Daniel J. Hulsebosch

FORUM: COMMENT

Nothing But Liberty: Somerset's Case and the British Empire

George Van Cleve places Somerset's Case squarely in the middle of Britain's imperial history. It belongs there. After clarifying the "narrow" holding in the case—that Charles Stewart could not forcibly remove James Somerset from England—Van Cleve argues that Chief Justice Mansfield and his Court of King's Bench "creat[ed] a new legal framework for slavery" and "did so quite knowingly at the price of undercutting the legal, economic and moral basis of slavery as an institution throughout the Atlantic Empire."¹ This argument that Somerset's Case transformed slavery law throughout the British Empire rests on three claims. First, Van Cleve views Somerset's Case as an imperial conflict of laws case because it involved a conflict between the laws of two royal territories, England and Virginia. Second, Van Cleve contends that Mansfield intended the decision and his remarks accompanying it about the positive law foundation of slavery to have abolitionist effects. Finally, these two points are related: Mansfield drew a distinction "between English and colonial law on slavery" in order to undermine slavery across the empire.²	1
Van Cleve is largely correct: Somerset's Case was a conflicts case; the distinction between English and colonial law was important within the empire's legal culture; and abolitionists embraced the decision. The problem comes in conflating intent with consequences and thereby directing attention away from the contemporary purposes served by the jurisdictional distinction between England and the other royal territories. The tentative argument proposed here is that the legal arguments in Somerset's Case more closely tracked an old discourse of English supremacy within the empire than the emerging language of human rights. Like most discourses, its sources reflected the past more than they controlled the future and resonated primarily with its local audience: those in England who were ambivalent about colonial slavery. Many there probably found slavery (as Mansfield did) "odious" while, at the same time (like Mansfield), understood that it was central to the imperial economy. The arguments and various reports of Mansfield's opinion suggest that the participants in Somerset's Case were most concerned to reconcile this tension: to keep slavery in the empire while keeping it out of England.³	2
For almost two centuries, the English constitution had been constructed by contrasting English legal liberties to those available elsewhere, including in other jurisdictions in the empire. This legal alterity emerged from a political culture that was caught between wanting the gains and glory of imperial expansion and fearing that royal dominions abroad would be training grounds for arbitrary government that might travel back home. The tragic endpoint of this reverse migration was called "slavery."⁴ Therefore, when the lawyers and judges involved in Somerset's Case spoke of slavery, they spoke not only about the liberty of James Somerset and others who looked like him. They also expressed concern for the liberties of Englishmen. Seen in this light, the decision left the institution of colonial slavery almost untouched while at the same time insulating England from chattel slavery, the power of returning West Indian planters, and political despotism. Finally, as Van Cleve notes, Mansfield's remarks highlighted his view (widely shared in London) that the British Parliament was supreme in the imperial constitution. Accordingly, Parliament had the power to make servants slaves and to make slaves servants, just as it had the power to alter all prerogatives, whether of planters, colonial governments, or even the Crown.	3
Van Cleve's claim that Somerset was a "conflicts case" adds to our understanding of both this case and the legal history of the British Empire. He is right to notice that each royal territory had its own political regime and laws, which meant that conflicts could arise when the law of one territory arose in the courts of another. Van Cleve also notes that the leading jurists of the British Empire never determined the best way to settle such conflicts, and we know little about how the courts in the colonies, dominions, and England actually resolved them.⁵ Framing Somerset as a conflicts case begins to shed light on the formal and, more important, informal arrangements that royal subjects made in their legal arrangements as they traveled across the internal borders of the empire. Throughout the arguments in Somerset's Case, Mansfield urged the parties to settle the dispute, and Van Cleve fairly concludes that American slaves brought to England were treated in a variety of ways.⁶ Other imperial legal conflicts were probably also resolved or ignored without litigation.	4
Van Cleve sums up the effect of conflicts law on the status of slaves in England: "slaves who came to England were no longer subject to chattel slavery, but were not fully emancipated; they were held to a lesser but substantial form of 'slavish servitude.'"⁷ But he does not analyze the methods that the lawyers and judges in Somerset's Case used to resolve the conflict between the colonial law of slavery and English law of servitude. This is no simple task. The English courts sometimes obscured the problem by using legal fictions that united the forum and the jurisdiction in which the case arose, a bit of legerdemain that recalls the old Bill of Middlesex fiction through which King's Bench extended its civil jurisdiction by hearing civil cases tacked on to fictitious charges of trespass in the county where the court sat.⁸ When the conflict was glaring and unavoidable by such means, as when Stewart sought to ship Somerset for sale in Jamaica, there was no imperial conflict-of-laws treatise to guide the lawyers and judges.⁹ Only one attorney in Somerset's Case, Francis Hargrave, referred to the continental literature on what lawyers in the next century called private international law, or the conflict between forum and foreign law.¹⁰ To the extent that there was an imperial conflict-of-laws jurisprudence at work, the historian must induce its principles from the casuist reasoning used during the arguments in the case. Even in the age of Lord Mansfield, who helped push the judicial opinion to the center of Anglo-American legal culture, these dialogues between lawyers and judges were more revealing than a court's typically brief, cryptic conclusion.	5
