North American Calm, West Indian storm: the politics of the Somerset decision in the British Atlantic

ABSTRACT

A significant historiographical literature posits that Lord Mansfield’s famous decision in the 1772 Somerset case deeply threatened slaveholders throughout the British Empire. Colonial slaveholders had good reason to believe that this ruling threatened their power over their slaves, and West Indian planters and their representatives publicly expressed fear and outrage about Mansfield’s ruling and what it represented. But the bulk of North American slaveholders did not either in public or in private. This article attributes that relative silence largely to the links between the politics of slavery and those of the imperial crisis of the 1770s. It was British emancipatory policies during the American Revolutionary War, rather than this decision, that panicked North American slaveholders and ultimately taught them their need to control the state.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Brigham Young University for funding the travel that helped me research this article. For useful comments on previous drafts, I thank Ed Rugemer, Brian Schoen, Trevor Burnard, and participants in the Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History, especially Jeff Pasley, Justin Dyer, Erin Holmes, and Ken Owen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Matthew Mason is a professor of history at Brigham Young University; Provo, UT 84602 USA.

Notes

1 This summary draws on M.S. Weiner, ‘New Biographical Evidence on Somerset’s Case’, Slavery and Abolition 23 (Apr. 2002): 122–31; and an array of documents in the Charles Steuart Papers, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

2 Folarin Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 125; E. C. P. Lascelles, Granville Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England (1928; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 12-30, 81-82; Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2005), 1–11.

3 William M. Wiecek, ‘Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World’, University of Chicago Law Review 42 (1974): 87–95; Shyllon, Black Slaves, 1–76. For a comparative perspective that shows how extreme the English confusion was, see Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 76–8.

4 James Oldham, ‘New Light on Mansfield and Slavery’, Journal of British Studies 27 (Jan. 1988): 45–68; Notes on the King agt. Stapleton, 1771, in Granville Sharp Collection, New-York Historical Society, New York City; Shyllon, Black Slaves, 117. For more on Mansfield and how he became the essence of the British Establishment, see C.H.S. Fifoot, Lord Mansfield (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936), esp. 1–51.

5 Shyllon, Black Slaves, ix; Ruth Paley, ‘After Somerset: Mansfield, Slavery and the Law in England, 1772-1830’, in Norma Landau, ed., Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 165–84, quotations on 179, 184. For more in this vein, see Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 11–76; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), esp. 203–07; James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro in English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1973), 117–41; Edward Fiddes, ‘Lord Mansfield and the Sommersett Case’, The Law Quarterly Review CC (Oct. 1934): 499–511; Daniel J. Hulsebosch, ‘Nothing but Liberty: “Somerset’s Case” and the British Empire’, Law and History Review 24 (Fall 2006): 647–57.

6 Wise, Though the Heavens, quotation on ix; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 231, 469–89, quotations on 231, 470. For other works playing up its antislavery impact, see Emory Washburn, Extinction of Villenage and Slavery in England; with Somerset’s Case. A Paper Read before the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1864); William R. Cotter, ‘The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England’, History 79, no. 255 (1994): 31–56; George William Van Cleve, ‘“Somerset’s Case” and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective’, Law and History Review 24 (Fall 2006): 601-645; Van Cleve, ‘Mansfield’s Decision: Toward Human Freedom’, Law and History Review 24 (Fall 2006): 665–71.

7 For examples of how influential this interpretation has been on other scholars, see Drescher, Abolition, 103-105; Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 134; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 21-22; Kristofer Ray, ‘“The Indians of Every Denomination were Free, and Independent of Us”: Anglo-American Explorations of Indigenous Slavery, Freedom, and Society, 1772-1830’, American Nineteenth Century History 17:2 (2016): 139, 144; Michael Meranze, ‘Hargrave’s Nightmare and Taney’s Dream’, UC Irvine Law Review 4 (March 2014): 219–38, esp. 224.

8 George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17–57, quotations on 17–18, 31, 41. For similar assertions of slavery’s and race’s causal significance in the Revolution, see Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2016); David J. Silverman, ‘Racial Walls: Race and the Emergence of American White Nationalism’, in Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman, eds., Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 181–204. The journalists who created “The 1619 Project” for the New York Times gave this interpretation broad popular circulation. See “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project”, New York Times Magazine, 20 Dec. 2019.

