In February of 2016, writer and social scientist Matthew Wills updated an article he had published years earlier so that it would “reflect current standards for referring to formerly enslaved people.” Just as we have learned that the N-word is harmful and therefore must not be uttered, so have we learned that referring to a person as “slave” or “former slave” can be harmful. So, now our reference is a not much improved term ― “enslaved.”
That humans ever held other humans in slavery is an abomination. Words such as “slave” should never have had the opportunity to exist. But it happened, and now Mr. Wills story is worth reading. As it did for Wills, it leads us into further research. He says that he was “Inspired in part by journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, conversations about reparations for slavery and its aftermath have become mainstream. But they aren’t new: Reconstruction’s unfulfilled promise of ‘forty acres and a mule’ had antecedents dating back to America’s founding.”
The update Mr. Wills applied to his story came approximately on the same date that an elderly woman known only as Belinda submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature in 1783.
Belinda had been enslaved and abused by wealthy landowner Isaac Royall for over 40 years before he packed up, abandoned his estate and fled to England in 1775, “Because he turned out to be a royalist,” writes Wills. “His estate was confiscated and his two dozen slaves were manumitted (there’s some speculation as to whether some were sold, including Belinda’s son Joseph). Belinda was enslaved by Royall for four decades and was old and penniless when she finally gained her freedom.”
Once free, Belinda asked for an annual pension for herself and her invalid daughter, as reparation for her abduction and enslavement. The funds were to be paid from the Royall’s former estate. According to Roy E. Finkenbine, professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archive at the University of Detroit, Mercy, there is some speculation as to whether some of Royall’s enslaved may have been sold, possibly including Belinda’s son Joseph. Belinda was enslaved by Royall for four decades. Now she was free, but old and penniless.
Belinda’s petition. According to Wills, “is one the earliest examples of requests for reparations for the slave trade and slavery.” As such, Belinda’s story has been studied closely by Finkenbine. He compares her petition to the many other freedom lawsuits and legislative petitions for emancipation that were submitted by the African-American community in Massachusetts in the 1760s-1780s, many of which were denied.
According to the State’s website, “[i]n 1780, when the Massachusetts Constitution went into effect, slavery was legal in the Commonwealth. However, during the years 1781 to 1783, in three related cases known today as "the Quock Walker case," the Supreme Judicial Court applied the principle of judicial review to abolish slavery. In doing so, the Court held that laws and customs that sanctioned slavery were incompatible with the new state constitution. In the words of then-Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice William Cushing: ‘[S]lavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges [in the constitution] wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence.’ This section introduces the legal status of slavery in Massachusetts prior to 1780, the Mum Bett case of 1781, and the Quock Walker case.”
The name Mum Bett refers to the petition filed by Elizabeth Freeman in 1781. As with almost all of the thousands of Blacks born into slavery, we know little of Mum Bett's life before that petition was filed. There are records showing that in 1746 she became the property of wealthy Sheffield, Massachusetts, resident John Ashley and his wife, Hannah. Bett and a younger woman, thought to be sister Lizzie, were given to the couple as a wedding present from Hannah’s father. Bett and Lizzie spent their early adult years working in the Ashley home.
Ashley, it seems, was not a bad fellow. We know that he was a strong supporter of the American Revolution, and that he claimed to have the largest farm in town. His wealth, however, hinged on the labors of the small group (number unknown) of enslaved people he owned. Around him, the abolitionist movement was gaining strength.
As far back as 1700, judge Samuel Seawall wrote a piece called “The Selling of Joseph” that called into question the practice of owning other human beings. He may have been an abolitionist, but he was no saint. Seawall also played a large part in prosecuting the Salem Witch Trials.
From what is known about him, Ashley was even tempered and treated the enslaved well. It was his wife Hannah who was unbalanced. As the story was told to the court, Hannah became angry with Lizzie for an unknown reason, pulled the coal shovel out of the stove, and tried to strike the girl. Bett stepped in front of Lizzie, protecting the younger woman by taking the blow of that red hot shovel herself. The attack left a permanent scar on Bett's arm. The two girls fled the Ashley home with only the clothes on their backs. They travelled in the night to the town of Stockbridge, seeking Theodore Sedgwick, an abolitionist known by the Blacks in the state. Sedgwick was an attorney, and future U.S. Senator.
It wasn’t just desperation that took the two women to Sedgwick. Bett had heard it mentioned around the Ashley household that he was looking for a test case to try before the courts. Like all the farmers whose enslaved Blacks represented wealth, Ashley was suspicious of Sedgwick, often speaking ill of the lawyer. After the vicious attack by Hannah, Bett believed she and Lizzie could be that test case Sedgwick sought, and he agreed.
In August of 1781, Brom and Bett v. Ashley was argued before the Court of Common Pleas. The jury deliberated a short time before finding in Bett’s favor. She and Lizzie were freed and awarded 30 shillings in damages. Ashley appealed the decision but dropped the case before it went to the high court. Instead, he beseeched the women to return to his home as a paid servant. Because of Hannah, they refused. Instead, Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman and went to work for Sedgwick's family, earning good wages.
Jon has previously written about the 1783 Quock Walker case where the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that the enslaved Walker was free and that the equality clause in the state constitution outlawed slavery throughout its jurisdiction. Additionally, after the colony ratified its constitution, some enslaved people, after gaining their freedom, successfully sued their masters for compensation.
Jon’s story appeared on Independence Day in both 2017 and 2018. Due to unfortunate circumstances, I have missed that date when this story might have been more appropriate. I’ll reprise it now.
He didn't think it was fair.