The dialogue in Somerset's Case indicates consensus on the general rule of lex loci: the courts of one country—the forum—should recognize a person's status created under the law of the jurisdiction where the action or legal relation at issue arose. The participants in the case assumed that civil status—like the state of servitude—translated from one legal system to another. But the court also "approved" of a limitation on this rule: while the forum court should recognize status conditions created in foreign jurisdictions, it need not recognize municipal regulations of the incidents of that status that were considered "inconvenient" or penal in the forum jurisdiction. Mansfield raised the case of marriage, which remains the classic example of how the conflict of laws operates. A marriage was recognized everywhere, but the incidents of marriage, such as "the regulations of power over children from it, and other circumstances, [are] very various."¹¹ The court grabbed this analogy to help determine the power of a slave master in England. Stewart remained Somerset's master, just as he had been in Virginia. But the incidents of that relationship, in particular Stewart's power to command and discipline Somerset, were different in England than in Virginia. As Mansfield reportedly said, "So high an act of dominion"—detention and deportation—"must be recognized by the law of the country where it is used." Nothing but "positive law" could support an institution so "odious."¹² The power of a master over a slave derived from only local positive law, meaning either statute or usage that derived from statute. A slave master in Virginia had the power to detain and deport his slave; the master did not have that power when he brought his slave to England.	6
Van Cleve makes much of this positive law remark. Mansfield's statement that slavery could rest only on positive law, he argues, applied to the whole empire and thereby endangered colonial slavery. At the same time, Mansfield avoided the more inflammatory claim that English common law prohibited slavery. In other words, the positive law argument was a rhetorical compromise that did not imply immediate abolition but would ultimately undermine colonial slavery.¹³ Arguably, though, the positive law rhetoric was more inflammatory because it could not be discursively restricted to England, while a holding based on English common law could. Still, it is not clear how much difference this rhetorical choice made or how the remark about positive law applied to the whole empire. First, the jurisdiction of King's Bench was limited to England and (for some purposes) Ireland. Its writs did not run to the whole empire; Mansfield's interpretation of slavery's legal basis did not, for example, bind colonial courts.¹⁴ Second, the posture of the case required the master to justify the detention and locate a legal basis for his self-help remedy. The return on the writ of habeas corpus stated that Somerset was Stewart's slave. Therefore, he had the burden to prove the legal basis of slavery or at least this incident of slavery. The positive law holding meant that the common law did not offer a remedy for the slaveholder in this case. But neither did the common law have the capacity to condemn slavery. A statement that the English common law prohibited slavery would not have made much sense to a practicing attorney in the eighteenth century, when the common law was conceived more as a limited collection of remedies than a seamless regulatory system. It is, nonetheless, significant that Mansfield neither found the master's right in the ancient law of villeinage nor incorporated the Atlantic practice of slavery and its legal remedies into the common law as he did much of commercial law, a choice that the positive law remark helps explain. Commercial law represented the customs of merchants in civilized nations; slavery was not included in that European body of "civilized" law but rather depended on municipal law.¹⁵ Finally, as a practical matter, most contemporaries concluded that positive, municipal law supported slavery in the colonies. Indeed, the participants in Somerset's Case assumed the legality of colonial slavery. In the nineteenth century, American jurists who opposed slavery also found that British statutes regulating the slave trade, combined with colonial regulation and the practice of slavery itself, had formed the basis of the institution in the colonies.¹⁶	7
