Elizabeth Freeman (`Mumbet`) Miniature portrait, watercolor on ivory by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811
Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society
Elizabeth Freeman: A Free Woman on God’s Earth
I
It was cold outside, but the glowing fire in the brick oven warmed the kitchen as Elizabeth busied herself baking the week’s bread for her enslavers, Col. John Ashley and his wife Hannah. Her younger sister Lizzie, also enslaved in the Ashley household, was too frail for heavy labor, so she watched as Elizabeth stirred the fire with an iron shovel. As she carefully placed the loaves in in the oven, Lizzie scraped a bit of leftover dough from the mixing bowl and formed it into a tiny loaf that she put alongside the others to bake. When the bread was done, the lady of the house, Hannah Ashley, came to inspect Elizabeth’s work. As she did, she spied Lizzie sitting near the hearth with her little crust of bread. “Thief!” she cried, as she took the iron shovel, still hot from the fire, and struck at the terrified girl. Elizabeth threw her strong arm in the path of the blow, saving Lizzie but suffering a wound that would leave “a frightful scar she carried to her grave.” By her own account, Elizabeth never hid her scar. Whenever someone asked how she got hurt, she would look them in the eye and say, “Ask Missus.” 1
46
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2022
Though described on her gravestone Even as she faithfully did the bidding of as a “most efficient helper,” Elizabeth was her enslavers, Elizabeth ached for freedom. anything but meek. When Mrs. Ashley The writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, attacked Lizzie, Elizabeth didn’t hesitate who knew her personally, quoted her as to offer physical resistance, and afterward saying “Any time while I was a slave, if one proudly wore her personal red badge of minute’s freedom had been offered to me courage. “When I set my foot down,” she and I had been told I must die at the end declared, “I kept it down.” 2 of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free Elizabeth was born into slavery in New woman.” 5 York State around 1744. As a young girl she became enslaved to the Ashleys, who called her Bett.3 John Ashley was a wealthy and influential figure in the town of Sheffield in southwestern Massachusetts. His neighbors revered him as a wise and compassionate man, but like many prosperous men in the American colonies, he used enslaved people to do the hard labor of keeping an 18th Century household running smoothly, and Mrs. Ashley The Colonel John Ashley House in Sheffield, MA was their “despotic” overseer.4
Photo courtesy of the Sheffield Historical Society
BY VICTOR CURRAN
