But this is why the freedom church that David George joined in the late 1760s is so important. We who speak out in public life to insist that God cares about love, justice, and mercy and to call people of faith to stand with the poor, the uninsured, the undocumented, and the incarcerated are often accused of preaching something new. But those who claim “traditional values” to defend unjust policies do not represent the tradition of David George, George Liele, and Brother Palmer. They do not represent the Black, white, and Tuscaroran people of Free Union, North Carolina, who taught my people for generations that there is no way to worship Jesus without being concerned about justice in the world.
The United States has a moral tradition, deeply rooted in the faith of a freedom church, that has inspired movements for abolition, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental justice. While that tradition has often been marginalized and overlooked, its values are no less traditional than those of the Chapel who claimed to own David George. To know George’s story is to know that another kind of faith is possible. As James Baldwin said, “We made the world we are living in and we have to make it over again.” But we don’t have to make it from scratch. We can build on the faith of people like David George to become the nation we have never yet been.
1774–1779
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Martha S. Jones
Not every revolutionary moment was marked by the firing of shots or the drafting of a declaration. In 1780 a woman known as Mumbet changed the course of the American Revolution when she sued for her freedom. She acted out of a turn of mind. She had been abused in the home of John Ashley, the man who claimed her as a slave.
It was time to preserve her life and get free. Mumbet believed that the law might help. Her home, in the newly independent state of Massachusetts, was governed by the aspirations of men like her owner who were free, white, and propertied. But those same men had produced a constitution that spoke directly to her: “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; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” These same rights, Mumbet argued in the court of common pleas in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, were also hers.
Even before Mumbet filed suit, her life had followed the course of the American Revolution in the way that so many enslaved people’s lives did. As a household servant to the Ashley family in Sheffield, Massachusetts, she saw to the backbreaking and often dangerous work of keeping up a home in the late eighteenth century. She was also a silent figure in the parlor, in the dining room, and in the corridors, as politics, military strategy, and more were debated. There in 1773 John Ashley hosted a meeting that produced the Sheffield Declaration, a manifesto that challenged British tyranny and championed colonists’ individual rights: “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”
Ashley was among the local men who felt the strain when Parliament pressed back. In 1774 the Intolerable Acts punished Massachusetts colonists for their defiance by repealing their charter, imposing governance from England, and limiting town meetings. It was not a declaration of war, but it was a spark for the hostilities that would follow. This was Mumbet’s political education, from which she gleaned new lessons about how to oppose her own bondage.
Both sides of the conflict understood that people like Mumbet could change the course of events. The British expressly tapped into enslaved people’s ever-present pursuit of liberty through a series of military proclamations. First in the fall of 1775, John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore and the British royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that he hoped would advantage his troop strength while also destabilizing the colony’s plantations. Dunmore declared “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others…free that are able and willing to bear arms.”
In the summer of 1779, British Army general Sir Henry Clinton did much the same. From his headquarters in Westchester County, New York, Clinton deemed all enslaved persons belonging to American revolutionaries to be free. Neither proclamation won the British much military success. But the lessons went beyond how not to win a war. Enslaved people learned that they possessed genuine bargaining power against imperial-scale authority. Neither Dunmore nor Clinton had acted out of humanitarian or antislavery impulses. Instead, they had been forced to subordinate their commitments to slavery for a military advantage. It was a lesson that enslaved people carried into subsequent conflicts, including the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, where they would again trade military service for the promise of freedom.
Contradictions—the enslavement of some alongside calls for the liberty of others—were the foundation of the Ashley household in the 1770s. But perhaps Mumbet understood this juxtaposition differently: that the liberty of some in Massachusetts rested upon the bondage of others. Slavery and freedom were two parts of one society.
The words of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence emerged from a similar morass. When composing that galvanizing manifesto, Jefferson omitted language that would have condemned the slave trade. The Articles of Confederation, completed the following year in 1777, did not speak to the problem of slavery. It was a scheme that relegated human bondage to a matter to be regulated by the individual states.
Historians continue to debate the meaning of these silences. For Mumbet, these failures to speak directly to slavery and its future were not exactly an invitation. Her ongoing enslavement in the Ashley household showed how even in the midst of revolution, contradictions wrought of old inequalities could persist. Mumbet’s claim to liberty appears all the more audacious in the face of the silence that characterized the founding texts.
Mumbet’s freedom suit reflected her interpretation of what the Revolution might make possible. It was, however, no naïve impulse. She took her ideas to a local lawyer, another party to the Sheffield Declaration, Theodore Sedgwick. He was likely a known figure to Mumbet, someone who had joined deliberations over colonists’ liberty in the Ashley home. Sedgwick was also a highly regarded lawyer who accepted Mumbet’s case along with that of a man named Brom.
Some historians have suggested that Sedgwick aimed to test the full meaning of the new state constitution. It was, however, a jury that finally heard the claim. Mumbet was declared free by strangers who concluded that “Brom & Bett are not, nor were they at the time of the purchase of the original writ the legal Negro of the said John Ashley.” Ashley initiated an appeal to the state high court but dropped it just a month later. Mumbet—newly self-baptized as Elizabeth Freeman—was a free woman who had put a nail into slavery’s casket, at least in Massachusetts. Her case along with others ended enslavement in one New England state, a revolution that came about when an aggrieved woman seized upon revolutionary ideas.