Samuel Pepys and Slaves

27 June 2022

The London Review of Books has a review by Fara Dabhoiwala of a book by Simon Newman called Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London which heavily features Samuel Pepys.

(UPDATE: You can download the book for free from the University of London Press)

The article begins:

On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new career as clerk of the acts to the Navy Board. Elizabeth was to be paired up with the elderly Batten; Sam was assigned to Batten’s daughter Martha. He knocked at the front door, ‘but would not go in till I had asked whether they that opened it was a man or a woman’. From behind the door, ‘Mingo, who was there, answered “a Woman”, which, with his tone, made me laugh.’ Pepys didn’t bother in his diary to explain who Mingo was but evidently they knew each other.

Read the article at the LRB or more about Mingo in the Encyclopedia.

This also makes me wonder whether we should more accurately refer to Mingo and Jack as slaves, rather than servants?

20 Comments

Second Reading

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

A very worthwhile read, which includes Pepys information beyond the Diary. Apparently Wayneman wasn't the only one sent off to Barbados by Pepys.

I expected it to be a downer, but didn't find it so -- Simon Newman included births, deaths and marriages information as well as advertisements for runaways and Diary and letter entries to illustrate the variety of experiences enslaved people encountered.

The word 'servant' was used to describe people of all colors, enslaved, indentured and free. In the 17th century London, they mostly wanted young boys as pages ... it's when the boys became men that problems arose.

Lots of statistics about the growth of London, trade and demographics of who did what where when, if you're interested in that.

When I started to research the people mentioned, I found some were MPs, details omitted by Newman, which I found curious. But omitted in their Parliamentary bios. was the fact that they were slaver traders and/or owners -- all were politely described as "traders", a word that will forever be suspect for me now.

It's good to confront the dead imperial elephant in the living room; it has enlightening stories to share of days gone by.
It's the entrepreneurial little elephants living next door that we are responsible for; more people are enslaved today than in the 18th century. That's what we need to be woke about.

Third Reading

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

The Society of Antiquarians: Salon: Issue 506
22 February 2023

"The role of the Church of England in the transatlantic slavery economy was complex and varied. Missionaries sent to work in the Caribbean and the Americas documented the harsh conditions of daily life on the plantations. Enslaved people were not allowed basic Christian rights such as baptism and marriage in case these rights damaged the property and legal rights of the owners.

"Some voices were raised against enslavement including Revd. Morgan Godwyn, an Anglican missionary to Virginia and Barbados. He wrote in 1680 appealing to William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, to allow Anglican priests to baptize enslaved people."

After the Diary, yes, but in Pepys' lifetime. I wonder what Sancroft did with the letter besides file it?

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

The UPDATE line in the original article says you can download the entire book at that link; sadly it no longer takes you to the book. Other interesting books, yes, but FREEDOM SEEKERS has moved on.

I did find an article of the same name at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ct…

"Read the article at the LRB" -- that still takes you to the story about Pepys, Elizabeth and Mungo on Valentine's morning.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

De facto slavery was practiced in Scotland during the 17th century, according to this book. I've corrected the scanning errors and updated the spellings I could guess; otherwise I've left the puzzlers. Scots and the law are not my forte:

From "The Annals of Duddingston and Portobello"
BY WILLIAM BAIRD, F.S.A. Scot.

EDINBURGH: ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 Princes Street.

1898.
http://archive.org/stream/annalsd…

The extent to which the trade with other countries was growing seems to have so alarmed the Government, lest the [COAL] supply should become exhausted, that by an Act passed in 1563 the transporting of coals "furth of the realm" was prohibited, but afterwards commuted so far by an Act of the Privy Council that "smiddy coal" was allowed to be exported.

In process of time these Acts came to be disregarded, until in 1609 a proposal was made by the Scottish Privy Council that the foreign coal trade should be legalized.
King James would listen to nothing of the kind.
In a long letter, dated Whitehall, 28 April 1609, he fully relates the reasons for his refusal, viz., his fear 'That as it is notorious that the coals both in that and this kingdom do daily decay, so that their is no hope of any sudden new growth; and as by the use of these coals the woods and growing timber throughout all the land shall be spared and uncut and undestroyed," and seeing "that coals are at this instant almost unbuyable for dearth," he considered it "a shameful thing that the private gain of some two or three individuals should be put in the balance, not only with the weele [WELFARE?] of the whole kingdom, bat even of this whole yle." [but even of this old earl?]

