FOUR
One day in the winter of 1765, the exact date is not known, a lawyer from Barbados named David Lisle savagely beat Jonathan Strong, his black slave. Lisle, who lived in London, was in the habit of beating the boy, but this attack was more severe than his previous assaults. He repeatedly struck Strong about the head and face with a pistol. The blows were so ferocious and so numerous that eventually the pistol broke, the metal barrel and lock separating from the wooden stock. Deprived of his weapon, Lisle cast the boy out into the filth of the Georgian street, his face a mass of open wounds. An account detailing Strong’s injuries concluded that the blows he had received had ‘made his head swell very greatly, and, when the swelling abated, a disorder fell on his eyes, which nearly occasioned the loss of his sight. This was followed by an ague, fever, and lameness in both feet.’1 By modern standards Jonathan Strong was a minor, a child of around sixteen, who had been beaten almost to the point of death and then thrown into the gutter. But David Lisle believed he had committed no crime, and was never charged for his horrific attack. The legal dispute that was to rumble on for the next two years concerned not the near-fatal injuries he had inflicted upon a child but his presumed right to sell that child to another man.
It is not clear from the records how Jonathan Strong survived the hours after the attack. He surfaces next in Mincing Lane in the City of London, a street that still exists today. Strong had evidently heard of William Sharp, a doctor, whose surgery was located on that street, and who once a week tended to the injuries and maladies of the destitute and the penniless. Somehow, Strong had found his way there to seek help. It appears that it was the doctor’s brother, Granville Sharp, who first saw Jonathan Strong queuing up with all the other unfortunates that morning in Mincing Lane. But even within that wretched line-up of Georgian London’s lame and disfigured, Strong was a shocking sight. ‘The boy seemed ready to die’, Granville Sharp later commented, he ‘almost lost the use of his Legs and Feet . . . and to compleat his misfortunes [was] afflicted with so violent a disorder in his Eyes that there appeared to be the utmost danger of his becoming totally blind.’2 Strong himself tells us a little of what happened, both before and after arriving in Mincing Lane. ‘I . . . went to Mr. Sharp. I could hardly walk, or see my way, where I was going. When I came to him, and he saw me in that condition, the gentleman take charity of me.’3
The charity that the two Sharp brothers provided to Strong possibly saved his life and almost certainly saved him from blindness. He was admitted to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and so devastating were his injuries that he remained there for four and a half months. ‘All the while I was in the hospital’, Strong later explained, ‘the gentleman find me in clothes, shoes, and stockings, and when I come out, he paid for my lodging, and a money to find myself some necessaries, till he get me into a place.’4 By ‘place’ Strong meant a job. He became a messenger boy, some sources say footman, to a Mr Baker, an apothecary, whose shop was located close to William Sharp’s surgery. With the assistance of Granville and William Sharp, Jonathan Strong had not only survived his injuries but had miraculously made the transition from abused slave to apparently free man in a paid position. For the first time in his short life he was independent and could imagine a future.
That might easily have been the end of things. The story of Jonathan Strong and Granville Sharp, two unknowns whose lives became momentarily entwined, could have become merely one of those tiny historical details that are from time to time picked out by hawk-eyed scholars. But two years later, on 5 September 1767, Strong was running an errand for his employer Mr Baker when he was spotted on the street by David Lisle. The broken boy, the child he had discarded as a worthless and expended item of property, was now fit and well. Lisle must have presumed that he would never see Strong again; educated and well travelled, he was worldly enough to have known that there was a very real chance he might die from the injuries he had inflicted upon him. But the sight of the boy revived in health, awoke in Lisle his sense of ownership and entitlement and he set about scheming to recover his ‘property’ and profit from it.
There might not have been full-time, professional slave-hunters in the London of the 1760s but there were certainly men who could be hired to kidnap black people and bundle them into West Indies-bound ships on the Thames. In the coming years Granville Sharp would learn all the intimate details of how these abductions were arranged and executed. It was to men with these skills that Lisle now turned. After having Strong watched, he had two city officers approach him. They told Strong that someone wanted to speak to him at a nearby pub, and the boy innocently agreed to accompany them. That ‘someone’ was David Lisle, who had Strong imprisoned at the Poultry Compter, a small city-centre prison used to hold vagrants, debtors and other unfortunates accused of minor offences – it was so named because it was near to one of London’s old poultry markets. By the 1760s the compter had become the facility in which recaptured slaves were incarcerated while their ‘owners’ made arrangements for them to be shipped to the West Indies and sold as plantation slaves. This was what Lisle had in mind for Strong and while he was behind bars the lawyer sold him for £30 to James Kerr, a Jamaican planter.
Again it was education that made the critical difference in shaping the life of a black Georgian. Strong had learned to read and write and he quickly dispatched a series of desperate notes. One was to Mr Baker, the apothecary; another was to Granville Sharp. Having grown used to the notion that he was the owner of his own person Strong implored Sharp to offer him ‘protection from being sold as a Slave’. Rushing to the compter, Sharp demanded to see Strong but at this critical moment he did not demand that the prison master release him. Understanding where the real danger lay, he instead insisted that the prison master, ‘at his own peril, [was] not to deliver him up to any person whatever, who might claim him, until he had been carried before the Lord Mayor’. Sharp then rushed off to the office of the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Kite, and informed him, ‘that a Jonathan Strong had been confined in prison without any warrant’.5 Sir Robert Kite agreed to summon all parties to appear before him. On 18 September, two weeks after Strong had been spotted on the street by Lisle, he was brought before the Lord Mayor in his offices at the Mansion House. Strong and Sharp were confronted by Macbean, a lawyer who was acting for James Kerr, Strong’s new owner, and Captain Laird, who was the commander of the ship in which Strong was to be transported to the West Indies. David Lisle was absent.
The scene that followed starkly demonstrated the legal uncertainty over the status of slaves in Britain. The Lord Mayor could have viewed Jonathan Strong in one of two ways: as a man who despite having committed no crime had been kidnapped and imprisoned; or as an item of property who had been stolen from his legal owners by Granville Sharp. As Sharp reported in his notebook, Sir Robert Kite, ‘having heard the claim, said, that “the lad had not stolen any thing, and was not guilty of any offence, and was therefore at liberty to go away”’. However, at that verdict Captain Laird turned to Jonathan Strong and ‘seized him by the arm’. In a raised voice Laird informed the Lord Mayor that he was claiming the boy ‘as the property of Mr. Kerr’. By this point Strong was convinced that a life of slavery awaited him and had been reduced and was weeping and shaking with fear. Sharp too was momentarily overcome by the startling abruptness of Captain Laird’s actions. But amidst the shouting and the crying, the city coroner, Mr Beech, who up to that point had been a mute witness to events, ‘came behind’ Granville Sharp, ‘and whispered in his ear the words “Charge him”.’ As if awoken from a stupor Sharp ‘turned upon the captain, and in an angry manner said, “Sir, I charge you for an assault.” On this, Captain Laird quitted his hold of Jonathan’s arm, and all bowed to the Lord Mayor and came away’. Jonathan Strong left the Mansion House a free man, ‘no one daring to touch him’.
