Elizabeth Freemanthe RiverstoneISFP

Around 1780, in John Ashley's house at Sheffield, in western Massachusetts, Hannah Ashley seized an iron shovel, red hot from clearing the oven, and swung it at a young girl named Lizzy. An enslaved woman of about 36, known in the house as Bett, put her arm in the way.

The blow cut across her arm to the bone. Lizzy, her sister in most tellings, was spared.

Years later Bett summed it up in one plain sentence: “Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzy.”

She added one detail. She never covered the wound, and when people asked about her arm in front of her mistress, she answered only: “ask missis!” Riverstones often argue this way, with a plain fact left where everyone can see it.

She had been born into slavery around 1744 at Claverack, New York. Almost nothing is recorded of her first 36 years. She was called Bett, and she would put her body between a weapon and someone she loved. That is nearly all we know.

Then she heard a new paper read aloud. Massachusetts had just adopted a constitution that called all men born free and equal. She went to a lawyer in Stockbridge, Theodore Sedgwick, and put it to him: “I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, ‘all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom.’”

Think what that walk to his door asked of her. She was still enslaved, with the scar on her arm. If she lost, she would go back to the Ashleys, and they would know what she had tried. She asked anyway.

Sedgwick took the case, and Brom, a man enslaved in the same household, joined her. In August 1781 a jury at Great Barrington found for them both. The clerk wrote that they should recover “thirty shillings lawful silver Money, Damages, and the Costs of this suit.” Ashley appealed, then let the appeal drop. She was about 37, and free.

That is the shape of many Riverstone lives: years of patience, then one act, aimed well, that cannot be taken back.

She took a new name, Elizabeth Freeman. The Sedgwick household knew her as Mumbet, often written Mum Bett. She worked for wages in their house for more than twenty years and was sent for as a nurse and midwife. Catharine Sedgwick, one of the children she helped raise, called her time with them “quite as much rule as service.”

She died at Stockbridge on 28 December 1829, at about 85. She was buried in the Sedgwick family plot, the only person outside the family laid in its inner circle. When Catharine died in 1867, she was buried beside her.

Once, Elizabeth Freeman had put her own arm in the way to protect someone she loved. In 1781 she did the same for herself.