In all probability it was considerably before the reign of the Modern Solomon [KING JAMES VI AND I] who indited this sapient epistle that the coal pits of Duddingston were opened near to Joppa, as we find a charter of Kelso Abbey, dated 1538, by which the lands of Easter and Wester Duddingston were granted to Robert Barton, where mention is made of his right to the coal and coal-heughs on the Barony.

From an early period until 1790, coal had continued to be extracted, and that in considerable quantity from the 3 or 4 pits wrought in that neighborhood. At the end of the century 13 seams of coal had been discovered and partly wrought; several being of first-rate quality.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

PART 2

"The inclinations and dips of the minerals were to the west, and nearly all at an angle of forty-five degrees from the horizon to the east, which always rendered the working of the coal an extremely difficult and dangerous process, and which in the end was the cause of the mines being given up, as they could not be kept clear of water."
Hugh Miller, who knew the geological configuration of the neighborhood of these mines, gives an excellent description of their coal measures in his Geological Features of Edinburgh and its Neighborhood. The pits were closed long before his day, but from a careful examination of the strata laid bare in the quarry between Joppa and Easter Duddingston and other places further inland, he formulated his theory of the Midlothian coal basin.

Hugh Miller continues: ''The coal measures fill a great basin, which occupies the comparatively level space between the western slopes of the Garleton Hills, near Haddington, and the eastern slopes of Arthur Seat and the Pentlands. The surface is comparatively level, because the basin is full; ..."
[The Garleton Hills, in East Lothian, Scotland, are a range of igneous hills, to the north of Haddington.-SDS]

"The workings of the several pits at Joppa followed the various seams in all directions, even to a considerable distance below the bed of the sea; and although the shafts have been long since filled up, frequent subsidences of the soil in recent years amply confirm the extensive nature of the workings. The influx of water, whether from the sea or otherwise, seems to have been a continual source of annoyance and expense.

“It is not yet fully 80 years” says Hugh Miller, writing in about 1855, “since they were slaves, as firmly bound to the soil as the serfs of Russia, and transferable, like the huts in which they dwelt or the minerals amid which they burrowed, from the hands of one proprietor to another. ... Profoundly ignorant — kept apart, by their underground profession and their peculiar habits, from the other people of the country — and withal not very formidable from their numbers, their liberty seems to have been taken from them piecemeal, mainly during the 17th century, by the Acts of Parliaments, in which, of course, they were wholly unrepresented, and by the decisions of a Court in which no one ever appeared for their interests.

“It was the old Scottish Parliament and our present Court of Session that made the colliers slaves; and the salters or salt makers of the north-eastern shores of Midlothian were associated with them in bondage."

There seems to be no doubt that this was so, and it arose from the immense territorial power of the coal proprietors, who were virtually the authors of the Acts and the prompters of the decisions, and in proof of this we quote a few passages from these iniquitous laws bearing out our statement.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

PART 3

In 1606, it was statute and ordained, under a penalty of £100, that no person within the realm should hire or employ colliers, coal bearers, or salters, unless furnished with a sufficient testimonial from the master whom he had last served; and further, "that sae mony colliers, coal bearers, and salters," as without such testimonial received such "fore wages and fees, should be esteemed, repute, and holden as thieves and punished in their bodies"
"Pretty well," says Hugh Miller, "as a specimen of the class legislation of the good old times!''

This Act, however stringent as it may seem, was found insufficient; there was a class of persons employed in the pits whom it did not include; and so in 1661, it was further enacted, "that because watermen, who lave and draw water in the coal-heugh-heads, and gatesmen who work the ways and passages in the said heughs, are as necessary to the owners and masters of the said coal heugha as the coal hewers and coal bearers, it is therefore statute and ordained, that they should come under exactly the same penalties as the others, in the event of quitting their masters without certificate; and that it should be equally illegal, in the lack of such a document, for any person to employ them."

But even that was not considered sufficient. The poor coaI worker, discontented and miserable, grumbled at his lot, and wanted wages; but such an unreasonable demand, while it was nominally complied with, was practically denied, for it was further enacted that it should "not be lawful for any coal master in the kingdom to give any greater fee than the sum of twenty merks in fee or bountith" — a clause which, according to the interpretation of Lord James, fixed the large sum of 1/. 2 s. as the yearly wages of colliers and salters.