If that morning on Mincing Lane in 1765 had been the moment Granville Sharp had come to understand the brutality that marred the lives of the black slaves whom he had grown used to seeing around him in London, it was now, two weeks later at the Mansion House, that he began to comprehend just how desperate their legal predicament was. The laws on slavery in Britain were a jumble of contradictions, uncertainties and ancient case law. For Granville Sharp this labyrinth of legal confusion and dispute became a rather personal issue because ‘A few days after this transaction’ at the Mansion House, he ‘was charged, by a writ, with having robbed the original master, David Lisle, the lawyer, of a Negro slave’. Two weeks after that the situation escalated further. Sharp’s diary contains the following entry for 1 October 1767. ‘David Lisle, Esq. (a man of the law) called on me in Mincing Lane, to demand gentlemanlike satisfaction, because I had procured the liberty of his slave, Jonathan Strong. I told him, that, “as he had studied the law so many years, he should want no satisfaction that the law could give him.” ’6 Granville Sharp was not a man to fight a duel, which is what Lisle had meant by his ridiculous demand for ‘gentlemanlike satisfaction’, but Sharp was a fighter, as Lisle was to discover.
In order to establish slave societies in North America and the West Indies two separate legal systems had evolved within the British Empire. The laws drafted by local legislatures in the New World colonies governed affairs there, while the people of England lived, as they had always done, under the common law, with its mosaic of precedents, determinations and case law. These two systems functioned well enough within their own jurisdictions but problems and uncertainties arose when enslaved black people were brought into Britain by planters returning from the colonies, or by slave captains selling ‘privilege negroes’ in British port towns. No one was clear as to what the exact status of those ‘slaves’ was within English law.
Laws in Virginia, Barbados and the other colonies had been drafted specifically in order to protect the slave system, and defend the rights of the men and women who profited from it. Laws there unambiguously defined Africans as chattel and established legal distinctions between white ‘servants’ and black ‘slaves’ and closed the loopholes that had enabled some black people to cast off their chains. But were any of these laws portable? Could Africans legally defined as slaves in the colonies be regarded and treated as such in ‘free’ England, or upon entering the kingdom did black slaves from the colonies automatically come under the protection of the common law, like everybody else? Should judges and juries treat them as men or as items of property under English law?
To the frustration and alarm of the planters and merchants there were no laws on the statute books of England recognizing or sanctioning slavery. The last laws to recognize any form of bondage in England had been those which had codified feudal villeinage, but that practice, a form of serfdom, had died out by the seventeenth century. If there were no positive laws legitimizing slavery then perhaps sanction for the practice might be found within case law and precedent? But here the legal history was contradictory and muddled. Hacking their way through a thicket of past judgements, judges and barristers uncovered cases going back to the sixteenth century. In 1569 a man named Cartwright had been seen beating another man. When questioned Cartwright defended his actions by claiming that his victim was a slave whom he had brought into the country from Russia. The ruling in this case – cited in a Star Chamber trial of 1637 – was that ‘England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.’ But what did that really mean; that slaves could not be beaten by their masters in England or that no one could be a slave in England? Despite the ambiguity of that antiquated judgement this lyrical phrase was to be quoted, misquoted, adapted and paraphrased for the next three centuries.
Forty years after the Star Chamber trial a case known as Butts v. Penny appeared to contradict that judgement. This case involved a claim for ‘trover’, damages resulting from the unlawful loss of private property. The property in question was ten black slaves. The Court of King’s Bench ruled that these ten Africans were indeed property as it was the custom for black people to be traded as ‘merchandise’, which by 1677 they were. But the Attorney-General intervened to prevent a final judgement in the case, so the significance of the ruling was in doubt. A series of late-seventeenth-century cases seemed to suggest that religion might hold the key to the conundrum. In 1694 a judge concluded that a ‘Negro boy’ could be regarded as merchandise because black people were ‘heathens, and therefore a man may have property in them’.7 But rather than offer a definitive answer to the problem this judgement merely raised new questions. If black people could be enslaved because they were ‘heathens’ that suggested they would have to be freed if they were baptized. The belief that conversion to the Christian faith bestowed freedom upon a slave was widely held among black people and slave owners in the colonies, right up to the formal end of British slavery in the 1830s. Runaway slaves in the West Indies were known to seek out clergymen and demand to be baptized. There were reports of baptismal ceremonies being interrupted by irate slave owners, bursting in and dragging enslaved people away from the font, to the horror of the officiating ministers. In the West Indies, the planters dominated the local legislatures and were able to pass their own laws clearly stipulating that baptism did not confer freedom, but in Britain the slave owners were never able to quash the belief. Jonathan Strong had himself been baptized after his escape from David Lisle in 1765, and among the letters he wrote from his cell at the Poultry Compter were notes to his two godfathers, both white.8 There was also a shocking case in London. In 1760 a nine-year-old black girl who was being held as a slave by an abusive mistress escaped and rushed to a church, where she begged to be baptized. The ceremony had begun when the mistress burst in and ‘violently forced her down the church and dragged her along the streets like a dog without pity or remorse regardless of her cries and tears, telling the people about her that the girl was a slave and she would use her as she pleased’.9
In 1696 the status of black people brought to Britain as slaves was thrown into even greater confusion when the issue came before John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of England. Holt was the judge who famously helped bring to an end the prosecution of women accused of witchcraft. In the case of Chamberlain v. Harvey, a black man who had been brought from Barbados to England and ‘baptised without the knowledge of [his mistress] while there’, argued that he was not a slave as that condition did not exist in England.10 He claimed his freedom specifically on the grounds that, ‘being baptised according to the rite of the Church’ he had been ‘thereby made Christian, and Christianity is inconsistent with slavery’.11 The slave owner in the case argued against the notion that conversion changed the status of the enslaved. Chief Justice Holt, in his judgement, contradicted earlier rulings and concluded that black people could not be defined as merchandise since English law did not recognize them as being any different to other people, Christian or not. However, Holt judged that while black people could not be recognized by the law as slaves, they could be regarded as ‘slavish servants’, occupying a station not dissimilar to that of an apprentice – a person who had sold their labour to a master for an agreed number of years and was bound to him for the duration. This meant that a master potentially had the right to regard their service as his property but not their persons. A fine but critical distinction.
