The Story of Mumbet
1.
There is much of interest in the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, town cemetery, located on Main Street and still in active use. It has graves dating to the 18th century, as befitting one of the oldest settlements in western New England, today a town of fewer than 2,000 residents, known largely through the imagery of one former resident, Norman Rockwell, and the music of a nearby resident, James Taylor.
Tours of the cemetery often stop at the grave of Popewannehah “John” Konkapot, the sachem of the local band of Mohican Indians when missionaries first arrived in Stockbridge in the 1730s. Konkapot was a brilliant and charismatic leader. He led his people in a mass conversion to Christianity, though not due to any religious epiphany. Upon observing that the Indians were dying of disease while the white settlers were not, he concluded (or let’s assume desperately hoped) that the settlers’ god was a better bet than his. The Stockbridge Indians fought alongside the colonists during the American Revolution and were the first Indians to receive American citizenship.
But neither this history nor the white man’s god saved the Stockbridge Indians from being tricked out of their land and sent off first to Upstate New York and eventually to northern Wisconsin, where their descendants are members of a federally recognized tribe, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. They live today on a reservation carved out of the Menominee Indian reservation by an 1856 treaty.
Chief Konkapot is remembered throughout the Berkshires. There is a Konkapot River, a 22-mile-long tributary of the Housatonic; a Konkapot Falls; a Konkapot Road; and a Konkapot Drive. On the village green in the town of Lee—also part of the land the Stockbridge Indians “sold” to the settlers—Konkapot’s likeness adorns a fountain, designed by the sculptor Daniel Chester French, more famous for his monumental figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. And then there is Konkapot’s headstone in the Stockbridge Cemetery, which reads,
HERE LIES
JOHN KONKAPOT
GOD, BE AS GOOD TO HIM AS HE
WOULD BE TO YOU IF HE WERE
GOD AND YOU WERE
JOHN KONKAPOT
2.
Fifteen years ago, my husband, Eugene Fidell, and I, were looking for a weekend getaway when we bought a house in Stockbridge. Eventually, we made it our legal residence. Our real estate agent had not emphasized that the town’s cemetery served as the back yard for the houses across the street, but once we realized how close we were, and how interesting the old gravestones looked, we began to investigate.
However, it was not Konkapot’s grave that first caught our eye. Rather, it was the extraordinary collection of headstones separated by a grove of trees from the rest of the cemetery. The stones, 144 of them, are arranged in concentric circles radiating from two central monuments. The taller monument marks the grave of the Honorable Theodore Sedgwick, who died on January 24, 1813, at the age of 66. The smaller one marks the grave of his second wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, who died six years earlier at the age of 54. The concentric circles of headstones mark the graves of their relatives and descendants, the line extending into the 21st century. (Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s tragic muse and probably the most famous modern Sedgwick, is not among the group. When she died in 1971 at the age of 28, she was buried in Santa Barbara, California.)
We learned later that this is the so-called Sedgwick Pie, and that the Pie is the property of the Sedgwick family, not the town of Stockbridge, as is the case with the rest of the cemetery. The popular explanation for the circular shape is that when Judgment Day comes and the dead are raised, the Sedgwicks, who once represented a kind of New England nobility, will have to look only at other Sedgwicks.
One grave in particular drew our attention, not because the stone itself was markedly different from the rest but because it alone was adorned with small rocks and a few flowers, obviously placed there by visitors. With some effort, we made out the faded carving:
Known by the name of
MUMBET
Died Dec. 28, 1829.
Her supposed age
was 85 Years.
She was born a slave and
She remained a slave for nearly
thirty years. She could nei-
ther read nor write yet in
her own sphere she had no
superior nor equal. She nei-
ther wasted time nor property.
She never violated a trust nor
failed to perform a duty.
In every situation of domes-
tic trial, she was the most effi-
cient helper and the tenderest
friend. Good mother, farewell.
Every time we strolled through the cemetery, we would notice new rocks placed on Mumbet’s headstone: People evidently knew Mumbet’s story and came in some numbers and with some regularity to pay their respects. But we had never heard of Mumbet and could scarcely imagine the trajectory that brought her to this remarkable resting place. Clearly, some investigation was called for.
3.
Few of us who grew up in the North had any idea that slavery in the United States was not exclusively a southern phenomenon. We certainly never learned in school that the slave trade was a mainstay of New England’s economy and some of its more revered institutions. By the mid-18th century, one Rhode Island adult in 10 was an African or Africa-descended slave. Slaves made up roughly 14 percent of the population of New York. Massachusetts had relatively fewer slaves, listing 5,249 in a 1776 census. Although mostly concentrated in the Boston area, slavery also existed elsewhere in the state, even in the Berkshires, still regarded then by proper Bostonians as something of a rugged frontier.
