Mumbet, knowing that the promise of freedom and equality should belong to her as well, successfully brings a lawsuit against her owners to be free and chooses the name Elizabeth Freeman.

Children will root for this intelligent, brave heroine who confronted the terrible nature of slavery in the United States and set the precedent for Blacks to be free in Massachusetts. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9780761365891 | Carolrhoda Books

More on Elizabeth Freeman

• Portrait and biography from Americans Who Tell the Truth
• Brom & Bett v. J. Ashley Esq. court records
• Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett) in PBS Africans in America

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“Freedom might be too great a temptation” Marker in Philadelphia. Click to learn more and find exact location.

In early 1797 (possibly Feb. 18), Hercules, the head cook at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation, escaped to freedom.

Hercules was married and had three children, Richmond (born 1777), Evey (born 1782), and Delia (born 1785) — all born into slavery on the Mount Vernon estate and slave labor camp (commonly referred to as a plantation).

Hercules became one of only a few people to successfully escape from George Washington to secure freedom. (He was preceded by the infamous Ona Judge who the Washingtons pursued but was never apprehended.)

This description is adapted from Blackpast.

In an interview on C-SPAN about The Black History of the White House, author Clarence Lusane noted:

Hercules was Washington’s cook. And Hercules also escaped. Now Hercules’s story is interesting because he was considered one of the most famous cooks in the country at the time. He had been trained in Europe, I believe. And just was well known across the country as a great cook [and] as being extremely loyal to George Washington.

Now it’s my sense that Hercules was probably in touch with the brother of Sally Hemmings, who were two individuals who were enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Her brother was a very talented cook as well. And they were both in Philadelphia at the same time.

So Hercules was in touch with him. And I believe probably was influenced by the fact that not only did he buy his freedom, but Ona had escaped. And so you know there was a way in which there was a buildup of freedom. And reaching for freedom on the part of people who were enslaved to George Washington.

For further reading, we recommend The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane and Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge by historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

In 2016, a Scholastic children’s book about Hercules that made light of his enslavement was recalled after a campaign by librarians, early childhood teachers, and many others — including from ZEP co-coordinating group Teaching for Change. Read Under Pressure, Scholastic Recalls Racist Children’s Book.

Find resources below to #TeachOutsideTextbook about enslavement and resistance.

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With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property.

Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives — their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.

Freedom on the Move will serve as a research aid, a pedagogical tool, and a resource for genealogists. Scholars, students, and citizen historians will be able to use the data produced from the ads in new and creative ways.

Many of the primary source digitized ads are not yet transcribed. The public, including students, are invited to participate in the Freedom on the Move project by typing up the text advertisements at the website and completing data entry on its platform.

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Belinda Sutton’s 1788 petition. Source: Massachusetts Archives

Belinda Sutton was born in West Africa and, according to her own petition, she was captured and sold into slavery before she was 12 years old. She was enslaved by the Royall family who settled in Massachusetts.

Because of their strong ties to the Loyalists, the state of Massachusetts seized the Royall family’s property, manumitting several enslaved people, including Belinda.

Two years later, Sutton petitioned the legislature for a pension paid out of the Royall family estate.

The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude. Read full text.

The legislature agreed to pay her £15 12s per year. Though Sutton had to renew her petition multiple times to actually receive payment, it is the first known case of a freedperson obtaining financial reparations for slavery.

Rita Dove wrote a poem called “Belinda’s Petition.” Learn more from BlackPast and the Missed in History podcast. See the petition and ruling: Massachusetts Archives Collection. v.239: p.12-14, petition of Belinda, February 14, 1783. SC1/series 45X and read full text.

Find two lessons for grades 7+ on reparations below and a lesson on resistance to slavery.

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Petition, January 13, 1777. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

On Jan. 13, 1777, abolitionist Prince Hall and seven other African Americans presented a petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives.