As the battle of case law and precedent rumbled on the stakes increased. When the royal monopoly was pushed aside and English and Scottish slave-traders enormously expanded the scale of the trade, legal decisions over the status of black Africans made by judges in England were no longer mere points of law, but judgements that could potentially have an impact upon the national economy. As the planter in the Chamberlain v. Harvey case asked, ‘Who would squeeze the sugar from the cane once all slaves had been sprinkled with holy water?’12
In 1701, Lord Chief Justice Holt spoke again on the matter. In the case of Smith v. Brown and Cooper, the former sued the latter when they refused to pay him for a slave bought in London. Holt threw the case out with the emphatic statement, ‘As soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free. One may be a villein in England but not a slave.’13 An African who was legally a slave in the colonies could not be held in that condition in England. Another judge, Mr Justice Powell, stated that ‘the law takes no notice of a negro’, and that ‘a black was to be treated as an Englishman’.14
Holt’s judgements horrified the planters, who felt their property rights were being dangerously undermined. So uncertain of their position were they that some were known to keep enslaved Africans on board ship when their vessels called at British ports, to prevent them from taking that first momentous step onto British soil, which their owners feared might be used, by some sympathetic magistrate, as a pretext to award them their freedom. Before he purchased his own freedom Olaudah Equiano was told by English lawyers that he could potentially be freed if he were to make his appeal on British soil.
In 1729 a group of ‘many merchants and British Planters’ petitioned the Attorney-General, Sir Philip Yorke, and the Solicitor-General, Charles Talbot – both of them future Lord Chancellors – for an opinion. The two lawmakers were received at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn after which they delivered to the gathered planters their learned opinion on the legality of slavery in Britain. The Yorke–Talbot opinion gave the planters everything they wanted. It stated that ‘a slave coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free, and that his master’s property or right in him’ remained unchanged. They also opined that for a slave in Britain, ‘baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms.’ Just as importantly Yorke and Talbot stated, ‘We are also of opinion, that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.’15 This after-dinner opinion appeared to put slavery on a far stronger legal footing. But within two decades two other cases – those of Galway v. Cadee in 1750 and Shanley v. Harvey in 1762 – appeared to confirm Holt’s earlier judgements, that a slave became free upon setting foot on English soil.
This was the maze of case law, precedent, contradiction and vested interest into which Granville Sharp suddenly found himself thrust in 1765.
Granville Sharp was one of the least likely civil rights campaigners in all of history. The Sharp family came from Durham. Their grandfather had been the Archbishop of York, their father Archdeacon of Northumberland. Granville was one of five children who grew up in a comfortable and, of course, deeply Christian household. The Sharp brothers moved to London and excelled, William Sharp opening his doctor’s surgery on Mincing Lane, James becoming an engineer manufacturing iron goods. Due to a deterioration in family finances the young Granville had not been given the educational advantages his older brothers had enjoyed. He worked in the linen trade and later became a clerk in the Ordnance Office. These somewhat mundane occupations allowed him time to indulge in what was his and his family’s real passion, music. The Sharps were amateur musicians, but of a very high calibre. They gave regular Sunday concerts as a family ensemble. David Garrick came to see them play and on one occasion they performed for King George III, whose appetite for music was insatiable. Some years they performed on a barge on the Thames, and a rather stunning portrait of the whole family was painted by Johann Zoffany, some time around 1790. Content in the bosom of his large and loving family, Granville Sharp’s existence was given rhythm and meaning by his love of life and music and by his deep and earnest faith. When David Lisle, a tough colonial lawyer, learnt who his opponent was in the dispute over Jonathan Strong he might have grown more confident of the chances of regaining his ‘property’.
From the portraits we have of him it seems there is little evidence of his personal contentment and familial serenity in the countenance of Granville Sharp. Thin-faced and punctilious, he was a descendant of Yorkshire Puritans and he looked the part. But this bookish, pious civil servant, who spent his spare time playing the flute, was the man who was to take on the slave owners of the so-called West India Interest and force the reluctant lawmakers of England to make a final and begrudged determination on the legality of slavery in Britain. He was to influence the lives of more people than he could possibly have imagined.
After being forced to make an undignified retreat under the gaze of the Lord Mayor, James Kerr, the man to whom Lisle had sold Jonathan Strong, focused his wrath upon Granville Sharp. Along with another of his brothers, James, Granville was accused of having denied Kerr the property he alleged to hold in Strong. In the ensuing legal row Jonathan Strong himself was not a party but merely the disputed item of property.
When Sharp sought legal representation to defend him against Kerr, the lawyers he approached advised him that his case was hopeless. Sir James Eyre, the Recorder of London, having spoken to the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, advised Sharp that the Yorke–Talbot opinion of 1729 was decisive. Undeterred and despite having no prior knowledge of the law or legal training, Granville Sharp rejected this advice and set about researching the law himself. For a year Sharp spent his days working at the Ordnance Office, his spare time playing music with his family and friends, but devoting other waking hours to his meticulous study of the law. He met a number of leading lawyers and had conversations with the Solicitor-General. Trawling through the labyrinth of case law he read Holt’s judgements and discovered that Yorke–Talbot, far from being a decision of case law, as many people had come to presume, was merely an opinion offered up after a cosy dinner with London’s planters. In 1767 Sharp condensed his research into book form. He then distributed copies of his manuscript to a number of lawyers, before its publication. It was read by William Blackstone, the first Vinerian Professor of English Law, whose famous Commentaries on the Laws of England had recently been published. The legal argument this amateur had presented across 167 pages was detailed and compelling enough to convince James Kerr to drop his action. A second action brought by Kerr was similarly abandoned and David Lisle eventually gave up his favoured tactic of sending Sharp letters demanding the return of Jonathan Strong. Sharp had responded to these approaches by reminding Lisle that Strong was not an item of property that he had taken from him, but a free man over whom neither of them had any legal property rights.
With the collapse of Kerr’s action Granville Sharp was no longer a defendant and Jonathan Strong was no longer at risk of being re-enslaved by Kerr or David Lisle. At this point Sharp could have ended his legal studies and returned to his flute and his monotonous job at the Ordnance Office. But he did not. In 1769, he published his book, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. Arranged across four parts it weaved together case law with notions of natural law and Sharp’s deeply held Christian morality. In it he argued passionately against what he called the toleration of slavery, warning that, ‘If such a toleration would ever be generally admitted in England, (which God forbid!) we shall no longer deserve to be esteemed a civilized people’.16 Sharp predicted that any toleration of slavery in Britain would allow the cancer of unfreedom to spread and undermine the liberties of other groups, ‘when any part of the community, under the pretence of private property, is deprived of this common privilege [rights under the law], ’tis a violation of civil liberty, which is entirely inconsistent with the social principles of a free state. True liberty protects the labourer as well as his lord’.17 These were fine words, but they are not why Granville Sharp is remembered. What made him famous at the time, and what makes him deserving of continued recognition, was his legal crusade on behalf of the enslaved.
From 1765 to 1772 Sharp searched for the case, that might be brought to trial and that would force the judges to make a final determination on the legality of slavery in Britain. He was worldly enough to understand that taking on the institution of slavery in the colonies was, in the 1760s and 1770s, a futile task. In those decades the British slave trade and the plantation system were hurtling towards the zenith of profitability. Islands like Jamaica were among the most productive territories in the world and the planters and merchants of the West Indies a powerful political force. For now Sharp contented himself with seeking to prevent what he termed the ‘toleration’ of slavery in Britain, though his views on the slave trade were clear.