9 David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 21–56, quotations on 38, 39, 40.

10 Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 66–80; Bradley, ‘Slavery in Colonial Newspapers: The Somerset Case’, Journalism History 12 (Spring 1985): 2–7, quotation on 4.

11 Thea K. Hunter, ‘Publishing Freedom, Winning Arguments: Somerset, Natural Rights and Massachusetts Freedom Cases, 1772-1836’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005), 108–28.

12 Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 181–83, 210, 340n24. For others who downplay the North American response, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 304; Srividhya Swaminathan, ‘Developing the West Indian Proslavery Position after the Somerset Decision’, Slavery and Abolition 24 (Dec. 2003): 46, 50; Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (London: Ashgate, 2009), 133–34.

13 Douglas Hay, ‘Dread of the Crown Office: The English Magistry and King’s Bench, 1740-1800’, in Landau, ed., Law, Crime and English Society, 19–45.

14 Quoted in Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 101.

15 Travis Glasson, ‘“Baptism Doth Not Bestow Freedom”: Missionary Anglicanism, Slavery, and the Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1701-30’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. LXVII (April 2010): 279–318, quotations on 279, 280, 284.

16 Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, ‘Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle’, Slavery and Abolition 32 (Sept. 2011): 332; Cristina Nogueira Da Silva and Keila Grinberg, ‘Soil Free from Slaves: Slave Law in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Portugal’, Slavery and Abolition 32 (Sept. 2011): 431–46; Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, eds., Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 49–50.

17 Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery; or of Admitting the Least Claim to Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England (London: Benjamin White and Robert Horsfield, 1769), 51n, 63, 71n.

18 Francis Hargrave, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, Lately Determined by the Court of King’s Bench (London: F. Hargrave, 1772), 15–16, 22–34, 60, 65–7, 79; Capel Lofft, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench, from Easter Term 12 Geo. 3 to Michaelmas 14 Geo. 3 (Both Inclusive), 1772–1774 (1776; repr., General Books, 2010), 30–1.

19 Lofft, Reports of Cases, 34.

20 Lofft, Reports of Cases, 45.

21 William W. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 7–8, 20–51, quotations on 21. For other useful discussions of this phenomenon, see Justin Buckley Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 37–73, 104; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), 97–101; Jerome Nedelhaft, ‘The Somersett Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality and Repercussions’, Journal of Negro History 51 (July 1966): 193–208.

22 Stephen Alsford, ‘Urban Safe Havens for the Unfree in Medieval England: A Reconsideration’, Slavery and Abolition 32 (Sept. 2011): 363–73; Richard S. Newman, ‘“Lucky to be born in Pennsylvania”: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-Slavery Borderland’, Slavery and Abolition 32 (Sept. 2011): 413–30; Da Silva and Grinberg, ‘Soil Free from Slaves’, 431–46; Peabody and Grinberg, eds., Slavery, Freedom, and the Law, 49–50.

23 William Bollan, Britannia Libera, or a Defence of the Free State of Man in England, Against the Claim of Any Man there as a Slave (London: J. Almon, 1772), quotations on 38–39.

24 Maurice Morgann, A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies (London: William Griffin, 1772), quotations on i, 8, 10.

25 Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1772): 325–26.

26 Massachusetts Gazette, 30 July 1772.

27 (Williamsburg) Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 20 August 1772; (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Packet, 3 August 1772.

28 London Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 20 May 1772.

29 Ibid., 30 May, 11 June 1772.

30 Ibid., 4 (quotation), 15, 20, 26 June, 4 July 1772.

31 Hannah Weiss Muller, ‘Bonds of Belonging: Subjecthood and the British Empire’, Journal of British Studies 53 (Jan. 2014): 29–58, quotations on 29, 31; Trevor Burnard, ‘Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition 32 (June 2011): 185–98, esp. 193.

32 Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1772): 309–10.

33 Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh), 24 August 1772.

34 Allinson’s ‘Preface’ to Granville Sharp, An Essay on Slavery . . . (Burlington, N.J.: Isaac Collins, 1773), vi. I am grateful to Jonathan Sassi for bringing this source to my attention.