It began,

To the Honorable Counsel & House of [Representa-] tives for the State of Massachusette Bay in General Court assembled, Jan 13 1777 —

The petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & christian Country Humbly shuwith that your Petitioners Apprehend that Thay have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable Right to that freedom which the Grat [Great] – Parent of the Unavese [Universe] hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind [mankind] and which they have Never forfuted [forfeited] by Any Compact or Agreement whatever — but thay [they] wher [were] Unjustly Dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their Derest frinds [friends] and sum of them Even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents — from A popolous [populous] Plasant [Pleasant] And plentiful cuntry [country] And in Violation of Laws of Nature and off Nations And in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity Brough [Brought] hear [here] Either to Be sold Like Beast of Burthen & Like them Condemnd to Slavery for Life – Continue reading.

There were other petitions and appeals to the courts, such as the one described in the children’s book below about Mumbet. These were among the countless daily examples of the resistance by people who were enslaved to the institution of slavery. Find more resources below for teaching about the fight to abolish slavery in the era of the American Revolution.

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Source: US National Archives

On Dec. 15, 1791, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, were ratified.

Howard Zinn said in 1991, at an ACLU celebration of the Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights,

Whatever freedoms we have in the United States — of speech, of the press, of assembly, and more — do not come simply from the existence on paper of the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, but from the struggles of citizens to bring those Amendments alive in reality.

And so we should celebrate today, not the words of the Bill of Rights, certainly not the political leaders who utter those words and violate them every day.

We should celebrate, honor, all those people who risked their jobs, their freedom, sometimes their lives, to affirm the rights we all have, rights not limited to some document, but rights our common sense tells us we should all have as human beings. Who should, for example, we celebrate? Continue reading.

Find more resources and related “This Day in History” posts below.

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This lesson is published in Teaching a Peoples History of Abolition and the Civil War (Rethinking Schools, 2019).

From the beginning, Black men and women resisted their enslavement . . . under the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and death, throughout their 200 years of enslavement in North America, these Afro-Americans continued to rebel. Only occasionally was there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their refusal to submit by running away. Even more often, they engaged in sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle forms of resistance which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their dignity as human beings. — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

For too long, historians painted a picture of the idyllic old U.S. South with paternalistic slave owners and docile and content slaves. Though challenged in the 1930s and ’40s by historians like W. E. B. Du Bois and Herbert Aptheker, this remained the dominant narrative of slavery until the late 1960s and ’70s. Today, any discussion of slavery should be coupled with the myriad and heroic ways enslaved people resisted their enslavement.

In this lesson, students create a collective poem, drawing on stories of resistance to slavery.

It’s also important to put this resistance in the broader context of how the U.S. economy was built on the backs of enslaved people. Students should grapple with how central the labor, knowledge, and skills of enslaved people were to the entire Southern economy. The stakes for maintaining slavery were high and any resistance was often met with brutal retaliation.

Nevertheless, enslaved people, with great courage, engaged in all sorts of resistance. While this pre-Civil War resistance did not ultimately topple the deeply entrenched institution of slavery, it challenged pro-slavery arguments that enslaved people were happy and content and provided fuel for abolitionist denunciations of slavery. Maybe more importantly, it established a tradition of defiance that was built upon during the Civil War and Reconstruction when wider acts of resistance became possible.

Find more remote-ready lessons here and refer to our remote teaching guide.

This lesson introduces students to several of these concepts, establishes the various ways that enslaved people resisted, and celebrates that resistance, culminating in a collective poem. To write the poem, students will break into groups and each group will express in poetry what they’ve learned about resistance. This lesson provides seven types of resistance as a guide:

Group 1: Theft and Property Destruction
Group 2: Maintaining the Family
Group 3: Culture, Music, Religion, and Education
Group 4: Resistance at Work
Group 5: Running Away
Group 6: Verbal and Physical Confrontation
Group 7: Revolt

This lesson is published by Rethinking Schools in Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War.