In the aftermath of his victory over Lisle and Kerr, Sharp began taking up cases that were brought to him by black people whose rights had been breached. The case of John Hylas, mentioned in the previous chapter, in which his wife Mary had been abducted and sold as a slave, was the first Sharp championed and took to court. The judgement reunited John and Mary Hylas and was the first in a string of legal victories, but no definitive determination on the status of slaves in Britain was drawn from it. By now the obsessive and combative aspects of Sharp’s personality were in the ascendancy. In addition to taking on legal cases he scanned the press looking for causes to fight and potential allies whom he might convert to the cause. In 1769 the following advert appeared in the Public Advertiser.
To be sold, a Black Girl, the property of J. B—, eleven years of age, who is extremely handy, works at her needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well; is of an excellent temper, and willing disposition. Inquire of Mr. Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St. Clement’s church, in the Strand.18
Sharp was so outraged that he wrote the same day to Lord Camden, the Lord High Chancellor of England, complaining about ‘the frequency of such publications’, which he felt ‘must tend very much to extinguish those benevolent and humane principles which ought to adorn a Christian nation’. Sharp requested his Lordship ‘take such notice of this notorious breach of the laws of nature, humanity, and equity, and also of the established law, custom, and constitution of England’.19 Sharp enclosed a copy of his book. His monitoring of the London press also brought to his attention advertisements for the implements of slavery. Slave collars and an iron punishment muzzle particularly appalled him. Sharp copied these advertisements and included them as an appendix to the letters he sent to the powerful and the influential.
The legal case that seemed to offer the promise of advancing his cause arrived in July 1770. It concerned the abduction and attempted deportation of Thomas Lewis, a black man who was regarded as a slave by a retired ship’s captain named Robert Stapylton. Seemingly in need of money, perhaps because of his advancing age, Stapylton had hired two Thames watermen, John Malony and Edward Armstrong, to seize Lewis. Compared to the abduction of Jonathan Strong by David Lisle and his hirelings four years earlier, this was a botched job, despite having been meticulously planned. Stapylton’s thugs pounced on Lewis on the night of 2 July, having lured him to a spot by the Thames in Chelsea. They overpowered and tied Lewis up with cord, but as the site chosen for the abduction was directly in front of a row of riverside mansions, when Lewis screamed for help a number of witnesses arrived on the scene, among them the servants from one of the nearby mansions, some of whom even knew Lewis. They rushed out and confronted his attackers. All that prevented them from rescuing him was that one of the watermen produced an official-looking document and, ‘pretended to have a warrant from the Lord Mayor for his apprehension’. Fearing arrest themselves the servants retreated. To silence Lewis, Malony and Armstrong gagged him ‘by thrusting a stick into his mouth’. They then bundled the poor man into a boat and ferried him down the Thames to the Captain Seward, a ship moored in the river, on which he was chained, ready to be transported to Jamaica and sold.20
The mansion beside which the abduction of Thomas Lewis had taken place, and from where the servants had come in the hope of rescuing him, was owned by one Mrs Banks, and she too had heard Lewis’s desperate screams and cries for help. Mrs Banks happened to be the mother of Joseph Banks, the celebrated botanist and one of the founders of the Royal Academy who, in the summer of 1770, was with Captain James Cook in Australia on his famous first voyage. It was Mrs Banks who contacted Granville Sharp about the case, Sharp’s reputation as the defender of black people having already spread through the city.21 Mrs Banks even bore the costs of bringing the action against the men who attempted to kidnap Thomas Lewis, and Sharp’s initial reservations about the case were founded upon his concerns over the costs Mrs Banks might have to incur. Nonetheless Sharp rushed into action. First he sought an injunction to have Lewis returned from Gravesend, but the servant dispatched there discovered that the ship had already departed. But bad winds momentarily kept the vessel off the Kent coast giving Sharp more time. As Sharp’s memoirs tell us, ‘a writ of Habeas Corpus was procured [and] sent down to Spithead, and served on board the ship, still lying in the Downs’.22 According to one account, the officer who served the writ to the captain of the Snow came on board to find Lewis, ‘chained to the mainmast, bathed in tears, and casting a last mournful look on the land of freedom, which was fast receding from his sight. The captain, on receiving the writ, became outrageous; but, knowing the serious consequences of resisting the law of the land, he gave up his prisoner, whom the officer carried safe, but now crying for joy, to the shore.’23 Lewis had escaped slavery in Jamaica by the slimmest of margins. With the man in question now returned to London, Granville Sharp and Mrs Banks brought a private prosecution, ‘against the author of the outrage!’. Robert Stapylton and the two watermen were charged with assault.24
The case came before William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Mansfield, whose name is for ever linked to that of Sharp, was a judge who on repeated occasions had granted writs of habeas corpus that returned slaves to their owners, and his prime objective in relation to the slavery question was to avoid making a judgement on the matter, for fear that such ruling would have far-reaching consequences.25 In the Thomas Lewis case Robert Stapylton’s defence was simply, ‘Lewis belonged to him as his slave.’ Appearing for the prosecution was John Dunning, the lawyer retained by Sharp and Mrs Banks and to whom Sharp had supplied a copy of his book. This Dunning used almost as a prop throughout the trial, brandishing it and quoting from it repeatedly. At one point, ‘Mr. Dunning . . . held up Mr. Sharp’s Tract in his hand, and declared, before Lord Mansfield and the Court, that he was prepared to maintain, in any of the courts in Great Britain, that no man can be legally detained as a Slave in this country’.26 But Mansfield adamantly refused to judge the case on this larger question and restricted the jury to consider only the status of Thomas Lewis – was he a slave or not? As Stapylton could not prove his claim to ownership his case fell apart. In his summing up Mansfield noted that, ‘whether they [slave owners] have this kind of property or not in England has never been solemnly determined’, but as Stapylton was unable to prove ownership of Lewis the judge was able to avoid making that determination. ‘We don’t find he was the defendant’s property’, was the verdict of the jury, which solicited chants of ‘No Property, No Property’ from the supporters of Lewis and Sharp in the public galleries. Thomas Lewis, who had given evidence on his own behalf during the trial, left court a free man but the legality of slavery in England remained uncertain and undecided, as Mansfield had hoped it would. ‘I don’t know what the consequences may be’, he stated, ‘if the masters were to lose their property by accidentally bringing their slaves to England. I hope it never will be finally discussed; for I would have all masters think them free, and all negroes think they were not, because then they would both behave better.’27 Sharp was bitterly disappointed that Mansfield had gone so far out of his way to avoid making a judgement on the legality of slavery in Britain.