It was found that at times the poor men became uncontrollable, and refused to work on any terms, and so there was a further clause devised to deal with the difficulty, which ran as follows: "Because coal hewers within the kingdom, and other workers within coal heughs, with salters, do lie from their works at Pasche, Yule, Whitsunday, and certain other times of the year, which times they employ in drinking and debauching to the ffrecLt offence of God and prejudice of their masters, it is therefore statute and ordained that the said coal hewers and salters, and other workmen in coal heughs in the kingdom, work all the 6 days of the week, except the time of Christmas."

Thus were these poor people — men and women — treated.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

CONCLUSION

That ignorance and vice were characteristics of such a condition of society goes without saying. It was inevitable when we remember the women were veritably yoke fellows with their husbands and brothers in this degrading service.

Here is evidence of an eyewitness to their work, which was to carry up to the surface in baskets or creels the coal hewn from the same, from which they were called “coal bearers."
"Each bears a lamp fastened to her head to light the long upward ascent, and, laden with more than a hundredweight of coal, and bent forward at nearly a right angle to avoid coming in contact with the low roof, they ascend slowly along the flights of steps, and through the narrow galleries, and lastly up the long stair of the shaft; and when they have reached the surface, they unload at the coal heap and return. And such is the employment of females for 12, and sometimes 15 hours together."

It was estimated by Robert Bald, the distinguished mining engineer, that an ordinary day's work was equal to carrying of a hundredweight from sea level to the top of Ben Lomond.

These collier women — the coal bearers of the old Scotch Acts — were even more strongly marked by the slave nature in this part of the country than the men.

Hugh Miller says: “I have seen them crying like children when toiling, nearly exhausted under the load, along the steep upper stages of their journeys to the surface, and then returning with empty creels, scarce a minute after, singing with glee.

They were marked by a peculiar type of mouth; both the upper and under lip drooped forward, swollen, meaningless, void of marks indicative of compressive control of mind. It was the mouth of the savage in that humblest and least developed condition of which great weakness is an even more deplorable trait than the prevailing rudeness and barbarism.

I describe a state of things which has become obsolete in the district. Women are no longer employed as ^MiinuLltt of burden in our Scottish coal pits. The drooping mouth already has disappeared from among our collier population.

My description might be regarded as one of the fossils of the coal measures — a memorial of a condition of things become extinct — and such is the character borne by even the comparatively recent history of our Scottish colliers in general. It bears upon its front the stamp of obsolete ages, and of states of society long gone by.

This verse of a song, called "The Coal-Bearer's Lamentation," is said to have been often sung by the poor women of Duddingston and neighboring parishes when at their toilsome work:
“When I was engaged a coal bearer to be.
When I was engaged a coal bearer to be.
Through all the coal pits I maun wear the dron brats.
If my heart it should break, I can never won free!”

Let us be thankful that not only in our parish, but throughout the British Empire so deplorable a condition of society has forever ceased to be tolerated.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

From the same book, the salt makers were similarly treated.

Salt was known to the Romans, and was made by evaporating sea water. This required a lot of fuel. Scotland's supply of timber for firewood began to fail as early as the 13th centiry, and the discovery of coal in Midlothian made the production of salt possible.

Hugh Miller's comments above regarding the Act of 1606, and the conditions endured by these endentured serfs apply to the makers of salt as much as they do to the coal miners.

The degraded condition of the laboring population of the district, and especially of the salt workers and colliers of Joppa has already been referred to; but it is rather startling in this 19th century to have the evidence of slavery existing within 4 miles of the capital [EDINBURGH] told us by an eyewitness of the fact:

William Chambers' evidence is remarkable. “The small smoke-dried community of these Salt Pans," he says, "was socially interesting. Along with the colliers in the neighboring tiled hamlets, the salt makers — at least the elderly among them — had at one time been serfs, and in that condition they had been legally sold along with the property on which they dwelt. I conversed with some of them on the subject. They and their children had been heritable fixtures to the spot. They could neither leave at will, nor change their profession. In short, they were in a sense slaves.

"I feel it to be curious," he continues, ''that I should have seen and spoken to persons in this country who remembered being legally in a state of serfdom; and such they were till 1799, when an Act of Parliament abolished this last remnant of slavery in the British Islands."

