Tomorrow's Dawn: How the Eighteenth-Century Trials of Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet) Led to Slavery's End in Massachusetts

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Coolidge Museum. Join us in the Coolidge Museum for a presentation by author Andrew Noone about his new book, Tomorrow's Dawn: How the Eighteenth-Century Trials of Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet) Led to Slavery's End in Massachusetts. In Tomorrow's Dawn, historian Andrew Noone offers a compelling account of two court cases that initiated the long battle to ban slavery in America. Through the better part of the eighteenth century, enslaving African-Americans was practiced throughout the colonies. Widespread in the South, it took a destructive civil war to end it. Less appreciated to this day, slavery was actively practiced in the Northern colonies as well. While Vermont and Pennsylvania enacted provisional bans, the first state to unconditionally ban slavery was Massachusetts. Seminal legal cases were instrumental. In 1781 Quock Walker, an enslaved farmhand, learned that the recently passed Massachusetts constitution held that "all men are created free and equal." Walker ran away, but was captured, triggering landmark litigation on his behalf. At the same time, Mumbet, an enslaved woman, fled her home, escaping to an estate whose owner, Theodore Sedgwick, was prepared to argue for her freedom. The Walker and Mumbet cases engaged a cast of reformers who would play significant roles in the early decades of the republic, including John Adams, Caleb Strong, Levi Lincoln, William Cushing and Sedgwick. The cases arose as states struggled to reconcile divergent aspirations for freedom and human rights. Massachusetts could not be a beacon of liberty while tolerating human bondage. It took the courage of two enslaved people for Massachusetts to make a bolder commitment to universal justice. Andrew Noone has written a timely and inspiring account of how dependent the "American experiment" is on the personal courage of litigants and the power of well-defended constitutional principles.

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