He was brutally beaten, and he was told there was nothing he could do about it. But, he wouldn't accept it, he knew it wasn't right, so he decided to do something, something many slaves before him never realized they could do. He sued for his freedom.
His name was Quock Walker. Walker was born to slave parents, but he always knew he had "unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." He knew this because it said so in the Massachusetts Constitution, which was based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Walker would bring suit against his owner to win his freedom. He not only won his court case, but he obtained civil damages against his owner for assault and battery.
Walker and his lawyers cited the language in the state constitution, that declared all men to be born free and equal, the same words in the Declaration of Independence.
The trial judge, Chief Justice William Cushing, would say, "Our Constitution of Government . . . sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal – and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it safeguarded by the laws, as well as life and property, and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our conduct and Constitution."
This case was popularly believed to have abolished slavery in Massachusetts, eventually becoming the first state of the union to effectively and fully abolish slavery. By the 1790 federal census, no slaves were recorded in the state. Walker would be given his freedom and awarded 50 pounds in damages.
President George Washington would appoint William Cushing as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court where he served from 1789 – 1810.
“The Quock Walker cases . . . stand not only as a monument in the history of freedom because they signaled the end of slavery in Massachusetts, but also as a milestone in constitutional history,” according to - Hon. Peter W. Agnes, Jr., Massachusetts Superior Court.
Those words Quock Walker used to fight for his freedom was in the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776:
"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."
Yet here it is 2024, and on the day when we white people celebrated with parades, fireworks, and hot dogs, the descendants of the formerly enslaved have nothing to celebrate. In 18th century Massachusetts they were freed and some received reparations, but that was just one state ― and only for a brief period of time. By the time our 16th president took office, there were humans enslaved in all 31 states.
President Lincoln’s endeavors to change that resulted in civil war. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Yet that Proclamation did not end slavery. It only applied to areas of the Confederacy currently in a state of rebellion, and they would not free the enslaved until that terrible war ended.
Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment, but he was murdered before he could get that finished. Upon his death, he was replaced by a Vice President who kowtowed to the former Confederate states, but the amendment had already passed in the Congress. Johnson couldn’t stop it.
A century after Belinda, Elizabeth Freeman, and Quock Walker all won their freedom and some small amount of reparation ― eight months after that good man met with death at the hands of an assassin, Lincoln’s dream came true. On the 6th of December 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified and slavery was abolished in the United States.
Well and good. As it should be. But what about the now freed men and women? They were free, but free to do what? They were suddenly left with no place to go. The Union Army had been preparing for what they knew would be a problem. General William T. Sherman was tasked with what to do with the now freed Blacks.
Sherman called for a meeting with black ministers from the slave states to seek advice. They told Sherman that they feared living among white people, saying it would take years for racial prejudice to dissipate in the South. As we know, they were correct in that assumption. Racism has never dissipated.
What the ministers suggested was for the properties of the large landowners to be broken up and plots of 80 acres be given to each freedman. This way they could live amongst themselves, away from what they knew would be a threat.
Speaking for the group of 20 ministers, the Rev. Garrison Frazier said, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Garrison, who himself had been enslaved, said “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”
Sherman agreed and issued Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865. By that order, a combined 400,000 acres of land would be seized from the Confederate states and granted to the freedmen in not 80, but 40-acre plots. “Union generals were attempting to divide these slave plantations into small farm settlements and make them available to the newly freed slaves,” says Valerie Grim, director of Undergraduate Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
The “40 acres and a mule” mentioned by Ta-Nehisi Coates wasn’t entirely part of the order. The 40 acres was correct, but the order contained no mention of mules. The term may have come because some of the freedmen were granted Army mules and considered reparations by the Generals.
As far as the land, “They were able to parcel it out to some of the former slaves, but for the most part, this dream was never realized,” Grim says. Following President Abraham Lincoln's murder, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land.”
So it was short lived. Law professor Roy L. Brooks of the University of San Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.” Johnson, though, was not the only politician who opposed this form of reparations for Black Americans. There were many in Congress who remained segregationist.
“After the Civil War, there just wasn't that appetite for Black reparations,” Brooks says. “There were other proposals made after the war for reparations for African Americans. Congress declined to go forward with reparations. So, it was not just Johnson. There was an attitude among the Congress that African Americans should simply be happy with being freed.”
But Black freedmen were far from happy. Left without money or a place to go, most were forced to remain on the farms and worked as sharecroppers for a pittance. Freedom was a myth. They were still tied to their former enslavers.
A hundred years earlier Belinda won her freedom and a few coins. Writer Wills tells of “the impassioned petition she submitted — which told of her childhood in Africa, her kidnapping, the shock of forced servitude in a foreign land, and the decades of abuse she experienced — lived on, spread by the Quaker anti-slavery network. In England, it was transformed into a potent narrative of slavery. The rewrite vigorously described slavery as a culture of rape.”
Belinda had won an annuity but the stories don’t tell that she only that first annual payment. The executor of the Royall estate ignored further state demands to pay her, and apparently neither the courts nor the State Assembly did nothing. In 1791 her name disappeared from the records. We will never know what became of her.
Finklebine’s research into the early Republic reveals depressingly little evidence of reparations for a people stolen from their homeland and deposited in chains on distant shores. His book ends by quoting an 1810 sermon by Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale.
“It is in vain to allege, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we…We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors.”
It is we, the privileged who, because of our fair skin pigment, have benefitted from the sins of our ancestors ― and it is we who are liable for their sins ― for a debt that has remained unpaid for centuries. Two centuries after Timothy Dwight’s sermon, their evil remains our inheritance.
https://ibw21.org/reparations/how-an-ex-slave-successfully-won-a-case-for-reparations-in-1783/
https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery
Thank you for increasing my understanding of this topic.