Slave Nation (3 page)

Mansfield had a personal interest in the situation of people of color. He was especially fond of his grandniece Dido Elizabeth Lindsey, who was the daughter of Sir John Lindsey, Mansfield’s nephew. Dido’s mother had been aboard a Spanish ship that Lindsey had captured. He acknowledged his paternity in his will.
¹⁵
Dido, in a painting with her cousin Elizabeth Murray, appeared to be a light-skinned black woman. She lived with Mansfield’s family and had grown up close to Mansfield’s grandnieces— her cousins—and she was accepted socially. She wrote letters for Mansfield when he was too ill to write. In his will he confirmed her freedom, left her £500 plus £100 per annum for life, and the life use of a painting of himself “to put her in mind of one she knew from her infancy and always honored with uninterrupted confidence and friendship.”
¹⁶

Mansfield released Somerset temporarily, but he was not a free man yet. The case dragged on while Mansfield tried to persuade Stewart to free Somerset. Mansfield did not want to decide on the legality of slavery in England. But the West Indian planters wanted a decision upholding slavery in Britain because the uncertainty was affecting the price of their “property.” They financed Stewart’s defense. Stewart promised them not to cave in to Mansfield’s urging. Mansfield even tried to persuade Elizabeth Cade, the “poor widow” who had paid for the writ of habeas corpus that freed Somerset, to purchase Somerset herself and set him free. She replied that this would acknowledge that Stewart “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.”
¹⁷

Mansfield was exasperated with the planters. He warned them in a preliminary hearing that they were likely to lose. He may have resolved the conflicting precedents in his own mind, or may have used this pressure to achieve a settlement. He told them that the case was so clear that it was unnecessary to convene the full court; he had succeeded in five or six cases in settling the matter by the owner agreeing to free the slave. He recommended that Stewart free Somerset, but: “if the parties will have judgment, whatever the consequences,
fiat justitia, ruat coelum
(let justice be done though the Heavens fall).”

Stewart’s lawyer had argued that freeing the fourteen or fifteen thousand slaves in England would produce profound disruption, and that the owners would suffer a loss of £700,000, or an average of £50 per slave. To this, Mansfield responded, “£50 a head may not be a high price.”

To Stewart’s claim that the uncertainty on the issue was already disturbing the commercial world, Mansfield told the slave owners that they had come to the wrong place to get the issue settled: “An application to Parliament, if the merchants think the question of great commercial concern, is the best, and perhaps the only method of settling the point for the future.”
¹⁸
His approach echoed Mansfield’s attachment to the principle of parliamentary supremacy over the colonies that was emphasized in the Declaratory Act of 1766. Having warned the merchants that they might lose, he postponed the decision so that they might reflect on his warning. The merchants tried, but were unable even to secure a hearing on a proposed bill despite their influence in Parliament.
¹⁹
No reason was given, but we may assume that the members were content to let the matter rest while it was before the court.

In late May, a London newspaper speculated on the consequences of Mansfield’s decision:

The West-India merchants have, we hear, obtained a promise from Mr. Stewart not to accommodate the Negro cause, but to have the point solemnly determined; since, if the laws of England do not confirm the colony laws with respect to property in slaves, no man of common sense will, for the future, lay out his money in so precarious a commodity. The consequences of which will be inevitable ruin to the British West Indies.
²⁰

On June 22, Somerset prepared for his final judgment. Many of his friends and interested blacks attended court that day. Granville Sharp was not in court. Sharp had pressed Mansfield to decide on the legality of slavery for several years. Mansfield had avoided the issue, but now appeared prepared to face it. Sharp’s presence, some believed, might have antagonized Mansfield.

Bewigged, Lord Mansfield mounted the bench while the clerk called the case of “James Somerset, a Negro, on Habeas Corpus.” Mansfield recited the facts, discussed the law briefly and concluded:

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’s 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.
²¹

Black members of the audience rose and bowed to the court. Somerset basked in the pleasure of being a hero in the black community. He was the guest of honor at a party of nearly two hundred blacks. The community celebrated not only his victory, but freedom for all black slaves in England. Sharp told him that Lord Mansfield had decided that a slave could not be held captive by his master. This, he said, would effectively abolish slavery in England.

That was the interpretation of the
Somerset
decision in both Britain and in the colonies.
²²
The London papers took note. The
Public Advertiser
, June 27, 1772, wrote:

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 [sic], his master. Lord Mansfield’s health was echoed round the room; and the evening was concluded with a ball. The tickets for admission to this black assembly were 5s. each.

Parliament never took issue with Mansfield’s decision. There would have been little enthusiasm in Britain for encouraging colonials to bring their slaves to England, as Sir John Fielding made clear in his 1762 book.
²³
The idea of introducing slavery into the law of England would have little or no support among the common people.
²⁴

Benjamin Franklin, then in London, was unimpressed. He minimized the
Somerset
decision at the time it was published.

It is said that some generous humane persons subscribed to the expense of obtaining the liberty by law for Somerset the Negro….It is to be wished that the same humanity may extend itself among numbers; if not to the procuring liberty for those that remain in our colonies, at least to obtain a law for abolishing the African commerce in slaves, and declaring the children of present slaves free after they become of age....

—Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!
²⁵

The decision in Somerset’s case meant more than Franklin suggested. If a master could not use force to restrain a runaway slave, the slave could liberate himself. On July 10, 1772, a little more than two weeks after the
Somerset
decision, Charles Stewart, Somerset’s “owner,” received a letter from an acquaintance named John Riddell who lived in Bristol Wells:

I am disappointed by Mr. Dubin who has run away. He told the servants that he had rec’d a letter from his Uncle Somerset acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their freedom and he was determined to leave me as soon as I returned from London which he did without even speaking to me. I don’t find that he has gone off with anything of mine. Only carried off all his own cloths which I don’t know whether he had any right to do so. I believe I shall not give my self any trouble to look after the ungrateful villain. But his leaving me just at this time rather proves inconvenient.
²⁶

“Uncle Somerset” probably hoped he had many such nephews and nieces. Over time, many black slaves in Britain freed themselves, as had Mr. Dubin, by walking away from their masters, who, like Mr. Riddell, decided not to seek them out.
²⁷
Sharp’s antislavery society gained in size and influence. Slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1833.

In the end, James Somerset merged into the black community of London, but his case lived on. And Mansfield’s description of slavery as “so odious” echoed through the Anglo-American world and gave the impression that he had abolished slavery in Britain: “News of the case echoed through American drawing rooms—the first repudiation of forced work by the mother country.”
²⁸

Somerset never knew that his private quest for freedom was the spark that helped start the American Revolution and that has haunted the nation down to the present day.

Beginning in the early spring and continuing until late fall of 1772, published reports of Lord Mansfield’s decision trickled into the colonies through weekly newspapers. There were at least fortythree stories about
Somerset
in at least twenty newspapers, all of which made clear in different ways that black slaves in England had been freed by that decision.
¹
The vast majority of these reports appeared in northern newspapers— Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York, and New Hampshire. There were accounts published in two of the slave states, Virginia and South Carolina, where fewer newspapers existed. Two of the papers were in Rhode Island where many slave owners from South Carolina and Georgia had summer homes.

The
Virginia Gazette
had six stories, starting on May 7, with reports of several preliminary hearings. On November 12, 1772, it also published a critique of the decision that had been circulated in England.
²
This critique, signed “A West Indian Planter,” marshaled the arguments against the release of Somerset which had been submitted in Somerset’s case. The critique argued that Somerset’s case had been wrongly decided and would have disastrous consequences.

The
South Carolina Gazette
had one major report on August 13. Another on September 15 reported “the substance of Lord Mansfield’s speech on the Negro cause,” under a dateline of June 24. The report included the following:

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by courts of justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political….And in a case so odious as the condition of slaves must be taken strictly, the power claimed by this return was never in use here; no master was ever allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he had deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatever; we cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom, therefore the man must be discharged.
³

The next week, the
Gazette
reported on the party in London attended by two hundred “blacks and their ladies” that celebrated the decision.
⁴

These publications warned southern slave holders that if the
Somerset
decision became the law in the colonies, their society would be at risk. These risks included greater supervision of colonial action, perhaps taxation of slavery that had now been declared “so odious” that it could not exist in England, and direct parliamentary control of colonial slavery.

Decisions about slavery could be made by Parliament, or the courts, or perhaps even the king, without consultation with the colonists themselves. If Britain hesitated to free slaves in the colonies because of the incomes the slaves produced, the government still might impose taxes on the sale or purchase of slaves and control the export of products they produced, providing needed revenues for the mother country’s treasury.

This was a serious worry. The
Somerset
decision reached the colonies in the second year of a thaw in the strained relations with Britain stemming from the taxation issues of the 1760s. Every colony had been established by a document from the king that authorized a colonial legislature to enact laws for the colony so long as they were “not repugnant to the laws of England.”
⁵
Thus the British government retained a kind of superintending power over the colony’s behavior. This was well known in the colonies.
⁶
This power was exercised by the Privy Council, an organization of senior advisors to the crown. The Privy Council acted through its Board of Trade and Plantations. The power to invalidate colonial legislation had been exercised against three colonial acts in the years immediately preceding 1772 when the
Somerset
case was decided.
⁷
By that year, colonial suspicions that Britain was trying to “milk” the colonies of their hard earned incomes by taxation had been exacerbated by British actions beginning in 1763, the year in which the French and Indian war ended.

The British promptly established a “proclamation line” to prevent colonials from seeking to settle west of the Allegheny mountains for fear of inciting further conflict with Native Americans. In 1765, the British imposed the Stamp Act, requiring the colonists to buy stamps that taxed common paper goods like playing cards and writing paper, as well as deeds, wills, and lawsuits. The British imposed the tax assuming that the colonists would be grateful for the British efforts during the French and Indian war. They were not. Every level of society was directly affected by this tax. The colonial reaction against “taxation without representation” was spearheaded by Massachusetts; it was spontaneous among the colonies and it was effective. In every colony people refused to use stamps and reduced their purchase of British goods.