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

An excellent article about how 17th century logic on the origins of the races has evolved into racism. BUT what we think today is different to what they thought then.
https://aeon.co/essays/modern-rac…

Just a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:
To help fend off polygenism, the Dutch humanist philosopher and monogenist Hugo Grotius proposed in 1642 that Native Americans were descendants of Norwegians who had moved to Iceland, then to Greenland, and then to North America. ...

The first intellectual to substantially defend polygenism was the French lawyer and theologian Isaac de La Peyrère (1596-1676).
In 1655 he published “Men Before Adam” and “Theological Systeme upon the Presupposition, That Men Were Before Adam” that sparked public fascination.

La Peyrère saw that Genesis contains 2 creation accounts, and cited this as evidence that the Bible teaches that God created ‘pre-Adamites’ who were distributed throughout Earth (according to Genesis 1) before creating Adam and Eve.

Through creative interpretation of Genesis 1, La Peyrère argued that all plants and wildlife were created for humans; and on this basis, he concluded that wherever plants and livestock were created, so humans were created as well.
In La Peyrère’s scheme, not only were pre-Adamite humans created before Adam, they were also distributed as mating pairs throughout the world.

Looking elsewhere to support polygenism, La Peyrère noted that, after Cain is cast out of Eden for killing Abel, he says: ‘Whosoever finds me, shall slay me,’ which suggests that other people already existed. Cain is also said to have had a wife, despite Adam and Eve not having had a daughter. One of La Peyrère’s contributions was his insistence that Adam and Eve are not the first human beings.

La Peyrère’s interpretation reduced Genesis from a global history of humanity to a history of the Jewish people.

La Peyrère further drew on a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans, which suggests sin predates Adam and Eve. La Peyrère takes this to mean there must have been sinners, and therefore people, before Adam.
By way of dispatching the Biblical claim that ‘God made all mankind of one blood’ – some ancient variations say ‘from one ancestor’ – La Peyrère reads it as saying that all humans are children of God and not descendants of Adam.

As well as accounting for Indigenous peoples, La Peyrère was concerned to reconcile Christianity with those non-Biblical histories that appeared to conflict with the timeline of Genesis.

The predominant view in the 17th century, based on a literal reading of Genesis, was that the creation of the world occurred c. 2348 BCE, making Earth about 4,000 years old, while Chaldean and Egyptian creation accounts cite the creation of humans much earlier.

https://aeon.co/essays/modern-rac…

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

Queen Elizabeth freed the last English serfs in 1574. But serfdom remained in Scotland until the Colliers and Salters (Scotland) Act 1775 prevented the creation of the status, and 1799, when coal miners who had been kept in serfdom prior to the 1775 Act gained emancipation. However, most Scottish serfs had been freed by then.

More about the coal miners at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

A new illustrated edition of the bestselling, conversation-driving anthology featuring some of our top journalists, historians, poets, essayists, and photographers examining the lasting impacts of slavery in America.

An illustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story.

In these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act. — Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface

Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features 7 chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in August 1619, when a cargo ship of people stolen from Africa arrived on the shores of Point Comfort, Virginia.
Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future.

Filled with original art by 13 Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project.

Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture.

ISBN-13: 9780593232255
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date: 10/22/2024
Pages: 288
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/…

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

The Atlantic slave trade began in 1415 and ran for 450 years. During that time, more than 16,000,000 Africans were kidnapped and transported to Europe, South and North America and the Caribbean.

Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça was born in the kingdom of Pedras of Pungo-AnDongo in 1649, in Angola. His birth coincided with Portugal tightening its grip on the slave trade in west central Africa. This trade’s brutal effects defined his early childhood and adulthood.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Portugal was in the forefront of European maritime empires and of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1585 Luanda (modern Angola’s capital) was established as a port south of the Kongo kingdom, in the Pungo-AnDongo kingdom, serving this trade.

Angola was named after the title of its king. Portuguese influence gradually spread inland and Lourenço’s grandfather, Hari I, was made a king by Portugal in 1626. During his 38 years of service to Portugal, he was forced to pay 3,800 enslaved people to the crown, a tax known as baculamento.

Hari I had to fight wars alongside Portuguese troops stationed in Angola in which two of his sons, including Mendonça’s father, died. Two of Mendonça’s uncles rebelled against Portugal and refused to pay tax in human persons.

