Essay 5-C: The Freedom Suits And Freedom Petitions and Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

In the 1760s and 1770s, several enslaved people sued slaveholders in New England courts for their freedom. They also used the traditional British right of petition to ask colonial legislators for their freedom. Enslaved people pursued these “freedom suits” and “freedom petitions” by claiming the rights and liberties in American founding documents. Black Americans appealed to the same universal ideals of natural rights, liberty, and equality.

A young lawyer named John Adams observed that New England enslaved people were influenced by the rights talk that was so pervasive in print and conversations in the years before the start of the Revolutionary War. He noted, “The arguments in favour of their Liberty were much the same as have been urged since in Pamphlets and Newspapers, in Debates in Parliament &c. arising from the Rights of Mankind.” Initially, slaves used the courts to confront the institution of slavery and secure liberty, equality, and inalienable rights.

In 1766, Jenny Slew of Ipswich courageously sued her master, John Whipple, for her freedom in a Salem, Massachusetts, court in late 1766. Slew stated that her master had “kept her in servitude as a slave in his service and restrained her of her liberty.” She won her freedom in a second trial and paved the way for others. Indeed, Adams witnessed the case and wrote in his diary, “This is all’d suing for Liberty; the first Action that ever I knew, of the Sort, tho I have heard there have been many.” Slew’s freedom suit was the first of many actions before the Revolutionary War by enslaved people to obtain the same natural rights as white colonists.
New England slaves also sent freedom petitions to legislatures. In 1773, four slaves—Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie—submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court claiming “the divine spirit of freedom.” They expected liberty from the colonists who were struggling for their own liberties and fighting oppression. They asserted their inalienable rights that “as men, we have a natural right to.”

State constitutions and the Declaration of Independence were founding documents that provided additional principled foundations for enslaved freedom suits and freedom petitions. Slaves in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire all submitted freedom petitions claiming their natural rights based upon the idea in the Declaration that “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.” The New Hampshire petitioners asserted that, “The God of Nature made us free.” They proceeded to claim the rights of “our lives, freedom, and property.”

The 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, drafted by John Adams, stated, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.”

Enslaved people, Quock Walker and Mum Bett, separately sued for their freedom and appealed to the principles in the state constitution. In 1783, Chief Justice William Cushing of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard Walker’s case and quoted the state constitution when he charged the jury. “All men are born free and equal and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws as well as his life and property.” On that basis, Cushing said, “the court are therefore of the opinion that perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government.” Thus, both Walker and Bett (who adopted the symbolic name Elizabeth Freeman) were free.

The principles in American founding documents continued to undermine slavery beyond New England freedom petitions and freedom suits. Freedom principles caused enslaved people to run away to the British during the Revolutionary War. Throughout the North, the Declaration of Independence inspired state legislatures to emancipate their slaves outright or gradually. The Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. Slaveholders in the North and the Upper South were inspired by the Declaration and its contradiction with slavery to privately manumit, or free, their slaves.

Whereas few colonists questioned the institution of slavery before the American Revolution, the principles of American founding documents caused many to oppose slavery. Tragically, however, slavery endured and grew until the Civil War.

Tony Williams is a senior fellow at the Bill Of Rights Institute and a fellow for Constituting America. He is the author of seven books on the American founding, including the forthcoming “Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America” with David Bobb.

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