, donating the land for its construction. She helped establish the first elementary school for Black children in the city, regularly visited prisoners to help with legal aid, opened accounts at grocery stores to pay for flood victims’ purchases, and turned her home into something like an orphanage and shelter for the needy. Known respectfully as Grandma Mason, she died in Los Angeles on January 15, 1891, at the age of seventy-three.
She was buried in an unmarked grave, but in 1988 a large headstone was placed over her burial site, and the following year the California African American Museum held an exhibition honoring her life. Mary Mildred Williams’s story captured national attention just before the Civil War. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1847, Mary appeared completely white. Her father, Seth Botts, was an enslaved man of mixed ancestry; her mother, Elizabeth Nelson, was also of mixed race, the daughter of her white enslaver.
When Elizabeth’s father died, she and her children came under the control of J. C. Whedon, who many assumed was the father of Mary and her sister Adelaide due to their fair complexions and the timing of their births. Seth Botts himself was unsure.
He escaped from Virginia in 1850 using forged papers, made his way to Boston, and worked tirelessly to buy his family’s freedom. In early 1855, he succeeded. The family adopted the surname Williams, the same name on the forged papers that had enabled Seth’s escape. When Senator Charles Sumner, a co-founder of the new Republican Party, learned of the family’s story, he arranged for a photograph of seven-year-old Mary to be taken and distributed it to newspapers.
The image of a girl who appeared entirely white yet had been enslaved shocked the nation. It became one of the first American celebrity portraits, a powerful symbol of the moral corruption of slavery. Sumner took Mary on a speaking tour, using her story to expose how slavery blurred the boundaries of race itself through generations of sexual exploitation. The controversy peaked on May 22, 1856, when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina nearly beat Sumner to death on the Senate floor.
The brutal assault was a pivotal moment in the collapse of North-South relations and a violent symbol of the divisions that led to the Civil War. Mary quietly faded from public view as the national crisis deepened. She lived in Boston, working as a clerk for the registry of deeds, earning $780 a year. She never married or had children, and lived with a companion named Mary Maynard in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, a place known for tolerating same-sex relationships.
Mary Mildred Williams died in 1921 in her mid-seventies, a quiet end for a girl whose image had once captured the attention of an entire nation.