I soon learned that John Ashley, the leading citizen of Sheffield, the southernmost town in Berkshire County, inherited Mumbet from his father-in-law, a Dutch trader in the Hudson Valley, around 1758. Nothing seems to be known about the family of Mumbet’s birth. She almost certainly was not known as “Mumbet”—a contraction for Mother Bett—until she was much older. “Freeman,” a name commonly taken by freed slaves, was probably acquired later as well. She was accompanied to the Ashley household by a girl named Lizzie, sometimes described as a younger sister and sometimes described as her daughter. (Books written about the Mumbet story for young readers usually explain her motherhood by asserting that she had been married to a male slave who fought and died in the Revolutionary War, but there is no evidence that this was the case, and the dates don’t align in any event. A number of dates in the various versions of the story don’t align, and some of the accounts are confusing and contradictory. I am drawing here on several sources and trying to construct a coherent narrative from some probably embellished tales fueled by overactive imaginations.) Ashley owned a prosperous gristmill and ironworks. In 1735, he built a big house on 3,000 acres, property that today encompasses a popular nature preserve and hiking area called Bartholomew’s Cobble. The house—where Ashley would live with his wife, Hannah, and their four children—has been preserved by a Massachusetts organization called The Trustees of Reservations and is open for tours during the summer.
Mumbet worked in the Ashleys’ kitchen and helped raise their children. On the eve of the American Revolution, the house was at the center of considerable ferment as the British began imposing tighter rein on the American colonies with onerous taxes and duties. In January 1773, Ashley summoned 10 other leading citizens to his home to consider how to respond to the latest outrage. The result was the publication of a list of grievances known to history as the Sheffield Resolves and considered a forerunner to the Declaration of Independence.
Ashley assigned the drafting duty to a young friend and protégé, Theodore Sedgwick, who had arrived in the Berkshires around 1765 and apprenticed himself to a lawyer in Great Barrington, one of the few lawyers in the region. Following his apprenticeship, Sedgwick opened a law office of his own. It’s easy to understand why young Theodore had ventured to a still raw community to seek his fortune. His father, born on a farm in Connecticut, was the youngest of 11 children. Although the family farm was fairly prosperous, there was little chance that Theodore—the third son—would inherit anything; an older brother, recognizing his talents, arranged to send him to Yale.
The Sheffield Resolves, signed by Theodore Sedgwick in the name of John Ashley’s committee, consist of 13 clauses. The most famous is the first: “RESOLVED, 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.” Another of the resolutions declared that “the late acts of the parliament of Great Britain, for the express purpose of raising and regulating the collecting a revenue in the colonies, are unconstitutional, as thereby the just earnings of our labour and industry, without any regard to our consent, are by mere power ravished from us … and clearly evince a disposition to rule us with the iron rod of power.” The date was January 12, 1773.
Fast forward to June 1780, with the Revolutionary War still in progress, when the voters of Massachusetts adopted a constitution. Written largely by John Adams, it was not the first of the state constitutions, but in its structure and language, it was to be the most influential. Although it has been amended many times since 1780, the document is widely considered to be the oldest continuously functioning constitution in the world. Of particular note is the “declaration of rights” contained in its first article:
Article I. 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; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
The adoption of the constitution, tracking in an important way the wording of the Sheffield Resolves, occasioned discussion and celebration in the Ashley household. Historians assume that Mumbet was privy and attentive to conversations about natural rights to freedom and equality. Some say she attended a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is unclear whether these experiences or a particular act of cruelty by Hannah Ashley (who was known for her bad temper) or perhaps even the urging of an abolitionist member of Ashley’s social circle led Mumbet in 1781 to take a drastic step. She walked four miles from the Ashley house in Sheffield to Theodore Sedgwick’s office in Great Barrington. She knew that he was a lawyer, and she understood that the law had something to say about her circumstances. She asked Sedgwick for help in obtaining her freedom.
Sedgwick, 35 years old at the time, must have been surprised at this unannounced visit. He knew Mumbet from his frequent visits to the Ashley home. He could easily have sent her away or let Ashley know to come and get her. But he was personally opposed to slavery, and furthermore, he had political ambitions. Bringing a case to give meaning to the words he himself had written in the Sheffield Resolves, and that the Massachusetts voters had adopted as their fundamental charter, would help his future prospects. He was later quoted as saying that he had been struck by “the palpable illogic of slavery at a time when Massachusetts was engaged in a fight for freedom from imperial regulation and control.” He agreed to take the case.
For assistance, Sedgwick turned to Tapping Reeve, a well-known lawyer who founded a law school in nearby Litchfield, Connecticut. For his part, Ashley decided to fight and brought in heavy legal talent of his own. The vehicle for the case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley was a writ of replevin, essentially a demand for the return of property, the theory being that John Ashley could not now and never could legitimately claim to possess Mumbet. (Brom was another slave whose case was joined with Mumbet’s; very little is known about him or what later became of him.) The sheriff attempted several times to serve the writ, but Ashley refused to surrender the woman he called his “Servant … for Life.”
