Not only was Mrs. Prince not a lawyer, but she was black, and further, a freed slave.
She won her case, and the selectmen in her town of Guilford were ordered to protect the family and resolve the dispute.
As Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina recounts in "Mr. and Mrs. Prince," this legal victory was one of many striking events in the lives of a family now brought to light from the shadows of county courthouse records and local historical society annals.
Abijah Prince was in his late 40s when, Gerzina writes, he "took his life into his own hands" by joining a militia unit in Deerfield, Mass., on the eve of the French and Indian War. He was then able to make a deal with his new owner to purchase his freedom with savings from his military pay.
With freedom, Prince became a landowner in Northfield, Mass., and the new Vermont communities of Guilford and Sunderland. In time, he secured his wife's freedom, as well as that of their children. He died in 1794 and his wife, Lucy, in 1821.
Gerzina, head of the English Department at Dartmouth College, had assumed that Prince acquired these properties "through the goodness of whites who had known him when he was a slave." But as she and her husband, Anthony Gerzina, pursued the story, "we were discovering that, like his freedom, Bijah got everything he owned through his own ingenuity."
While his story is a unique one, of equal interest is that of the communities of which the Princes were a part.
In Deerfield, in the 1750s, there were some two dozen slaves and free African-Americans. These smaller frontier towns, writes Gerzina, "presented a picture of slavery that went against so much of what we think we know about American slavery."
In them, free blacks could buy property and attend school, while slaves could shop in local stores, and even travel freely, especially on their masters' business. The law, Gerzina writes, "recognized the rights of free blacks, but also upheld the institution of slavery," and slaves could be bought and sold, as Prince himself had been.
At about the same time as Lucy Prince was appearing before the Vermont Governor's Council, a bizarre chapter in the history of slavery in America was being written in England.