Teacher Stories

Honoring enslaved people by learning how they resisted slavery based upon the @ZinnEdProject Collective Poem lesson and readings @Prairie220 @AnneSchmittBMS #prairiepride pic.twitter.com/TYGvpsKtuB

— MrsSchmittHistory (@BMSHistSchmitt) April 12, 2022

Caneisha Mills

Caneisha Mills with Teaching a Peoples History of Abolition and the Civil War.

Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Washington, D.C.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this powerful resource.

I started using Zinn Education Project teaching materials three years ago, particularly for the beginning of the year in my 8th grade U.S. history course.

Last year, I wanted my students to have a deeper understanding of the legacy of resistance before, during, and after the Civil War. So, I decided to teach the Poetry of Defiance lesson. I wanted to dismantle the idea that African Americans were bystanders in the fight against oppression.

Lesly Torres, one of the students who participated in the Poetry of Defiance lesson.

The lesson was so well-received and sparked such great dialogue amongst my students that now I am attempting to use at least one Zinn Education Project lesson during every unit.

I used the lesson at the end of the school year. I remember how tired and emotionally exhausted my students were after almost a month of standardized testing, and yet when I taught this lesson they became so energized that they wanted to compile their poems to read to the class.

One student, who had not done extra projects before, offered to type up the poems during her lunch period. We displayed their work in the hallway on small boards and the students all came by to read the poetry of their peers. The words below of my students speak for themselves.

Write that I sang my sorrows away using that written word learned at night and worked not to my fullest capacity but moved slowly as the moon. 

Write that we all enslaved people resisted slavery by coming up with our own plans to eventually rebel against our “slave masters.” We would pull down fences, sabotage farm equipment, break elements, and damage boats. 

We gather as a whole with axes, clubs, knives to fight back, burn down crops, kill masters, freedom will come one day praying to god.

Write that I wouldn’t ignite the life of an enslaved person for revolt or punishment 

Write that I witness children taken from the chest of women. Forced to work like males, only to give our fruits of our labor to our monster. Tired I was, when I got the plan, I made sure my master won’t get the fruit. I plowed and swallowed, and cracked the tool. When the whip came down, I knew it was worth it. The fruit of our work today was ours. 

Write that I was bound with chains from the moment I ventured too far. Then thrust into a life of pain where I felt I was slowly sinking deeper into tar. 

Write that we enslaved people were treated harshly and were being sold to many people. To the whites we were known as savages and animals.

Write that I have seen the brutal beatings performed by the slave owner to those of us they call their property. I have seen their attempts to silence our struggle. But we will rise. 

Write that I saw my family run towards the freedom but blocked by violence but we did not give up and we never will.  

Write that I write my spirituals, our thoughts we have spread to all that need it. Let our thoughts inspire others and let our words be a motive for them to do what they want.   

Write that I needed no pass to get around, to ask a man and his power could I get around. Write that I walked outside the plantations with my free will and head high. Write that I no longer had that, as I walk along the fence in the plantations with dirty feet and low head. 

Write that I will never be free knowing that I will still wake up every morning with hope. Write that through my life I have never known what freedom felt like, my only freedom would be my dreams or nightmares. 

Write that I watched the light in my son’s eyes go out, write that I felt, the hot sun pushing me down, write that I waited but nothing… nobody came to save me. 

Write that enslaved people were beaten day by day, nonstop work endless hours of doom. 

Listening to the bold words of the enslaved outside, and the master’s whips going about. Tonight was gonna be a night of excitement, we were planning something big, so big that they wouldn’t know what hit them. Most run away or even asked for freedom, some had hidden messages in their religious singing. But we are using our ability to sabotage their workings. This will be amazing. 

Classroom Stories

Adapting Adam Sanchez’s lesson, Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted, for online learning was a labor of love. The Rethinking Schools/Zinn Education Project’s mixer activities have been a catalyst for understanding in my classroom; I couldn’t imagine any space — even at a distance — that didn’t include that power.

