“Just to Say, ‘I Am Free’”

In 1780, with the American Revolution in full cry, one enslaved woman seized an opportunity to assert her freedom. Hearing the constitution of the new state of Massachusetts, which included the line “All men are born free and equal,” read aloud in the public square, she approached a neighbor for legal assistance. Mum Bett, as the plaintiff was known, filed a lawsuit to gain her freedom. For the first time in America, a suit challenged slavery’s constitutionality—and succeeded.

In recent years popular understanding of slavery in America has undergone a transformation, as historians have worked to portray in three dimensions enslaved individuals who were overwhelmingly illiterate and so unable to leave accounts of their own. The only glimpses of enslaved persons’ lives incorporated into the record were those that had been observed by White officials compiling census records, White slaveowners keeping ledgers, White newspaper editors setting the type of runaway notices, and White lawyers writing legal documents. In a limited but profound way, new and deeper scholarship has begun to rebalance that skew.

Most Americans think of slavery as a phenomenon that occurred in the southern states before the Civil War, typified by plantation settings populated by gangs of enslaved people oppressed by indolent slave owners. In fact, slavery was a going concern in