Belle (12 page)

Granville Sharp, drawn by George Dance

On the face of it they were as different as two men could be. Lord Mansfield was by now one of the most famous men in the land. Wealthy, titled and powerful, equally known for his verbal brilliance and his fair-mindedness. Perceived as the founding father of modern commercial law, so vital to the new world of international trade and its necessary underpinning, insurance. But a man who would never let his personal associations get in the way of his professional life, as was seen from his prosecution of Jacobite leaders who were family friends.

Granville Sharp, by contrast, was a humble civil servant, a clerk in the Ordnance Office in the Tower of London. He came from a clergy background. He was the youngest of fourteen children, had little formal education and was largely self-taught, studying Greek and Hebrew out of a passion for the Bible and the classics. He was a very accomplished musician, playing a variety of instruments and possessing a strong bass voice. The whole Sharp family was musical, and would become famous for their concerts on a barge on the Thames. Granville – or ‘Greeny’ to his family – often signed his name with the musical notation G#.

Sharp was to become one of Britain’s leading abolitionists. He was also to become a thorn in the side of Lord Mansfield. But they will forever be united in history as the men who freed British slaves.

On the fateful day when Jonathan Strong was beaten up by his master, Greeny had been visiting his brother William’s surgery in Mincing Lane. The location was at the heart of London’s financial district, and the home to many slave traders. Coming out of his brother’s surgery, Sharp was astounded to find the young black man in a pitiful state. The Sharp brothers tended to him, found him a bed in hospital and secured him a job after his recovery. There the story might have ended. But two years later, in 1767, Jonathan Strong, recovered from his ordeal, was spotted by his former owner, David Lisle. He seized him, had him thrown into prison and set about selling him to a sugar planter. Strong appealed to numerous people for help, and in desperation sent a message to Granville Sharp.

At the heart of Strong’s appeal was his firm conviction that he was no longer a slave. There was a strong belief among the black communities in England that freedom was automatically conferred once you set foot on English soil. Others also believed that Christian baptism could manumit them. Many slaves escaped, and it was the work of slave-catchers to roam the streets in pursuit of them. Rewards were posted, and if the runaways were caught they would be resold and sent back to the sugar islands, or to Charleston in South Carolina, where the new cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South were creating huge demand for slave labour.

Jonathan Strong’s friends, to whom he appealed for help, were frightened off by Lisle, who was a lawyer. But Granville Sharp was made of sterner stuff, and would not be bullied or deterred. He took immediate action, and arranged a hearing that took place in September. Strong was released. Lisle started an action against Sharp and another of his brothers, claiming £200 for depriving him of his property.

When Sharp consulted his lawyer, he was told that the case would probably go against him because of the Yorke–Talbot ruling of 1729, which had ‘opined’ that a slave’s status did not change when he came to England, that a slave could be compelled to return to the colonies from England, and that baptism would not manumit a slave.
¹
Many slave-owners invoked Yorke–Talbot, though, as Sharp insisted, it was an ‘opinion’ and not a ‘ruling’: only a formal ruling could stand as a legal precedent.

Sharp was also told that Lord Mansfield had upheld this opinion on more than one occasion. But he refused to accept that ‘the law of England was really so injurious to natural rights as so many great lawyers for political reasons had been pleased to assert’.
²
With his love of learning and his strong sense of social injustice, Sharp immersed himself in English law to determine whether slavery was illegal in England. His legal advisers confirmed that as the law stood, it favoured a master’s rights to his slaves as property, that a slave remained the chattel of his master even on English soil, and could be removed at will.

Once again, Granville Sharp was not to be deterred. He set about finding any possible ambiguity or chink in the armour of the law in order to prove that slavery was illegal on English soil. He was determined to force a definitive legal ruling on whether slaves could be compelled to leave the country. He discovered that as far back as 1569 there had been a legal judgement which stated that ‘England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.’
³
This was later to become the motto of the abolition movement. He also cited the 1706 opinion of Lord Chief Justice Holt that ‘as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free’.
⁴

There was a more recent case, in 1763, which, oddly, Sharp overlooked. An ex-slave, Harvey, had appeared as the defendant in
Shanley v Harvey
. He had been brought to England as a child, and his owner, Shanley, had given him to his niece, who had him baptised and changed his name. On her death she left Harvey a sum of money, which Shanley tried to recover. Lord Henley, the Lord Chancellor, dismissed the action, with costs against Shanley. In his judgement he held that as soon as a person set foot on English soil, he or she became free, and that a ‘negro’ might maintain an action against his or her master for ill usage, together with an application for
Habeas Corpus
if detained. A writ of
Habeas Corpus
(‘may you have the body’) requires a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court.

Deep in his legal studies, Sharp was encouraged by William Blackstone’s definitive
Commentaries on the Laws of England
. Blackstone, the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, stated that the ‘spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and with regard to all natural rights becomes
eo instanti
[“at that moment”] a freeman’.
⁵
After the first, highly successful, edition of his
Commentaries
was published in 1765, Blackstone refined his views on slavery. In the third edition (1768–69), the end of the final sentence was revised (after ‘laws’) to: ‘and so far becomes a freeman; though the master’s right to his service may probably still continue’.
⁶

Having read only the first edition, Granville Sharp wrote to Blackstone, expecting his support. But Blackstone backtracked in his reply, carefully insisting that he had not challenged the legitimacy of a master’s right of ownership. He warned Sharp that he faced ‘uphill work in the King’s Bench’.
⁷

Sharp knew very well that Blackstone was a friend of Lord Mansfield. They had mutual friends, James Boswell and David Garrick among others. Sharp may also have known that Mansfield had adopted a little black girl, the daughter of a slave and Mansfield’s nephew, whom he was bringing up as his own child. Others in London who were connected with the question of slavery certainly knew this. On the other hand, he also knew that Mansfield was a friend to British merchants, and would be wary of alienating the sugar interest.