The first hurdle to overcome was the difference in participation between a captive audience in class and students logging in when they can at home. There are the logistics of asynchronous participation which come from any online learning scenario. And there is particular care to be taken specifically during the COVID-19 outbreak, when families are experiencing stress and upheaval at home. . . . Continue reading

—Rachel Toon

Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Before I taught Zinn Education Project lessons about resistance to enslavement, my students were under the impression the only types of agency enslaved people could exercise were running away or violent revolt. Some thought that if you didn’t run away or fight violently, then enslaved people must have accepted their condition of enslavement. The most popular or well known African Americans from this time period are Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom ran away. By the time students reach my class, these are often the only stories young students hear about resistance. It was time to set the record straight and expand their understanding of enslavement and resistance.

I chose the lesson Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted from the phenomenal teaching tool, Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War. After learning about the variety of ways enslaved people resisted their enslavement, they came away with new understandings about how resistance exists on a continuum and that resistance can take many different forms as well as the fact that how a person chose to resist varied widely due to many different circumstances they faced. This has been one of my favorite lesson to teach from ZEP and I look forward to keeping it in permanent rotation when I teach about the lives of the enslaved. Thank you!

I have included a link to one of my student’s poems here.

—Ami Byrne

Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Cupertino, California

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On Aug. 22, 1781, Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, secured her freedom in a precedent setting court case.

As explained at the Freeman Center,

She had sought out an attorney to sue for her freedom under the newly ratified Massachusetts state constitution. With the help of Theodore Sedgwick, a Stockbridge attorney and abolitionist, she pled her case in the Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington in August 1781.

Freeman was one of the first enslaved people in Massachusetts to file a “freedom suit” and win in court under the 1780 constitution, with a ruling that slavery was illegal.

Verdict in Brom and Bett v. Ashley case.

Years later, under the Dred Scott decision, she would not have been allowed a voice in court nor to challenge her status as property.

To introduce students to the story of  Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, we highly recommend Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence.

The picture book gives young readers a slavery-to-freedom narrative that is clever, honest, and age appropriate. Gretchen Woelfle’s recounting of Freeman’s true story of resistance and liberation is smartly written and beautifully illustrated by Alix Delinois.

Woelfle also includes Mumbet’s story in a collection of profiles for middle school, Answering the Cry for Freedom: Stories of African Americans and the American Revolution.

Learn More

• Elizabeth Freeman statue in the historical galleries at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
• Portrait and biography from Americans Who Tell the Truth
• Brom & Bett v. J. Ashley Esq. court records
• Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett) in PBS Africans in America
• Learning for Justice Hard History podcast includes examples of more “Liberty Suits”

The post Aug. 22, 1781: Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman Secures Her Freedom appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The class conflict that led the colonists to oppose British rule did not end with the Declaration of Independence. It flared up within Washington’s army when soldiers protested their lack of pay, and it continued after the Treaty of Paris was signed.

The war had loaded all of the states in the union with heavy debts. Most states — and the federal government — depreciated their debts, issued paper money, or else they let regular people pay taxes and debts in produce, in order to relieve the burdens on people who had already made considerable sacrifices.  

An 1884 illustration by Howard Pyle from Harper’s Magazine, “Shays’ mob in possession of a court-house.” Source: DPLA

In Massachusetts, though, wealthy financiers pressed for full repayment of debts — even though most war bonds, and the promissory notes the soldiers had received in place of pay, had been abandoned by their original holders. These notes were openly traded on exchanges at a fraction of their value, where they were bought up by wealthy financiers and speculators.  

By 1785, many of these speculators served or had friends in Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin’s government. When the legislature voted to pay the bonds and notes in full, in four annual payments — and to raise the money by levying taxes not on the Commonwealth’s businesses, but on regular people — the wealthy merchants were effectively paying themselves windfall profits at the people’s expense. The people complained in petitions, but Massachusetts’ aristocratic 1780 Constitution allowed the merchants in the Senate to stifle proposed reforms from the ‘lower house’ of the legislature. 

