merits and services were inscribed upon the gravestone which covers her remains in the outcast division of the churchyard of the valley which she protected.
Colonel Ashley’s lady was not amiable enough to be trusted with human property. She one day struck at Mum Bet’s sister with a heated shovel, which did not hurt the sister because Mum Bet, always ready, caught the blow upon her arm. She carried to her grave this brand of slavery; but it gave liberty to multitudes. She acted as a free person would have done. She left the house, and refused to return. Colonel Ashley appealed to the law for the recovery of his slave. The slave opened to Judge Sedgwick, to his infinite astonishment, her purpose of claiming her liberty under the law. Nothing could seem more absurd to the lawyers: but the illiterate woman was right. In the “Bill o’ Bights,” she said, there was no distinction made among the people. To be human was enough: and she claimed to be free and equal with everybody else. Mr. Sedgwick undertook her cause, and gained it. It was tried at Great Barrington: and the result was that she was declared free, and entitled to compensation for her services from the age of twenty- one.
This happened in 1772, when she was thirty years old. Her example was followed, with success, by so many slaves that society saw the absurdity of at once maintaining slavery and glorying in their Bill of Rights. They preferred the extension to the contraction of liberty, and soon abolished slavery in the State of Massachusetts.
The wonder was what Mum Bet could know about the “Bill o’ Rights.” She said it was owing to her “keepin’ still and mindin’ things.” She made it all out by listening to the conversation while waiting at table. She gathered the terms of the declaration, and common sense showed her her interest in them. Thus did emancipation begin by an untaught negro woman “keepin* still and mindin’ things.“
Her lawyer asked her what he was to do with all the money she was now worth. She desired him to fee the lawyers well, and take care of the rest for her. No inducement could prevail on her to return to Colonel Ashley’s. She wanted to escape from the associations of slavery. She lived twenty years with the Sedgwicks, very happily, and married there, and lived to the age of eighty- five, taking care of a host of grandchildren. Her long life was full of good deeds; but the great fact of her having pulled up the first root of slavery is that by which she will be remembered through future generations.
This story is brought to mind just now by the setting in of a new phase in that decline of American slavery which was begun by Mum Bet. She died just before the advent of the most critical period of the fortunes of the great Republic, whose fortunes are, and for a time must be, bound up with the “peculiar institution“ which Mum Bet could not tolerate. She died in 1829, when events were ripening for the change which was to come to pass in 1832.
She obtained her freedom, as we have seen, in 1772. The American Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in 1776. One of the provisions of the new law of the infant Republic was, that the slave-trade should cease in 1808; that is, the importation of native Africans: for the trade in slaves between the separate sovereign States of the Union has never been stopped.
During the term of Mum Bet’s free life, the condition of her countrymen in the Southern States was growing worse in proportion to the development of European manufactures and American trade. New tracts of territory were bought — as Louisiana and Florida— over which the pnedial negroes were spread, as fast as they had worn out the soil in the older States. Their owners gained power in the Federal Government by allowing the North fiscal advantages in exchange for such power. It was in this way that the planters got leave to reckon three-fifths of all their slaves (women, children and all) as a part of the constituency which sent them to the legislature at Washington: and it was thus that they obtained the one single provision in the constitution of the Republic which recognised slavery: — that by which the citizens of all States were bound to catch and send back fugitive slaves; or, as they were daintily called, “persons held to labour and service, escaping into another State.”
During a course of weary years, the negroes were worked harder, treated less and less like “family retainers,” and more and more like farm stock, till, when Lafayette paid a visit to the country in 1825, he remarked with sorrow the debased condition of the negroes, saying that when he was there before, the negroes used to live in the camp with the white soldiers, and bivouac with them on the march, and fight side by side with them in the field: whereas now they had been pressed down into a more injurious slavery, and were hated, according to the old rule, that men hate those whom they have injured.
Then came the long series of insurrections, at last averaging twelve in a year, including the great and small risings in all the slave States. That series closed with the fearful Southampton massacre of 1831 — two years after Mum Bet was in her grave. In that rising above seventy whites were slain by negroes. Even then, there were planters who believed themselves safe, unaware that the old “patriarchal” feeling had long been worn out, by the increased sufferings of the “retainers.” A kind-hearted gentleman of Vir- ginia told a guest from the North, at the very time of the Southampton rising, that it was a mistake to suppose that there was not a perfect understanding between masters and slaves; and he proposed to put this to the test on the spot. He summoned his confidential negro— his head manager — asked him if he knew what had happened at Southampton, and that the insurgents were coming that way; found he knew all about it; told him that he should depend on him to defend the house and its inmates; and was startled at the countenance and silence of the man. He proceeded:
“If I arm you, you will protect my family?”
“No, massa.”