Partial names for partial people?

Bett, that was it. She washed, sewed and ironed their clothes; cultivated their crops and cooked their food. Yet this whole person’s identity was reduced to one syllable for half her life. (“Mum” was added when she got older.)

Bett and Lizzy. Two nicknames for Elizabeth given to one set of sisters born in Claverack, New York, on a forced-labor prison camp that Americans nostalgically call a plantation. Bett was born between 1742 and 1744. Lizzy was younger, with even less certainty about her birthday.

Some people buy housewarming gifts for newlyweds. Others give matching watches or champagne glasses. Plantation warden Pieter Hogeboom bestowed Bett and Lizzy to his daughter, Hannah, when she got married and moved to Sheffield, Massachusetts.

Hannah didn’t always prize daddy’s presents. She swung a hot shovel at Lizzy one day, but Bett intervened and got gashed instead. The scar from this laceration spurred Bett’s determination for liberation.

Hannah’s husband, John Ashley, also resolved to be free – from England. John and a lawyer friend, Theodore Sedgewick, wrote the “Sheffield Resolves” to urge American independence. They and a bunch of deacons got their whole town to vote for it on January 12, 1773. The top resolutions were also top priorities for Bett:

Bett wanted freedom so bad that she later said, “Any time… while I was a slave, 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–I would” (from “Bentley’s Miscellany, Volume 34,” by “Miss Sedgewick, p. 421.”).

John Adams was the primary penman for the Massachusetts Constitution which became law on October 25, 1780. Guess who was there to hear it read aloud from the top steps of the Sheffield Congregational Church?

Article 1 stated that “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” and “seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

Bett couldn’t read or write but she could reason. She persuaded Mr. Sedgewick the next day to help her cash in on the promises of the Massachusetts Constitution. Sedgewick enlisted the help of Tapping Reeve, who established America’s first law school a few years later. Since women didn’t have rights to bring lawsuits, they found a male slave, Brom, to be Bett’s co-plaintiff.

Bett and Brom won their freedom and a small payment of reparations. The case had multiple ripple effects. John Ashley settled a suit from his slave Zach Mullens, resulting in his freedom. Bett’s case also paved the way for Quok Walker’s freedom suit. Walker paved the way for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. The colony that was first to encode slavery became the first state to abolish it.

Most importantly, Bett used her freedom to give herself a full name – Elizabeth Freeman. Her minute of freedom lasted until she died on December 28, 1829.