Elizabeth Freeman Successfully Sues for Her Freedom
Clip: Episode 6 | 1m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Mumbet, later known as Elizabeth Freeman, would help bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts.
When Mumbet, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts, gets struck by her mistress with a shovel, she leaves and refuses to return. She successfully sues for her freedom, helping to bring an end to slavery in that state. Mumbet would change her name to Elizabeth Freeman and serve as a healer, nurse, and midwife to her neighbors.
From
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Episodes presented in 4K UHD on supported devices. Corporate funding for THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was provided by Bank of America. Major funding was provided by The Better Angels Society and...
Elizabeth Freeman Successfully Sues for Her Freedom
Clip: Episode 6 | 1m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
When Mumbet, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts, gets struck by her mistress with a shovel, she leaves and refuses to return. She successfully sues for her freedom, helping to bring an end to slavery in that state. Mumbet would change her name to Elizabeth Freeman and serve as a healer, nurse, and midwife to her neighbors.
From
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship♪ Voice: Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me and I'd been told 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.
I would.
[Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet)] Narrator: When an enslaved woman in Western Massachusetts called Mumbet was struck by her mistress with a kitchen shovel, she had stalked from the house and refused to return.
Her owner went to court to get her back.
Mumbet's lawyer convinced an all-White jury that since the preamble to the new Massachusetts state constitution declared all men "free and equal" and since his client was a human being, she should be free.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed.
Mumbet changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman and lived nearly 50 years in Stockbridge, serving her neighbors as a healer, nurse, and midwife.
Her gravestone in a Stockbridge cemetery reads, "She was born a slave... yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal."
♪ By the time of her death in 1829, all the states from New Jersey north to New England had called for the abolition of slavery, but it would take another generation and a still more terrible war to end it everywhere in the United States.
♪
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Episodes presented in 4K UHD on supported devices. Corporate funding for THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was provided by Bank of America. Major funding was provided by The Better Angels Society and...