MAY 25, 1774
Lancaster Hill and other Black Americans in the Massachusetts Bay colony, “who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country,” declared in a petition that they were born free just like the white citizens and “have never forfeited this Blessing by any compact or agreement whatever.”
Seven years later, Elizabeth “Bett” Freeman heard that the new Massachusetts Constitution said every person had a right to freedom. The next day, she approached a lawyer and was quoted as asking, “I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are created equal, and that every man has a right to freedom.” She said she wanted her freedom, too. The lawyer agreed and filed a lawsuit on behalf of her and another African American.
In 1781, the case went to court, and a jury ruled in her favor, making her the first Black woman set free under the Massachusetts state constitution.
“Any time while I was a slave,” she said, “if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me and I had 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!”
At the same time, Quock Walker, sued his former master, Nathaniel Jennison, for battery. After the local courts ruled in his and Freeman’s favor, they pressed the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on whether the state’s Constitution applied to those enslaved. That challenge led to Supreme Court Chief Justice William Cushing’s conclusion that slavery was “inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.”
By 1790, the U.S. Census found no Black Americans enslaved in Massachusetts, making it the first state to abolish slavery
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