The case that Granville Sharp had been waiting for ever since 1766 came knocking at the door of his lodgings in Old Jewry in the City of London. It arrived just six months after the Lewis case had concluded, not that Sharp could see its potential straight away. In his diary Sharp wrote that on 12 January 1772, ‘James Somerset, a Negro from Virginia, called on me this morning . . . to complain of Mr. Charles Stewart. I gave him the best advice that I could.’28
Little is known of the life of James Somerset. We learn something of him from Sharp’s diary and pick up the basic details of his life from the discussions in court and in various affidavits, though he himself was never to take the stand in the case that was to determine his own freedom. Like too many of the black people in our story he appears in the records more spoken about than speaking, the subject of events rather than an actor in them. What we do know is that he was a domestic slave from Virginia. Charles Stewart, a former Boston customs officer of Scottish origins, regarded Somerset as his property, and had done for twenty years. Under the laws of Virginia or Massachusetts, Stewart’s ownership of Somerset was not in question but in November 1769 Stewart brought Somerset with him to London. Perhaps on the streets of the English capital, Somerset began to notice the numbers of free black people, and started to imagine that he might be able to simply slip among them, and find some degree of anonymity within the chaotic bustle of the multi-racial metropolis. There he could bide his time in the hope that Charles Stewart would give up looking for him and return to Virginia. Or perhaps, during his time in London, Somerset came to understand that the only chance of freedom that was ever likely to present itself required him to ensure that when his owner returned to Virginia he was not on board that ship with him. Somerset might also have come to question his status as a slave on spiritual grounds, as we know that on 12 February 1771 he was baptized at St Andrew’s in Holborn. There he was welcomed into the Church and received by three white godparents. Whatever his reasons, after two years in London and two decades serving Stewart, on 26 November 1771 James Somerset escaped.
Like Mary Hylas, Thomas Lewis and an unknown number of black men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the hired slave-hunters were unleashed against James Somerset. He was stalked on the streets of London. He was cornered and captured near Covent Garden, after having known just two months of the freedom he craved. From Covent Garden he was taken to the Ann and Mary, a ship in the Thames, and there put in chains, out of sight in the gloom of a lower deck. James Somerset was, however, not to be returned to his empty life as a domestic slave in Massachusetts but to be cast into the hellish existence of a Jamaican plantation slave. He was, it appeared, doomed.
Somerset reached out to his godparents from the church in which he had been baptized, and they came to his defence. Elizabeth Cade, Thomas Walkin, and John Marlow, all of them moral enemies of slavery, together secured a writ of habeas corpus on Somerset’s behalf, which was granted, again by Lord Mansfield.29 This compelled Captain John Knowles of the Ann and Mary to surrender Somerset to the court. Mrs Cade appears to have taken the lead. Yet although Lord Mansfield granted the writ and demanded that Somerset be presented to the court, Stewart and Knowles, the men who between them had arranged for the kidnapping and deportation, were initially regarded by Mansfield as the injured party in the affair. It was Somerset the plaintiff rather than Stewart and Knowles the defendants who was bound over to appear in court. Knowles brazenly complained in his affidavit that Somerset having ‘departed and absented himself’ from the service of Stewart had thereby deprived him of his property.
Despite knowing so little about the man, what we can say about James Somerset is that he was clearly determined to fight for his freedom and adamant that he would not return to Stewart, or be sold into Jamaican slavery at the hands of Captain Knowles. To fight his case he went to see Granville Sharp, whose fame and reputation had increased with each victory in court. The injustices of Somerset’s plight appear, after a delay, to have fired Sharp’s indignant temper. Two weeks later he agreed to take the case on and the usual flurry of frenetic activity began. On 29 January he records in his diary the payment to the relevant clerk of six guineas, ‘to retain two counsel in the case of Somerset.’ The legal team Sharp assembled quickly expanded. As well as the experienced and pugnacious William ‘Bull’ Davy and John Glyn, sergeants at law, Sharp accepted an offer of service from Francis Hargrave, a young barrister who was so passionately anti-slavery that he had researched the legal issues and the case-law history much in the way Sharp himself had done. The two swapped notes. Also on the team was the sergeant at law John Alleyne and the barrister James Mansfield, who was not related to the Lord Chief Justice. Both Hargrave and Alleyne worked pro bono on what promised to be a landmark case that might lift their professional reputations.
Against this impressive array of legal minds there appeared for the defence a figure who was familiar to Granville Sharp. The barrister whose services were retained by Charles Stewart and Captain Knowles was John Dunning, who only the previous year had defended Thomas Lewis. In that case he had declared, in public session and in front of Lord Mansfield, that England’s ‘Laws admit of no such property’. Throughout that case Dunning had brandished a copy of Granville Sharp’s book. By appearing in the defence of Stewart, in support of his right to own property in Somerset, Dunning put himself in a ridiculous position and the whiff of hypocrisy undermined his case and his performance in court from the start.
When the case finally began in January 1772 the argument that Dunning struggled to present, to an often hostile courtroom, was one in which he attempted to sidestep the morality of slavery and instead lay out a commercial case. Dunning argued that to refuse to recognize the property rights of slave owners who had brought slaves into England would be to the detriment of British commerce. Another of Stewart’s barristers, William Wallace, argued that it would be a grave injustice if Stewart lost his property merely because he had travelled to England to conduct legal business. Wallace also contended that any judgement that disavowed the slave owners’ right to their ‘property’ would, in effect, liberate from bondage thousands of black people already resident in Britain. It was during the Somerset trial that the black population of the country was estimated at around fourteen to fifteen thousand. This dubious figure was arrived at, in part, to allow the defence counsel to make another equally dubious calculation of the potential economic costs of their mass liberation. By Dunning’s reckoning the cost of freeing all the black slaves currently in England would exceed £800,000. Mansfield himself, at one point in the trial, remarked that ‘setting 14,000 or 15,000 men at once loose by a solemn opinion, is very disagreeable in the effects it threatens.’30 Another pertinent financial issue emerged during exchanges between William Wallace and Lord Mansfield when the court learnt that Charles Stewart’s costs and expenses were being paid by the West Indian merchants.31 To some extent the Somerset case became a proxy war between the West India Interest on the one hand and humanitarians like Sharp and his supporters on the other, as money was donated to pay the counsel on both sides.
Lord Mansfield, who was one of the architects of English commercial law, was innately sympathetic towards aspects of the arguments that were put forward by John Dunning, but as in previous cases he hoped to find a way to avoid making a definitive judgement. In an effort to prevent the case coming to trial Mansfield endeavoured to persuade Somerset, Stewart, and Captain Knowles to negotiate through their attorneys and reach a settlement outside of court. In court, during one of the many adjournments, he informed counsel that ‘In five or six cases of this nature, I have known it to be accommodated by agreement between the parties: on its first coming before me, I strongly recommended it here’. On two separate occasions Mansfield suggested that Stewart could at a stroke ‘end the question, by discharging or giving freedom to the negro’. On another he proposed that Elizabeth Cade, one of Somerset’s godparents who had helped secure the writ of habeas corpus, should herself purchase him from Charles Stewart and then set him free. Elizabeth Cade, a poor widow opposed to slavery on religious principle, adamantly refused to even consider Lord Mansfield’s suggestion as to do so ‘would be an acknowledgement that the Plaintiff had a right to Assault and imprison a poor innocent man in this Kingdom, and that she would never be guilty of setting so bad an Example’.32 What James Somerset thought of these various schemes for his manumission is not recorded.