Hari II, who took the throne of Pungo-AnDongo, was executed.

The Ndongo polity was finally conquered in 1671 and brought fully under Portuguese control. Members of the royal group were exiled.

Mendonça witnessed these processes and was part of this exile network in Brazil, which was colonised by Portugal at the time. By order of the Portuguese crown, Mendonça studied for 4 years at the Convent of Vilar de Frades in Braga, a city in Portugal.

By the 1680s, he was elected as an international lawyer for Black Christians across Africa, Portugal, Brazil and Spain. He was allowed to practise “throughout the whole of Christendom in any kingdom or dominion” and “using the economic and political right which is conferred to him”.

In 1684, Mendonça presented a court case to Pope Innocent XI, petitioning the Vatican, Portugal, Italy and Spain to stop enslaving African people. He demanded abolition not only for Africans, but also for New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity) and Native Americans.

This petition was made more than 100 years before British abolitionist leaders William Wilberforce and Thomas Buxton fought for the passage of Great Britain’s Act of Abolition.

The Vatican was the leading court in the Catholic world. In the 15th and 16th centuries the Vatican had issued a series of papal bulls permitting the enslavement of Africans, meaning it also had the judicial authority to ban slavery under ecclesiastical law.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

CONCLUSION:

In his address to the Vatican, Mendonça exposed the hypocrisy of the Atlantic slavery, using 4 core principles of law: human, natural, divine, and civil laws.
He argued for the abolition of slavery and included Black Brotherhoods and interest groups of men, women and young people of African descent in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Africa.
The scale of this international initiative led by Africans in the Atlantic region has not been fully researched.

Mendonça’s thinking developed because of his legal role for the Black Christian Brotherhood, a role conferred on him by Carlos II of Spain, and the archbishop of Toledo, Luis Manuel Fernández de Portocarrero y de Guzman.

His argument for abolition included non-Iberian empires in Africa, the Americas and Europe, and enabled him to take his criminal court case to the Supreme Court of Christendom in an attempt to overturn Pope Nicholas V’s bull, which was the foundation of perpetual Atlantic slavery.

Proponents of slavery at the time argued that Africans enslaved their own people and that this practice was embedded in their socio-political, economic, religious and legal systems.

The abolition of Atlantic slavery has been told as a narrative in which morally superior European Christians rescued Africans both from their own and subsequent imperial systems of slavery. Both the slave trade itself, and colonialism after British abolition, were justified by these linked, usually Christian, narratives.

Mendonça regarded the narratives about African slavery as treacherous tales aimed at justifying the unjustifiable. The records of the case reveal the Africans' role in the early abolition movement and their development of arguments to connect divine, natural, civil and human law.

They also show the political nous of Mendonça and his networks in attempting to unite oppressed constituencies within the Atlantic and the broader Catholic world.

Mendonça’s relationship with new Christians, Native Brazilians and other Africans was central to the case he made for universal human rights, liberty, reparation and humanity.

The Vatican court’s verdict on Mendonça’s case in 1686 was a universal condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade.
But the Christian states of Europe failed to honor it.
It would take another 200 years before slavery was finally abolished.

By exploring Mendonça’s life, and the records surviving from an important court case in the 1680s, this book offers a new perspective on the slave trade, the Black Atlantic, Catholicism, imperialism and abolition. These are all central to global history.

"Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century"
By José Lingna Nafafé, University of Bristol
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Online publication date: August 2022
Print publication year: 2022
Online ISBN: 9781108974196
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/978110897…

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

In 1696 the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt, in the case of Chamberlain v Harvey, ruled that ‘no man can have property in the person of another while in England’.
Yet 23 years later, the West India lobby, opposed to Holt’s statement, obtained an unofficial opinion from the Attorney Gen. Philip Yorke Philip Yorke (1690-1764), 1st Earl of Hardwicke and the Solicitor Gen. Charles Talbot (1685-1737), 1st Lord Talbot:
"We are of opinion 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 is not thereby determined or varied; and that baptism doth not bestow freedom upon him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these Kingdoms. We are also of opinion that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations." - Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1729

These conflicting statements explain the significance of the Somerset v Stewart decision.

Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant who had become a cashier and paymaster of customs in Boston, Massachusetts, came to England on business in 1768/9, bringing with him James Somerset, an enslaved person under his ownership.