35 John Riddell to Steuart, March 1772, 10 July 1772; James Parker to Steuart, 12 June 1772, Charles Steuart Papers.

36 (Williamsburg) Virginia Gazette (Rind), 14 Oct. 1773; Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 16–18.

37 Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery, and Antislavery: 1612–1865 (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 78.

38 Lathan A. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 1:139–40, 149–50. Charles R. Foy has argued that the ruling electrified slaves in the British Atlantic, encouraging a more than three-fold expansion of runaways by water from 1773 to 1775. His numbers seem unassailable, but the causal link to Somerset is unclear. See ‘“Unkle Sommerset’s” Freedom: Liberty in England for Black Sailors’, Journal for Maritime Research 13 (May 2011): 21–36, esp. 21–22.

39 Hunter, ‘Publishing Freedom’, 7. For a similar analysis see Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free, 1–18; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 22–23, 26, 44.

40 ‘A Lover of Constitutional Liberty’, The Appendix: Or, Some Observations on the Expediency of the Petition of the Africans, Living in Boston, &c. . . . Likewise, Thoughts on Slavery . . . (Boston: E. Russell, 1773), 14.

41 Even Samuel Martin, Sr., A Short Treatise on the Slavery of Negroes in the British Colonies (Antigua: Robert Mearns, 1775), although published in 1775, had been penned by the Barbadian absentee planter in 1772.

42 Printed amidst the London news rundowns in Boston Evening-Post, 27 July 1772; Massachusetts Gazette (Boston), 23 July 1772; Newport [Rhode Island] Mercury, 3 Aug. 1772. For yet another proslavery piece published while the case was still being argued, see ‘Some Observations upon the SLAVERY of NEGROES’, London Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 June 1772.

43 Thomas Thompson, The African Trade for Negro Slaves, Shewn to Be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity, and with the Laws of Revealed Religion (Canterbury, U.K.: Simmons & Kirkby, [1772]), quotations on 11-12. For Thompson’s career and how he came to defend the Atlantic slave trade, see Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7, 128, 183, 185, 204–19.

44 Samuel Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield (London: J. Dodsley, 1773), quotations on 10, 27, 28, 30; see also Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1772): 307-09; Caledonian Mercury, 13 July 1772.

45 London Gazetteer, 15 July 1772.

46 Edward Long, Candid Reflections upon the Judgement Lately Awarded by the Court of King’s Bench, in Westminster-Hall, on What is Commonly Called the Negro-Cause, by a Planter (London: T. Lowndes, 1772), quotations on 4, 41, 43 44, 58–9.

47 Srividhya Swaminathan, ‘Developing the West Indian’, quotation on 41.

48 ‘An African Merchant’, A Treatise upon the Trade from Great-Britain to Africa; Humbly Recommended to the Attention of the Government (London: R. Baldwin, 1772), Appendix pp. 8, 17.

49 Swaminathan, ‘Developing the West Indian’, quotations on 40, 44, 46, 50.

50 William J. Van Schreeven and Robert L. Scribner, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1973-1983), vol. 1 passim; W.W. Abbott and Dorothy Twohig, et al, eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1983–1995), vol. 9 passim; Julian P. Boyd, et al, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950 -), vol. 1 passim; Jack P. Greene, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752–1778 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Virginia Historical Society, 1965), vol. 2 passim; James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (New York: Macmillan Co., 1911–1914), vol. 1 passim.

51 William Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 24 Apr., 23 June, 20 July 1772, Arthur Lee Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Richard Henry Lee, Life of Arthur Lee, LL.D., Joint Commissioner of the United States to the Court of France, . . . with His Political and Literary Correspondence and His Papers . . . (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1829), vol. 1 passim, 2:110-341.

52 Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 23, 30 July, 20, 27 Aug., 3 Sept. 1772.

53 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 30 July – 24 Sept. 1772.

54 Virginia Gazette (Rind), 12 Nov. 1772.

55 Virginia Gazette (Rind), 11 Mar. 1773.

56 South-Carolina and American General Gazette (Charleston), 10 Aug. 1772.

57 George C. Rogers, et al, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980–2003), 8:xiv, xxii, 142–43, 353, 435–36, 468. For an excellent account of the relationship between Henry and Robert in London, see Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 12–14, 27–61.