Protests over similar conditions in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Rhode Island led to reforms, as governments adjusted their debts to distribute the burden more fairly, but in Massachusetts, Governor Bowdoin pressed ahead with policies that threatened to seize the people’s livestock and farms, and sell them at auction, where wealthy men would buy them up at a discount. This made farmers fear that they would lose the liberties they had won, and be “brought under lordships” again.

One Massachusetts farmer wrote in an editorial that “nineteen parts of twenty of the public securities were possessed by merchants and opulent gentlemen in the maritime towns,” who were “accumulating fortunes by the general distress.” Another complained that the land was being sold “for about one-third of its value, our cattle about half.” This injustice led to inflammatory rhetoric in editorials, as another farmer wrote that  

I’ve labored hard all my days and fared hard. I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war. . . . I have been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me. . . . I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors, nor lawyers, and I know that we are the biggest party, let them say what they will. . . . We’ve come to relieve the distresses of the people.

Town officials throughout Massachusetts sent petitions to Boston, begging for reforms, but the legislature adjourned in July of 1786 without offering any relief. So on Aug. 29, 1,500 farmers from more than 50 towns surrounded the Northampton courthouse to prevent the foreclosure court from seizing livestock and land. The protestors drew upon a long English tradition of nonviolent, theatrical street protests, to show their countrymen that the government was acting unjustly.  

When Governor Bowdoin responded to this peaceful protest by calling the protestors rebels and anarchists, farmers in Concord, Taunton, Worcester, and Great Barrington closed their courts in nonviolent protests. The government then issued arrest warrants and passed a repressive Riot Act that would seize protestors’ land and imprison them for a year, while indemnifying deputies against liability if they killed protestors. Samuel Adams even published an editorial claiming that “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” In spite of these heavy-handed threats, the people maintained the peace while staging further protests, closing the courts through December.  

Governor Bowdoin’s administration had dragged its feet for fear of sparking an actual rebellion, but he finally sent an army to disperse the protestors. When the farmers learned that an army was coming, they marched to the Springfield arsenal, to keep the government from using its weapons against them. They took cannon fire that killed four and wounded twenty, but instead of fighting, they fled, crying ‘murder, murder.’ About 1,000 men stayed with Shays and the other leaders, only to disband when Governor Bowdoin’s army pursued them in early February, but on April 1, 1787, the people of Massachusetts renounced Governor Bowdoin’s hard-line policies.  In an electoral landslide. They elected John Hancock governor, to issue reforms and pardons.

While the farmers won their nonviolent resistance campaign, nationalists like Henry Knox described their protests as a ‘rebellion’ to generate fear among the “Founding Fathers,” hoping to convince George Washington to support a Constitutional Convention, to strengthen the Articles of Confederation. Unfortunately, historians have largely repeated Knox’ story, that we need a strong federal government to protect us from the threat that regular people might stand up for their rights — instead of the people’s story: that people need to band together to protect themselves when their government acts against their interests. Thomas Jefferson, writing from France, asked famously, “Can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted?” adding, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” 

Only a few years later, in 1791, the federal government created an almost identical crisis, the “Whiskey Rebellion,” when it taxed whiskey distillers in order to pay the same exact war bonds and promissory notes, in full.

Daniel Bullen is the author of Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story.

Listen to a song about Daniel Shays by David Rovics.

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Crispus Attucks. Source: Public Domain.

Crispus Attucks was a merchant seaman and dockworker of African and Wampanoag descent.

On March 5, 1770, he was the first person shot to death by the British during the Boston Massacre, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Here are primary documents from the Library of Congress about the trial for his murder. The documents include “copies of reports and transcripts of the court proceedings published in 1770, 1807, and 1824, as well as a history of the Boston Massacre ‘consisting of the narrative of the town, the trial of the soldiers, and a historical introduction, containing unpublished documents of John Adams, and explanatory notes,’ published one hundred years later in 1870.”

Below is a list of resources for teaching outside the textbook about the period of the American Revolution.

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