Mansfield’s other tactic was to repeatedly adjourn the case and delay proceedings. Between the writ of habeas corpus being granted in December 1771 and the final decision in late June 1772, there were eight separate hearings of the case; each of them, except the last, ended by an adjournment. This tactic backfired spectacularly on Mansfield, as it provided the legal team that Granville Sharp had assembled to expand the scope of their case, making it ever more difficult for him to offer a limited judgement, specific only to the case of James Somerset. The chain of adjournments also gave journalists on the London and provincial newspapers more time to report the case, which in turn increased public interest.33 The later adjournments were reported almost as cliff-hanger endings in a long-running drama, one in which the great questions of freedom, slavery and property rights might be decided.
The case that Davy and Glyn presented on Somerset’s behalf centred on the canon of legal arguments developed by Sharp during his studies in 1766. These arguments had been refined and practised by the barristers Sharp had worked with during the previous cases, including John Dunning. At the core of the case for the prosecution of Stewart and Knowles was the proposition ‘that no man at this day is, or can be a slave in England’.34 Therefore if Somerset was indeed a man, and Mansfield himself ‘concluded him one’ then ‘it was impossible he could be a slave in England unless by the introduction of some species of property unknown to our constitution’.35 Davy and Glyn argued that not only did English law not sanction slavery, the protections it offered applied to all people who entered into England, irrespective of race or even religion. The only laws or statutes that had ever sanctioned any form on bondage in England were the ancient laws pertaining to villeinage, which were clearly defunct. Only colonial laws sanctioned slavery and they were not applicable in England. If the slave laws of Virginia and Jamaica were accepted in England, they argued, then why not all colonial laws and statutes? Referring to the Cartwright case of 1569, which had famously resolved ‘That England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in’, Davy, addressing Mansfield, commented that, ‘I hope, my Lord, the air does not blow worse since. But, unless there is a change of air, I hope they will never breathe here; for that is my assertion,—the moment they put their foot on English ground, that moment they become free. They are subject to the laws, and they are entitled to the protection of the laws of this country, and so are their masters, thank God!’36
It was Francis Hargrave, the novice, who had offered his services free, whose speech most doggedly sought to expand the scope of the case beyond just the facts pertaining to James Somerset. Hargrave wanted to explore general principles and he did so brilliantly. ‘The questions arising on this case do not merely conserve the unfortunate person who is the subject of it,’ he said. ‘The right claimed by Mr. Stewart to the detention of the negro, is founded on the condition of slavery in which he was before his master brought him into England; and if that right is not recognized, domestic slavery, with its horrid train of evils, may be imported into this country.’37 This potent spectre of slavery imported into England, and ‘tolerated’ as Sharp had described it, was powerfully fleshed out by Hargrave in a barnstorming speech that demonstrated the extent to which slavery was out of step with English traditions and lacking a sound basis in English law – facts that Lord Mansfield despite himself fully understood. Hargrave’s speeches were as much history lessons as legal arguments and Lord Mansfield’s failure to prevent him and other counsel from expanding the scope of the case made it increasingly difficult for him, the further proceedings dragged on, to offer a narrow and limited judgement. For all his legal brilliance in the case of James Somerset, Lord Mansfield, to some extent, lost control of proceedings.
On 21 May 1772 Lord Mansfield adjourned the case for the last time, but not before making one final plea to Stewart for him to ‘end the question, by discharging or giving freedom to the negro’.38 With the money of the West India planters behind him Stewart had nothing to lose and no incentive to settle and had promised his paymasters that he would see the case through to judgement.39 ‘If the parties will have it decided’, Lord Mansfield said, ‘we must give our opinion. Compassion will not, on the one hand, nor inconvenience on the other, be to decide’.40
So Lord Mansfield retired to deliberate, fearful of the potential consequences that might flow from the judgement that was now expected of him. To find in favour of Somerset carried the risk of undermining the property rights of the slave owners and such a decision could, potentially, lead to the emancipation of the thousands of black servants and slaves in Britain. Whereas should he rule that the slave laws of Virginia protected Stewart’s property rights in James Somerset while in England, ‘to the extent it has been argued’, carried what Lord Mansfield described as ‘consequences altogether foreign to the object of our present enquiry’. These considerations were what he described as the ‘obstructions that militate against an immediate decision’.41 But he concluded in court that, ‘If the parties will have judgment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum;” let justice be done whatever be the consequence. 50l. a-head may not be a high price; then a loss follows to the proprietors of above 700,000l. sterling. How would the law stand with respect to their [the slaves] settlement; their wages? How many actions for any slight coercion by the master? We cannot in any of these points direct the law; the law must rule us.’42
The Lord Chief Justice took over a month to make his judgement. During that time he returned to his mansion, Kenwood House in Hampstead. There, within his home, was his extensive law library and his bust of Homer, and also his family which – to say the least – was not entirely conventional. Lord Mansfield’s nephew, Captain Sir John Lindsay of the Royal Navy, had a daughter who was the product of an affair between Lindsay and an enslaved African woman named Maria. She had been named Dido Elizabeth Belle and in 1765, the year Jonathan Strong stumbled into Mincing Lane and Granville Sharp began his legal studies, Captain Lindsay brought her to England. When Lindsay returned to sea he entrusted his daughter to the care of Lord Mansfield and his wife Elizabeth Murray; they a wealthy childless couple, she a mixed-race girl of just four years old. Although technically Dido was merely Mansfield’s illegitimate grand-niece she was brought up at Kenwood House, alongside the couple’s orphaned niece Elizabeth. Her exact status within Mansfield’s household is not entirely known, though it seems she might at times have been treated affectionately but not as a full equal, in much the way the poorer relations to wealthy families were regarded. Dido also performed some acts of service to the young Miss Murray and managed the dairy at Kenwood. But the extent to which Dido’s status within the family was determined by her race, as opposed to her illegitimacy, is impossible to disentangle. Later Mansfield was to leave Dido an annuity in his will and use his legal skills to ensure that she was unambiguously recognized as a free person. Today Dido Belle is well known. The portrait, by Zoffany, of her and the young Elizabeth Murray is one of the best-known images of any black Georgian, but her existence was not widely known in 1772. At a time when the black population of London probably numbered fewer than ten thousand it is truly remarkable that the man who was to make a legal determination on the issue of slavery in England had a mixed-race niece, to whom he was evidently devoted, yet this was the case and Dido must, at times, have been in Mansfield’s mind over the weeks during which he agonized over his judgement.
