Jenny Slew

Jenny Slew was born as a free woman to a white mother and an enslaved father around 1719.[1] Her family had experienced generations of turmoil, her earliest European ancestors fled England during the English Civil War, a great grandmother was hanged as a witch due to her thievery, and her grandparents were murdered by local Indian tribes.[2]

Jenny Slew was kidnapped and enslaved for six months by John Whipple Junior in her hometown of Ipswich, MA.[3] Slew sued in a Salem, Massachusetts Court for her freedom. She was the first to sue and eventually win her freedom in the colonies, though it was far from an easy journey.[4]

Her initial case was thrown out of court on a technicality, as she had been labeled a “spinster” despite never being formally married.[5] Spinster was a formal title in colonial Massachusetts, therefore the woman described in the court documents didn’t exist. This was an important distinction, as women who chose to marry gave up their legal right to own property or sue in a court of law and instead automatically relegated such responsibility to their husband.[6] It was unclear if this precedent had any relevance, as Jenny Slew had married an enslaved man with no legal rights of his own.[7]

Once Slew appealed her case, she was successful in pursuit of freedom for two reasons. The first was that her owner, John Whipple, claimed he could produce his bill of sale for her and he was unable to do so.[8] Perhaps a more persuasive reason for the court, was that Jenney Slew was had a white mother, and it was traditional in the colonies for children to inherit the race of their mother regardless of child’s complexion.

Little is known about Slew’s life after the trial, but historians know Slew worked with anti-slavery societies and used language of freedom for the American colonists against the British Government to support anti-slavery arguments.[9] The court mandated that Whipple pay Slew four pounds for the damages, the equivalent of approximately seven-hundred pounds today.[10]

When Whipple died, his brother inherited everything and saw to it that the family slave, Plato receive fair compensation and treatment.[11] Plato lived to be one-hundred and nine years old.[12] The economic desperation caused by the taxes and political strife New England began to experience in the 1760s led to privileged white men lashing out against vulnerable minority women. Slew’s case is remarkable in that a white man was held accountable for his choice to exploit a woman of color more than a hundred years before slavery was abolished in the United States.