Brom and Bett v. Ashley was the 1781 Massachusetts lawsuit in which two enslaved people, Elizabeth Freeman and a man named Brom, sued Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield for their freedom and won. It was the first successful freedom suit brought under the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, and the jury’s decision that Ashley could not lawfully hold them as property became the legal footing that ended slavery across the Commonwealth within a few years.
Who Brought the Case and Why
Elizabeth Freeman, known during her enslavement as Mum Bett, was born around 1744 in Claverack, New York, on the plantation of Pieter Hogeboom. When Hogeboom’s daughter married Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, Hogeboom gave Freeman and her younger sister Lizzie to the couple as a wedding gift. Freeman spent decades in the Ashley household after that.
Ashley was, by most accounts, the wealthiest and most influential man in Sheffield. He was a farmer, innkeeper, judge, lawyer, mill owner, selectman, and shopkeeper all at once. Suing him took real nerve, but a case against a lesser figure would not have carried the same weight.
The breaking point reportedly came when Ashley’s wife tried to strike another enslaved person in the household with a heated kitchen shovel. Freeman stepped between them and took the blow herself, leaving a scar she deliberately kept visible afterward as evidence of her treatment. Not long after, she went looking for a lawyer.
She was joined in the suit by a man named Brom, also enslaved by Ashley. The record gives little more than his name, but the action was filed jointly on behalf of them both.
The Lawyers and the Sheffield Declaration
Freeman found her way to Theodore Sedgwick, a young attorney in the region already sympathetic to anti-slavery arguments. Joining him as co-counsel was Tapping Reeve. What made the pairing pointed was the history between Sedgwick and Ashley.
Eight years earlier, on January 5, 1773, Colonel Ashley had hosted a meeting of eleven men in the upstairs study of his Sheffield home to draft what became known as the Sheffield Declaration. Sedgwick helped write it. The declaration’s first resolution stated that “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.” The town approved it on January 12, 1773, and The Massachusetts Spy published it the following month.
The document was a protest against British colonial authority, not a statement about slavery, but its language about natural equality had obvious implications for the people Ashley held in bondage. Freeman was enslaved in the house while these meetings were happening and is widely believed to have overheard or learned of the discussions. Sedgwick knew exactly what principles Ashley had publicly endorsed, and he was prepared to hold him to them.
The Constitutional Argument
The legal strategy centered on Article I of the Declaration of Rights in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which 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.” 1General Court of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Constitution
Sedgwick and Reeve argued this was binding law, not aspirational philosophy. If every person was born free and equal under the Commonwealth’s highest legal authority, then holding any person as property inside the state was illegal. The constitution carved out no exception for people already enslaved, and the lawyers insisted none could be implied.
The framing shifted the burden. The question was not whether Brom and Bett deserved freedom but whether Ashley could point to any legal authority that let him hold them. To reinforce that framing, the lawyers filed a writ of replevin, a device normally used to recover personal property being held without authority. Here it cast the case as a demand to remedy an ongoing wrong: the unlawful detention of free people.
The Trial and Verdict
The case went to trial in 1781 in the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas. 2Digital Commonwealth. Brom and Bett v. Ashley Ashley’s defense argued that the constitution was never intended to disrupt existing property relationships or social arrangements. Slavery had been practiced in the colonies for generations, his lawyers contended, and the equality language was a general political principle rather than a specific legal prohibition.
The jury ruled for Brom and Bett, finding that they were not and could not be the legal property of John Ashley. The court awarded thirty shillings in damages and ordered Ashley to pay costs of five pounds, fourteen shillings, and four pence. It was the first successful judicial application of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution to strike down a claim of ownership over another person.
Ashley announced he would appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court and had a hearing scheduled for October. He never went through with it. Other freedom suits were moving through the courts at the same time, including the Quock Walker cases and another action against Ashley himself brought by an enslaved man named Zach Mullen, and all of them were decided in favor of the enslaved plaintiffs. Facing that wall of adverse rulings, Ashley dropped his appeal and confessed judgment, formally accepting the original verdict that Brom and Bett had never been his legal slaves.
How the Case Ended Slavery in Massachusetts
Brom and Bett v. Ashley opened the door. The Quock Walker cases walked through it. In related proceedings between 1781 and 1783, an enslaved man named Quock Walker sued for his freedom and his former enslaver, Nathaniel Jennison, faced criminal charges for assault. The culminating decision came in April 1783, when Chief Justice William Cushing issued jury instructions in Commonwealth v. Jennison directly addressing whether slavery could survive under the state constitution.
Cushing rejected the argument that longstanding colonial practice was enough to sustain the institution. He acknowledged that slavery had been “countenanced” under earlier provincial laws but noted it was “nowhere expressly enacted or established” as a matter of law. The constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal,” he wrote, was “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.” He concluded that under Massachusetts law “there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract.”
No single statute abolished slavery in Massachusetts. The rulings simply made the institution legally unenforceable. Slaveholders could no longer use the courts to recover people who left, and anyone still held in bondage had a clear path to challenge their status. By the time the first federal census was conducted in 1790, Massachusetts recorded zero enslaved persons within its borders. 3Massachusetts Court System. John Adams and the Massachusetts Constitution
What Happened to Elizabeth Freeman
After the verdict, Ashley offered to hire Freeman back as a paid servant. She refused. She went to work instead in the household of Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who had argued her case, and built a reputation locally as a healer, midwife, and nurse.
After roughly twenty years of paid work, she saved enough to buy her own home, where she lived with her children. She died on December 28, 1829, and was buried in the Sedgwick family plot in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She remains the only person outside the Sedgwick family interred in the inner circle of that plot.
The case Freeman initiated in 1781 freed two people from one household and did much more than that. It supplied the legal reasoning that made slavery incompatible with the Massachusetts Constitution, gave later freedom suits a working template, and helped push the Commonwealth to become the first state to effectively abolish slavery through judicial interpretation rather than legislation.