From the very start the Somerset case had attracted the attention of the public. The earliest hearings had been held before busy courtrooms, packed with interested spectators and supporters of Granville Sharp’s campaign. By the summer of 1772, after more than six months of speeches, repeated adjournments and fresh hearings, all of it reported by the press, the case had become a national sensation and the topic of endless debate. Newspaper coverage was constant throughout the case but peaked between May and June. The powerful speech given by Francis Hargrave in the May hearings that stunned the court had been widely reported. Rather as Hargrave had done in court, journalists and correspondents to the newspapers endeavoured in print to link the case to wider issues and principles. Long before the case was anywhere near resolution, newspapers in London and the provinces had already painted a wholly distorted picture of the issues on which a judgement was, eventually, to be made. A Bristol periodical suggested that the point of the case was to determine ‘how far a Negro or Black, is a slave in England’.43 The picture was made more confusing still by reports of statements supposedly made by Lord Mansfield. Some newspapers widened the scope of the case even further; the future of British commerce and the security of the West Indian colonies were both said to rest on Mansfield’s judgement. Other correspondents made dire predictions of the fate that would befall the nation if Mansfield ruled in favour of Somerset, while equally apocalyptical visions of the future were fleshed out by correspondents who imagined a bleak future in which slavery was tolerated in England and the violence of the plantation system imported into the mother country.
The scale of public interest was not accidental. Behind the scenes Granville Sharp had been busy raising awareness and building support. He had employed a shorthand writer to record the speeches given in court; these were then printed and disseminated across the country. Sharp sent copies, along with his personal letters, to influential figures in politics and the church. To reinforce the fact that the fates of real, flesh-and-blood human beings were at stake, Sharp, rather brilliantly, had James Somerset hand-deliver documents to these notables. Somerset even delivered a package of documents from Sharp to Lord Mansfield himself.44
Granville Sharp’s campaign harnessed an interest in the issue of slavery that already existed and that was building within sections of the public. Here was an institution that raised difficult questions about the limits of the freedoms that Englishmen increasingly valued. Slavery was built on violence; it ripped families apart, separated husbands from wives and children from their mothers. All of this played on late Georgian notions of sentiment and tragedy. Much of this sentimentalism was paternalistic, and fixed the black African very much as a passive victim, but the emotions it elicited were real and powerful. The slow rise of a new Christian philanthropy, the same spirit that had provided both Jonathan Strong and James Somerset with white godparents from the churches in which they had been baptized, inspired a moral and religious fervour in people who, in later years, would be called abolitionists. To them the potential of the Somerset case was clear and unambiguous.
After so long a wait, and following so much fevered speculation and dubious misreporting, it was inevitable that when Lord Mansfield came to deliver his judgement on Monday 22 June 1772 he found Westminster Hall overflowing with members of the public, representatives of the interested parties and reporters from the newspapers. Among those present were the anxious agents of the West India Interest, who feared that Lord Mansfield was about to deliver a judgement far less favourable than the opinion the planters of the late 1720s had solicited from the obliging Lords Yorke and Talbot. Press reports speculating that the case was more likely to go in favour of Somerset than against him served to increase the alarm of the West India merchants and their supporters. Also in attendance were people who had more resting on the case than property rights. As the newspapers tell us there were a number of black people in Westminster Hall awaiting the judgement. Beyond the courtroom the case was being eagerly followed by Britain’s black population, some of whom had reason to fear for their own legal status should Mansfield rule against James Somerset.
The mood of the crowd in Westminster Hall was made more febrile and expectant by news from the markets. As Mansfield prepared to read his judgement the nation appeared to be teetering on the brink of economic chaos. The collapse of a leading credit house, and the flight to France of the banker Alexander Fordyce who was unable to pay his debts, had sparked an eighteenth-century credit crunch. There had been a run on the banks and around twenty institutions had collapsed. On the day that Mansfield was giving his judgement, Horace Walpole complained, with some incredulity, that ‘One rascally and extravagant banker has brought Britannia, Queen of the Indies, to the precipice of bankruptcy! . . . He has broken half the bankers.’45 James Boswell writing in the Scots Magazine painted a vivid picture of the tense atmosphere that had pervaded the city that day: ‘Words cannot describe the general consternation of the metropolis . . . A universal bankruptcy was expected, and the stoppage of every banker looked for. The whole city was in uproar, and many of the first families in tears. Every countenance appeared clouded, occasioned either by real distress, or by what they feared for their friends’.46 It is against this backdrop of heightened tension that Mansfield prepared to give his judgement on slavery and the rights of slave owners, with all its potential implications for the national economy.
When Lord Mansfield appeared at Westminster Hall he began by reminding the court how, over a year earlier, James Somerset had been kidnapped and chained aboard the ship the Ann and Mary in which he was to be transported to slavery in Jamaica. The right that Somerset’s owner Charles Stewart had presumed when he had kidnapped Somerset and attempted to deport him from England constituted, in Mansfield’s view, ‘so high an act of dominion’, that it could only be permitted if such a right were ‘recognized by the law of the country where it is used’.47 He went on, ‘The power of a master over his slave has been extremely different, in different countries. The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’48
It was reported in the newspapers that on hearing those last words the black people within the crowd ‘bowed with profound respect to the Judges, and shaking each other by the hand, congratulated themselves upon their recovery of the rights of human nature, and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England.—No sight upon earth could be more pleasingly affecting to the feeling mind, than the joy which shone at that instant in these poor men’s sable countenances.’49
To those who heard it, and to those who were to read about it later, the judgement appeared to grant freedom not just to James Somerset but to all black people in Britain. This is not what Mansfield said, but it is what most people took his judgement to mean. The exact meaning of Lord Mansfield’s judgement was debated at the time and has been the subject of more than two centuries of argument among both legal experts and historians. The fact that we do not have a precise written transcription of the judgement significantly clouds the waters, and expands the scope for interpretation and misinterpretation. Court reporting was haphazardly done in the eighteenth century and Mansfield’s own copy of the judgement was destroyed, along with his other papers, when his house was targeted during the Gordon Riots of 1780. All that survives are the newspapers’ accounts of what Mansfield said in court and law reports compiled some years later.50 One of those reports puts into the mouth of Lord Mansfield words that were in fact said by Francis Hargrave, Somerset’s counsel and perhaps the most ideologically anti-slavery member of his legal team. Through this haze of misreporting, the judgement was widely interpreted as a final determination by Lord Mansfield that slavery did not exist as a recognized institution within the laws of England, having never been introduced by any positive law or Act of Parliament. However, a more narrow interpretation of the judgement suggests that all Lord Mansfield ruled upon was whether a slave owner had the right to forcibly remove a slave from the country. A later ruling by Lord Mansfield in a case of 1785 relating to the enslaved black woman Charlotte Howe supports the view that what he had made in 1772 was a narrow ruling on the deportation of slaves out of England. But Lord Mansfield was never able to rein in the misinterpretation of the judgement for which he is best remembered today. Yet whatever the scope of the judgement the startling fact was that James Somerset was no longer a slave. Lord Mansfield had concluded that Charles Stewart did not have the right under English law to seize James Somerset on English soil and deport him to the colonies. He could arguably have thus returned him to Charles Stewart, still in a state of slavery. But he had concluded his ruling by saying that ‘therefore the black must be discharged’. The judgement had made Somerset free and he, by the act of resisting deportation and taking the case to law, had manumitted himself. Lord Mansfield’s later claims that his judgement was narrow and limited are to some extent undermined by the fact of Somerset’s freedom.51
Ultimately the exact terms of his judgement and intentions became less significant than the popular understanding, or misunderstanding, of it. This popular interpretation overpowered and overwhelmed the dry letter of the law. Black people in Britain and their supporters were determined to take the decision as monumental and to regard its impact as wide and far reaching, despite the technical narrowness of what Mansfield had actually ruled. Just five days after the judgement, the Public Advertiser reported that ‘On Monday near two hundred blacks with their ladies had an entertainment at a public-house in Westminster, to celebrate the triumph which their brother Somerset had obtained over Mr. Stuart, his master. Lord Mansfield’s health was echoed around the room; and the evening was concluded with a ball.’52 The Public Advertiser of 25 June noted that ‘A Subscription is now raising among the great Number of Negroes, in and about this Metropolis, for the purpose of presenting Somerset with a handsome Gratuity, for having so nobly stood up in Defence of the natural Rights of the sable Part of the human Creation.’53 The slave owners were unsure as to the scope of the judgement, but feared that when Mansfield had warned of ‘inconveniences’ that ‘may follow from the decision’, he had them and their Property rights in mind. In May 1772 the slave owners had asked Parliament to pass an act to end all uncertainty and legalize the holding of slaves in England. When Parliament refused, the slave owners took that decision as an indication that the anti-slavery mood in Britain was beginning to gain traction.