58 Boston Gazette, 13 July – 21 Sept. 1772, Pennsylvania Chronicle (Philadelphia), 25 July – 19 Sept. 1772, and Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), 24 Aug. – 14 Sept. 1774, show that it was certainly possible for Northern papers to ignore Somerset. But they are exceptions to the general rule of greater Northern than Southern engagement.

59 Massachusetts Gazette, 10 September 1772. For this same commentary, see Newport Mercury, 14 September 1772; Ipswich Journal (Ipswich, England), 4 July 1772.

60 Massachusetts Gazette, 10 September 1772. For more of this paper’s coverage of the case, see 23, 30 July 1772.

61 Boston Spy, 30 July, 6, 27 August 1772.

62 Ibid., 17 September 1772.

63 Boston Evening-Post, 7 September 1772.

64 Boston Spy, 1, 22 October 1772; Boston Evening-Post, 21 September – 26 October 1772, quotations from 28 September.

65 Verner W. Crane, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1950), 221–23. For one reprint of this piece, see Derby (England) Mercury, 26 June 1772.

66 David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

67 Henry Marchant, ‘Journell of Voyage from Newport in the Colony of Rhode Island to London, Travels thro’ many Parts of England & Scotland – began July 8^th 1771’, Rhode Island Historical Society, microfilm edition, entries for 7 Feb., 12, 21 May 1772. For more on Marchant and his sojourn in Britain, see David S. Lovejoy, ‘Henry Marchant and the Mistress of the World’, William and Mary Quarterly 12 (July 1955): 375–98.

68 [Richard Nisbet,] Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture. Or a Defence of the West-India Planters, from the Aspersions Thrown out against Them, by the Author of a Pamphlet, Entitled, “An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping.” By a West-Indian (Philadelphia: n.p., 1773), iii.

69 Personal Slavery Established, by the Suffrages of Custom and Right Reason. Being a Full Answer to the Gloomy and Visionary Reveries, of all the Fanatical and Enthusiastical Writers on that Subject (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1773).

70 Notably Van Cleve, ‘Somerset’s Case’, esp. 603–06.

71 Sharp, Representation of the Injustice, 80–81.

72 Hargrave, Argument in the Case, 11, 67; Lofft, Reports of the Cases, 30-45, quotation on 43; Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain, 91–92.

73 Hulsebosch, ‘Nothing But Liberty’, 648; Eliga H. Gould, ‘Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, Circa 1772’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., no. 60 (July 2003): 471–510, quotations on 472, 474, 508. See also Gould, ‘Liberty and Modernity: The American Revolution and the Making of Parliament’s Imperial History’, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–31, esp. 116; Andrew Shankman, ‘Toward a Social History of Federalism: The State and Capitalism To and From the American Revolution’, Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Winter 2017): 615–28.

74 Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), esp. 23, 30 July, 27 Aug. (quotation) 1772; South-Carolina and American General Gazette, esp. 10 August 1772.

75 Marchant, ‘Journell of a Voyage’, 22–23 June 1772.

76 Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 27 August, 3 Sept. 1772; Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 Aug., 9, 16 September 1772; Newport Mercury, 31 August 1772.

77 William Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 24 April, 23 June, 20 July 1772, Arthur Lee Papers.

78 Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 20 October 1774.

79 Pennsylvania Packet, 17 August 1772; Virginia Gazette (Rind), 23 April 1772.

80 Massachusetts Gazette, 6 November 1766 (supplement).

81 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

82 Some Fugitive Thoughts on a Letter Signed Freeman, Addressed to the Deputies, Assembled at the High Court of Congress in Philadelphia. By a Back Settler (South Carolina, 1774), 25. My reading of this passage differs completely from that of Charles R. Foy, who interprets this passage as an invitation to Carolina’s slaves to flee to England; see ‘Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783’, Early American Studies 4 (Spring 2006): 71.

83 Massachusetts Gazette, 10 September 1772.

84 Roger Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977), 229.

85 Boston Evening-Post, 28 September 1772.

86 Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, 44; Foy, ‘Seeking Freedom’, quotation on 47; Foy, ‘Unkle Sommersett’s’ Freedom’; Cassandra Pybus, ‘Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 (April 2005): 243–64; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 28, 44, 63, 69.

87 Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999), 133–63; Parkinson, Common Cause.