Do not lose sight of America’s might-have-beens | Douglas Rooks

**Douglas Rooks** _has been a Maine editor and columnist for 41 years. He welcomes comment at_ [_\[email protected\]_](/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#83e7f1ecece8f0c3f7e7f0adede6f7). _His biography of Gov. Ken Curtis_, _“Transformational,” has just been published._  With the arrival of America’s 250th birthday, there’s agreement on at least one thing: we seem utterly divided about what this nation means, and might mean. We again confront our greatest contradiction, that the founding of this vast, fascinating and constantly changing country embraced both freedom and slavery. Succeeding centuries have not entirely resolved this obvious flaw. Wars of words have spread from politics into historical writing and back again. An entire school of scholarship appears devoted to the proposition that America has nothing much to be proud of, with a furious counter-reaction defined largely by the current Trump administration. In this fraught moment, we might usefully consider one of history’s great but little known might-have-beens, spotlighting New England and its unique role in the founding, now largely eclipsed. Massachusetts — which then included Maine — has the best claim to being the “cradle of liberty,” yet its prime position began fading as soon as a Virginian, George Washington, assumed command of the Continental Army and the war moved south. After independence was won, the “Virginia aristocracy” governed the new nation for its first half century, interrupted only by two Adamses from Massachusetts, both one-term presidents. Advertisement John Adams’ largest contribution to liberty came not as president but as the principal author of the Massachusetts state constitution, enacted in 1780 when the war’s outcome was still unknown. It put into constitutional law the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “All men are created equal,” and has been a model for state constitutions ever since. Its great significance lies in furnishing the basis for the first jury decision and then court ruling abolishing slavery anywhere in the world. The tale is beautifully told by longtime New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse in [“The Story of Mumbet.”](https://theamericanscholar.org/the-story-of-mumbet/) Mumbet was an enslaved woman, one among hundreds and perhaps thousands in colonial Massachusetts. By some estimates, 20% of the population of Boston were in bondage. In 1781, she left her master and went to see Theodore Sedgwick, an attorney with abolitionist sympathies. Sedgwick decided to defend her claim that the embracing “Declaration of Rights” in the 1780 constitution, more explicit than the Declaration’s, meant that she was a free woman. Sedgwick saw, as he said later, “the palpable illogic of slavery at a time when Massachusetts was engaged in a fight for freedom from imperial regulation and control.” The master, John Ashley, refused the claim, saying Mumbet was his “Servant … for Life.” The case was tried in Berkshire County and the jury found for Mumbet, freeing her and assessing Ashley substantial costs and damages. In another case two years later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court abolished slavery throughout the commonwealth. Chief Justice William Cushing wrote, “The idea of slavery in inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature.” Mumbet’s story, at least, has a happy ending. She was employed by Sedgwick, midwifed his children and ran his household. She is buried in the family plot in Stockbridge, with her own tombstone and a lengthy inscription. Advertisement One has to wonder why this was not the start of abolition throughout the 13 colonies. In the years following the Revolution, slavery disappeared throughout the North, though slowly, sometimes by judicial ruling and in other states by legislation. Progress was hardly uniform. Many free Black men had their right to vote revoked; in some states, they didn’t regain it until passage of the post-Civil War amendments. In the South, several founders, including the Declaration’s author and John Adams’ great rival, Thomas Jefferson, agreed slavery was incompatible with the national creed. Yet they never found a way, or perhaps the courage, to insist when it might still have happened without bloodshed. After the cotton gin invented by Yankee Eli Whitney revolutionized cloth production, it was too late. Throughout the South, slavery became an integral part of the economy, culture and political system, implicating the North, where most slave ships sailed from. Instead of being deplored, a new generation of Southern leaders fiercely defended the “peculiar institution.” The notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857 took the opposite course from Chief Justice Cushing, forbidding Congress from regulating slavery, and attempting to extinguish rights for any Black American. The day it was handed down, war became inevitable. On this anniversary, I prefer to think of Mumbet, a nearly forgotten figure who put us on what should have been our true course. Freedom and justice for all Americans continues to elude us. We must persist. Copy the Story Link Tagged: [Douglas Rooks](https://www.pressherald.com/tag/douglas-rooks/)