Granville Sharp himself had been unclear about what the judgement had achieved. He had not been in court to hear Lord Mansfield’s judgement and had not appeared at any of the hearings. Having attended the earlier cases he had championed, Sharp had concluded that his presence in court risked annoying Lord Mansfield, and he stayed away. Furthermore he had his work in the Ordnance Office to occupy him. For Sharp the case ended as it had begun, with James Somerset calling upon him at the lodgings he shared with his brother in Old Jewry. On 22 June 1772 Sharp’s diary reads, ‘This day, James Somerset came to tell me that judgement was to-day given in his favour.’54 From a number of later statements it is clear that Sharp was not convinced that the ruling had ended slavery in England.
Beyond 22 June 1772, when we can pinpoint him in Old Jewry delivering the news to Granville Sharp, James Somerset, the man whose personal freedom had become the subject of this epic trial, disappears from written records, his later life lost to us. His name, of course, linked for ever to those of Lord Mansfield and Granville Sharp, lived on, but the Somerset judgement for which he is remembered was not what most people at the time understood it to be and not what many historians subsequently reported.
Interpretation and misinterpretation aside, the judgement meant that slave owners no longer had the power to enforce their claims over enslaved people in England. The threat of deportation, the most powerful of the tools used to compel obedience on slaves in England – the ship as opposed to the whip, as one historian put it – had been taken from them. After Mansfield slaves in England could, in effect, free themselves by running away, and the slave owners knew it. The pro-slavery propagandist Edward Long saw the ruling in this light and regarded the loss of the right to imprison or transport slaves in Britain as virtually the same as granting him or her freedom. And there were black people who similarly interpreted the ruling and promptly left their owners to claim the freedoms they believed the Lord Chief Justice had granted them. In July 1772, less than a month after the judgement, one John Riddell of Bristol Wells wrote to Charles Stewart to report his slave Dublin had left him. ‘I am disappointed by Mr. Dublin who has run away’, Riddell wrote. ‘He told the servants that he had rec’d a letter from his Uncle Sommerset [sic] acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their freedom & he was determined to leave me as soon as I returned from London which he did without even speaking to me . . . I believe that I shall not give myself any trouble to look after [for] this ungrateful villain’.55 In 1769 Joseph Knight, a Jamaican slave who had been taken to Scotland by his owner John Wedderburn, read of the Somerset judgement in the Edinburgh Advertiser and decided that Mansfield’s decision applied to him, despite Scotland having her own separate laws and legal system. Knight emancipated himself and later got married, but was then arrested by John Wedderburn. Knight appealed and in 1778 the sheriff of Perthshire concluded, ‘that the state of slavery is not recognized by the laws of this kingdom’.56 At appeal before the Court of Sessions the Somerset case was cited repeatedly. At this higher court it was decided that Joseph Knight was a free man as the laws of Jamaica, where Wedderburn had purchased Knight, carried no more weight in Scotland than the laws of Virginia did in England. Yet these were isolated cases. After the Mansfield judgement there was not a large-scale dash for freedom among enslaved black Britons. The economic considerations that convinced black people to stay with their masters, whether as slaves or as servants, were unchanged by rulings from the King’s Bench. Life among the black poor on the streets of London and elsewhere remained as precarious and harsh as ever and black slaves lacking family networks or marketable skills were barred by poverty from seizing the freedoms that the law appeared to have conceded.
But while black people and their supporters, along with a number of slave owners, believed that the Mansfield judgement had ended slavery in England, some masters understood that the judgement had been far less definitive and attempted to hold on to their slaves, while others chose to simply ignore the case. Long after 1772 advertisements for the sale of slaves were still appearing in British newspapers, as were notices offering rewards for the return of runaways. Furthermore, even for Mansfield’s narrow judgement to take effect, and for kidnapped slaves to be saved from deportation to the plantations, their abductions had to be prevented and they themselves had to be liberated from the ships in which they were imprisoned. As the cases of Jonathan Strong, Mary Hylas, Thomas Lewis and James Somerset had all demonstrated, it took a combination of various factors – luck, literacy and determination on the part of the enslaved, botched abductions or the active involvement of outraged witnesses like Mrs Banks to alert the courts and bring cases of abduction to law. How many black Georgians were more discreetly abducted and covertly deported, both before and after the Mansfield judgement, will never be known. There are reports of black men and women being forced aboard West India-bound ships long after 1772. The tragic story, mentioned in the previous chapter, of the black man who, having been abducted, committed suicide while on the Thames, and became the inspiration for Thomas Day and John Bicknall’s poem The Dying Negro, took place in 1773. Even in 1823, sixteen years after the abolition of the slave trade, it was reported that a black woman named Grace Jones was forcibly transported by her mistress to slavery on the island of Antigua.
On 17 April 1773, as the repercussions of the Mansfield judgement reverberated around Britain and radiated across the empire, Granville Sharp, still in his lodgings in Old Jewry, recorded in his diary that ‘Poor Jonathan Strong, the first Negro whose freedom I had procured in 1767, died this morning.’ Jonathan Strong was only around twenty-five years old. He had never fully recovered from the vicious beating he had suffered at the hands of David Lisle in 1765.