During their time in England, Somerset was baptised, with 3 abolitionists - Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade and John Marlow - acting as godparents.

As the Yorke-Talbot opinion suggested, there was a belief, which their opinion disagreed with, that the baptism of an enslaved person made them free.
Somerset escaped Stewart’s service in October 1771, evading recapture until the end of November. He was taken to a ship anchored in the Thames, and detained there for the purposes of being shipped to Jamaica to be resold as a slave.
His godparents intervened, issuing a writ of habeas corpus, a legal procedure under which a prisoner would be brought to court to decide whether they had been lawfully detained.
Somerset was duly brought before the Court of King’s Bench on 9 December 1771.

The case began in February 1772, heard by 3 judges with Mansfield presiding as Lord Chief Justice.
Somerset was released pending the hearing, and in that time met with the famed abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had previously issued writs of habeas corpus for similar cases to resolve the uncertainty surrounding slavery. Although he supported Somerset’s case, he did not represent him; Somerset was defended by a team of barristers led by the sitting MP for Middlesex, John Glynn.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

PART 2

The defence sought to frame the judgment on the basis that a ruling in favour of Stewart would set a precedent for legalising enslavement across the British Isles. Francis Hargrave, in this his first case, exemplified this position during proceedings, stating that ‘the question is not whether slavery is lawful in the colonies… but whether in England?’
Another main point of contention from the defence, articulated by John Alleyne, was that due to Stewart’s ownership of enslaved people being legalised through municipal law in America, his ownership of James Somerset did not hold sway in ‘a country where such municipal regulations do not subsist.’

The lead counsel for Stewart, John Dunning, who was also a sitting MP, sought to challenge Alleyne’s argument. He posited that although municipal regulations were not binding in a different country, there were relationships similar to Stewart and Somerset’s of an equivalent status that could be transposed: ‘I have not heard, do I fancy, is there any intention to affirm, the relation of master and servant ceases here?’
William Wallace also questioned what the implications of setting Somerset free would be for the lucrative industries in the colonies that were dependent on the labour of enslaved people. He argued that ‘the Court must consider the great detriment to proprietors… that many thousands of pounds would be lost to the owners, by setting them [enslaved persons] free.’

On 14 May, Mansfield adjourned the final session before his judgment was to be given. As in previous cases he had presided over, Mansfield strongly recommended that an agreement between the parties be reached before an opinion was given, but it seemed that both sides were committed to a judicial resolution.
Reluctant to give a judgment on the legality of slavery in general, Mansfield narrowed the remit of his judgment. Rather than answering questions on the morality of enslavement, or the potential detriment to British commerce, Mansfield stated that his decision would be based on ‘whether any dominion, authority or coercion can be exercised in this country, on a slave according to American laws?’

The Court of King’s Bench's decision was finally read by Mansfield in Westminster Hall on 22 June 1772. The Morning Chronicle reported the day after the decision that ‘Lord Mansfield in a written speech, as guarded, cautious, and concise, as it could possibly be drawn up, delivered the unanimous opinion of the whole court…’
Within the parameters he had previously proposed, Mansfield asserted that ‘so high an act of dominion must be recognized by law of the country it is used.’ As the dominion over another person that slavery imposed was not supported by English law, Mansfield declared: "Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England."

James Somerset was therefore released.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

CONCLUSION:

Although this declaration created a judicial decision against the institution of slavery in England, the parameters Mansfield had set greatly narrowed the impact of Somerset’s release. The precedent set by this case was that the actions of Stewart to detain Somerset against his will to deport and sell him into slavery were not supported by English law.
However, this did not outlaw the existence of slavery in the colonies, or the existence of domestic servitude. Rather it stipulated that the level of dominion over another which Stewart had tried to enforce – the forced deportation of an individual for the purpose of selling them as a slave – was unlawful in England.

Despite Mansfield later stating in 1785 that his decision went ‘no further than that the master cannot by force compel him [the slave] to go out of the Kingdom’, this judgment was seen by many as a boon to the emerging abolitionist campaign, posing the question, if slavery in its fullest extent could not be legal in England, why was it still legal in the colonies?

With the anti-slavery rhetoric gaining traction, the West India Interest saw for the first time there was unified opposition to the status quo.
New tactics were needed to counter fears that Somerset v Stewart could eventually destabilise the practice of colonial slavery.

https://historyofparliament.com/2…

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