With Jeanne Pickering
Hosted by Partnership of Historic Bostons
Thursday, June 12, 7:00-8:30 PM, Online
On July 1, 1714, at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, two so-called “free Negroes,” Anthony Tyns and Armote, were married. Ten months later their daughter, Lydia, was born.
We would pay little attention to their marriage except that 55 years later, Anthony and Armote’s great-grandson and Lydia’s grandson, Edward Lewis, would sue for his freedom from Deacon Solomon Dodge of Topsfield claiming, as the descendant of a free woman, his right to be free as well.
Twenty-one lawsuits for freedom were filed in Essex County, Massachusetts. from 1765 to 1783. In the early years, plaintiffs, such as Ned Lewis and his mother, claimed their freedom based on descent from a free or indigeneous mother. Then, in 1772, an enslaved man, Ceasar, from Andover, claimed his owner had broken an oral contract to allow Ceasar to purchase his freedom. After a prolonged trial and and an appeal during which John Lowell represented Ceasar and John Adams represented the enslaver, Ceasar won his freedom.
With Ceasar’s case, it was clear that Essex County juries would not support enslavers’ property rights in human beings. Enslavers began to negotiate outside of court or simply failed to mount a defense. With no judicial support for it, slavery waned in Massachusetts even before the outbreak of the Revolution.
The freedom suits forced white citizen juries to choose between enslavers’ property rights and enslaved people’s right to liberty. Through these individual fights, enslaved people contributed to the long and complicated process of expanding the American definition of freedom from the political to the personal. Historian Jeanne Pickering explores these cases, the enslaved men and women who successfully fought them and their effect on the ending of slavery in Massachusetts.
Jeanne Pickering is an independent scholar of slavery in 18th century Essex county, Massachusetts. She holds an MA in history from Salem State University, for which she wrote a thesis on the freedom suits filed by enslaved people in Essex county during the revolutionary period. Jeanne specializes in searching for enslaved people in local archives including court, probate, town and church records. She presents her research at public history venues and academic conferences. She also maintains several online databases of her research at her website: NorthShoreSlavery.org.
FIND OUT MORE
Historic Beverley has a powerful online exhibition, Set at Liberty, which you can view here.
National Park Service, African Americans in Essex County: An Annotated Guide
Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Slavery and Freedom
PLEASE NOTE
This talk will be recorded and posted on historicbostons.org and our YouTube channel.
The opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenters and not necessarily those of the Partnership of Historic Bostons.
Image: A page from the writ filed on behalf of Edward Lewis, one of the enslaved people who sued for his freedom. Jeanne Pickering