The case was tried before a jury in the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington. Sedgwick’s argument relied on the language of the Massachusetts Constitution: All men meant all men, without distinction of race or present condition of servitude. The jury of local farmers quickly ruled for Mumbet, ordering Ashley to pay her and Brom 30 shillings in damages plus court costs of more than five pounds, a substantial sum. Ashley initially indicated that he would appeal, but he never did.
Mumbet was not the only slave to sue for her freedom around this time. To the east of the Berkshires, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, Quok Walker sued his owner for assault and battery. This led to a series of suits and countersuits, resulting two years later in a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that formally abolished slavery in the Commonwealth—something that the jury’s decision in Mumbet’s suit, applying only to one case, had not accomplished. “The idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature,” Chief Justice William Cushing wrote in Commonwealth v. Jennison.
Theodore Sedgwick offered Mumbet a job. She remained in the family’s paid employment until the end of her life. This is how she came to rest in a grave alongside that of Sedgwick’s daughter Catharine, who was devoted to Mumbet.
4.
Clearly, Mumbet’s story is entwined with that of the Sedgwicks. The family still retains a foothold in Stockbridge, in the substantial house on Main Street that Theodore Sedgwick built as his fortune and ambitions grew. The house is today owned by a Sedgwick family trust. Any direct descendant of Theodore Sedgwick is eligible to apply to the trustees for permission to live in a part of the house, which remains occupied under those terms today.
There have been many distinguished Sedgwicks, and many tragic tales surrounding their often colorful lives. To cite just one example, John Sedgwick was a popular Union general in the Civil War, one of Ulysses S. Grant’s favorites. Ron Chernow, in his biography of Grant, recounts that the Union Army’s commanding general conferred briefly with Sedgwick on the morning of May 8, 1864, as the two scanned Robert E. Lee’s fortifications near Richmond.
As Chernow writes, “Shortly after Grant rode off, Sedgwick, a smart, good-natured, and much-beloved bachelor affectionately nicknamed ‘Uncle John,’ mocked his men for being afraid of Confederate snipers taking potshots at them. They didn’t have to worry, he insisted, because the rebels ‘couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.’ These were his last words as he toppled over dead on his horse, struck by a marksman’s bullet to the head.” Grant considered General Sedgwick’s loss “irreparable,” declaring, “His loss to this army is greater than the loss of a whole division of troops.”
The progenitor Sedgwick family into which Mumbet moved in 1781 was a troubled one. Theodore Sedgwick himself was to go on to great accomplishment: He was a delegate to the Continental Congress, served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, interacted with everybody who was anybody during the earliest years of the new country, and spent the last years of his life as a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sedgwick’s first wife, Elizabeth Mason, died of smallpox a few years after their marriage. He and his second wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, who came from a considerably more distinguished New England family, had 10 children, seven of whom lived to adulthood.
Pamela Sedgwick suffered from a serious mental illness, probably severe and chronic depression and perhaps bipolar illness as well. She was often unable to get out of bed and could not manage the family’s affairs, a serious failing because her husband was often out of town, in Washington or Boston. To the family’s gratitude, Mumbet took over running the household and did so with great efficiency. The children were devoted to her, particularly Catharine, a writer and published novelist, who never married and regarded Mumbet as a surrogate mother. Pamela Sedgwick died by suicide. Six generations later, a Sedgwick descendant, John Sedgwick, born in 1954 and himself suffering from depression, began investigating the striking incidence of mental illness across the family’s history. The result was In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family, published in 2007 and still in print. It is a cultural history of a particular stratum of American society as well as a compelling family memoir.
The courage that Mumbet displayed in seeking her freedom served her well in many trying circumstances during her years with the Sedgwicks. There are various versions of the steps she took in 1786 to preserve the house from the marauding farmers of what became known as Shays’ Rebellion. Theodore Sedgwick had taken his family out of the Berkshires for safety, leaving Mumbet alone in the house. She locked the family’s silver and other possessions in an attic trunk that contained her own possessions. When the rebels came to the house, one of the grandest on the street, looking for whatever they could take, Mumbet stood her ground and refused their demand that she open the trunk. Instead, she offered them some beer, which they downed quickly before stumbling off.
Theodore Sedgwick remarried after Pamela’s death. Mumbet left the household then and moved into her own house in a small Black community along the Housatonic River in Stockbridge, although she continued to work for the family and to serve as a midwife at Sedgwick births. Details of her personal life at this point are unclear. She did have a daughter, who may or may not have been the Lizzie of her earliest years with the Ashleys, to whom she left half her property. She may have had grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. There is some evidence that at one time she married into a family named Burghardt. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a celebrated son of Great Barrington better known as W. E .B. Du Bois, proudly claimed direct descent from Mumbet. Late in her life, Mumbet gave Catharine a gold necklace. Catharine had the beads made into a bracelet that she engraved with Mumbet’s name. She wore it every day for the rest of her life.
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