To his disappointment, Sharp soon realised that Lord Mansfield was reluctant to make a clear legal decision regarding the issue of slavery in Great Britain.
⁸
The two men now became regularly involved in legal disputes, with Sharp accusing Mansfield of putting commercial interests above those of black freedom.
⁹
But he may have held out hope that an emotive appeal regarding the inhumane treatment of black people would catch at Mansfield’s Achilles’ heel – as we will see, gossip was circulating around London that the Lord Chief Justice was in thrall to the black girl who lived with his family.

In 1769 Sharp published
A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery or even Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men of England
, the first tract in England attacking slavery. In it he argued that the forcible removal of slaves was a contravention of the 1679
Habeas Corpus
Act, and that the Yorke–Talbot ‘opinion’ was trumped by that of Lord Chief Justice Holt. The most important principle, however, was that under the common law of England, there could be no property in persons, and that all persons (irrespective of colour) were subject to the protection of the King’s laws. As for slave-owners, ‘they usurp an absolute authority over their
fellow men
, as if they thought them mere
things
, horses, dogs etc’.
¹⁰
For Sharp, ‘the plea of
private property
… comparing a man to a beast is … unnatural and unjust’. This was about the ‘
humanity
’ of the negro. Sharp was stepping it up.

While the Jonathan Strong case was pending, Sharp became involved in another case, that of John Hylas, whose wife had been captured and sold into West Indian slavery. The verdict was in favour of Hylas, and Mary’s owner was ordered to return her. Sharp hoped that this case might settle the issue of the legality of slavery in England, but it was not to be. The judge presiding, Lord Wilmot, did not address the matter.

Another case looked more promising, that of
R
[
Rex
, i.e. the Crown]
v Stapylton
. In 1771 Sharp was visited by a Mrs Banks, who hurried to see him after a man called Thomas Lewis was seized by two men on behalf of his former master, Robert Stapylton, and dragged on board a ship. The intention was to transport him and sell him to a Jamaican planter. Sharp and Mrs Banks obtained a writ of
Habeas Corpus
demanding Lewis’s return. Time was of the essence, as the ship had already set sail, and was heading for the Downs, off the coast of Kent.

Just in time, a servant of Mrs Banks delivered the writ to the ship, where Thomas Lewis was chained to the mainmast. He was set free. Sharp and Mrs Banks initiated a criminal prosecution against Stapylton and the two men who had helped to kidnap Lewis. The defendants claimed that Lewis belonged to Stapylton, who could therefore do what he wished with him. The case went to trial at the Court of King’s Bench, with Lord Mansfield presiding. Mrs Banks bore the expense.

The question that the case hinged upon was whether Lewis had ever been free. He himself insisted that he was a free man, and had never been a slave, but a servant of Stapylton’s, and had always received wages. Mrs Banks’s lawyer, John Dunning, repeatedly tried to air the question as to whether there could be such a thing as property in persons, but Mansfield kept bringing the case back to whether Lewis could be proved to be free or not.

There was a serious concern that Mansfield might disqualify Lewis as a witness because he was a slave: ‘You don’t prove his being free by himself,’ Mansfield interjected at one point. The
Habeas Corpus
writ extended to ‘any person or persons’, and the worry was that a black might be seen not as a ‘person’, but as the ‘property’ of his owner. If so, that would be the end of the case.

The turning point came when Mansfield suddenly and unexpectedly invoked the ancient principle of English liberty, directing the jury: ‘I shall presume him free unless they prove the contrary.’
¹¹
He then went even further, saying that unless the jury found that Stapylton was the legal owner of Lewis, ‘you will find the Defendant [Stapylton] guilty’. The jury cried out, ‘Guilty, Guilty!’, finding that Lewis could not be transported against his will, as they had no evidence to prove that he had ever been bought. Mansfield turned to the jurors and said, ‘I think you have done very right to find him not the property, for he was not the property, and you have done right.’

However, in the course of his summing-up, Lord Mansfield had been careful to say that ‘whether they [slave-owners] have this kind of property or not in England has never been solemnly determined’. In other words, the case must stay specific, and must not address the wider question of the ownership of slaves in Britain – though that of course was precisely the issue that Sharp wanted to force open. Mansfield’s summing-up showed more than a hint of exasperation:

Lord Hardwick and Lord Talbot [two other senior judges] had several discussions concerning the rights of property in Negroes … I don’t know what the consequences may be if they were to lose their property by accidentally bringing them into England … it is much better it should never be finally discussed or settled … for I would have all masters think [their slaves] free and all Negroes think they were slaves because then they would both behave better.
¹²

As Lewis moved to leave the building, Dunning made one last request of Mansfield: that Lewis should be protected. Mansfield ordered, ‘If anybody dares to touch the boy as he is going out of the Hall especially now as the jury have found the boy not the property of the defendant, tell the officer to take them into custody and bring them before me.’
¹³

Conventionally, four days elapsed between verdict and sentence. During that time, Mansfield appeared somewhat troubled. He confessed that ‘Ever since that trial I have had a great doubt in my mind, whether the negro could prove his own freedom by his own evidence.’ He also believed that Lewis had been led ‘into the evidence improperly’, and began to doubt whether a ‘slave may be a witness to prove himself free’.