Consequently, King's Bench recognized the status condition of servitude but not the master's disciplinary powers that marked colonial slavery.¹⁷ Mansfield seems to have felt that he should not, or perhaps could not, disregard that status because it arose in a royal dominion rather than a "foreign" country. Although Somerset's counsel implied that English courts could choose whether or not to follow the law of the foreign jurisdiction on the basis of "convenience," this was not the sense Mansfield conveyed when dealing with colonial law. A conflict between two sovereign kingdoms was different from a conflict between two royal territories loyal to the same king.¹⁸ This distinction helped neutralize the comparative law examples cited by Somerset's counsel. These showed slaves being emancipated when brought from one kingdom to another that did not recognize slavery, including the unreported case of a Russian slave in which a sixteenth-century English judge is said to have exclaimed that English air was too pure for a slave to breathe. Mansfield doubted, for example, whether the relocation of a master and his slave from one royal territory to another was enough to emancipate the slave fully.¹⁹ He also referred to various Parliamentary regulations of slavery, which proved that "the law"—meaning Parliamentary law—"has interfered for the maintenance of the trade in slaves and the transferring of slaves."²⁰ While the reports of his opinion are cryptic, this too indicates that Mansfield was taking notice of British Parliamentary policy to protect slave masters when they transferred their slaves from one place to another, including within the empire. Thus, although "the condition of slavery, in its full extent, could not be tolerated here," King's Bench implied that slaves brought to England were still servants.²¹	8
Many more English cases involving colonial law would have to be examined to establish whether there was a coherent choice-of-law practice emerging in the eighteenth century. All this suggests only that Mansfield was distinguishing the law of a royal territory from truly foreign law. In this limited sense he was developing an imperial conflict-of-laws jurisprudence: English courts could choose whether or not to recognize status conditions created under foreign law but were obligated to recognize status conditions created in other territories held by the English Crown. In one like the other, however, the English courts did not have to recognize incidents of status that were not valid under English law. Simply put, a master in England did not have the right to deport his servant from England; the courts would free a slave detained for that purpose. But the slave was still a servant.²²	9
Process is not the only way to view Somerset's Case. It might also provide evidence of an emergent imperial master and servant law. Servants in one royal territory were bound as servants in another, though the definition of servitude changed as a master and his servant traveled from one territory to another. The incidents of slavery, in particular, varied across the empire. There had long been at least two slavery regimes in the British empire—one in England and another in the overseas colonies—and in reality many more than two.²³ Rarely had any Briton knowledgeable about the law argued that one law of slavery applied across the empire. Those who tried to manufacture a coherent body of imperial law usually failed because they trespassed on one or more territorial jurisdiction. In most situations, it was in the interest of few Britons to imagine the empire as a single jurisdiction requiring uniform law, including a uniform law of slavery.	10
There were exceptions. With the law of slavery, one was the Yorke-Talbot opinion in 1729. This was an unofficial opinion obtained by the West Indian lobby from the king's attorney general and solicitor general declaring that Christian conversion did not emancipate slaves and that planters could bring slaves from the colonies to England and still hold them as slaves.²⁴ Van Cleve presents the opinion as one of several bits of evidence showing that the law of English slavery was ambiguous. If the historical task is simply to show that reasonable legal minds differed across time about the status of slaves in England, then the Yorke-Talbot opinion serves as evidence of that ambiguity. If instead the task is to interpret how persistent scripts were used differently over time, then the emphasis would shift from the opinion to the procurement process. About the same time, these and other Crown lawyers opined that an Englishman carried as much of English "law and liberty with him, as the nature of things will bear."²⁵ Both of these scripts—that colonists enjoyed the liberties of Englishmen and that rights created in other royal territories should be recognized in England—had circulated in the Anglophone Atlantic world for more than a generation but had received little credence in the metropolis.²⁶ Why they both received some credence in the 1720s is an unanswered question. A starting hypothesis is that by then the reverse migration of planters reached a critical mass. These opinions would then become evidence of the influence of American slaveholders in English politics, influence that peaked on the eve of the American Revolution, when Prime Minister Lord North "used to say that they were the only masters he used to have."²⁷ Here was a moment in which leading lawyers expressed support for an empire-wide legal regime without addressing many specifics or resolving the tension inherent in the idea that English laws traveled to the colonies, while, at the same time, that some colonial law was valid in all royal territories, including England.	11
Under the more orthodox conception of the empire, each royal territory had its own lawmaking authority, although the authority of each was derived in whole or part from the Crown that united them all. The colonies could not make law contrary or repugnant to the laws of England, but what this meant as a matter of doctrine was never clear. Laws contradicting the English common law were more often upheld by the Privy Council than disallowed.²⁸ Harmonization was not the ideal of early modern English legal thinkers. Instead, English jurists, from Lord Coke to Lord Mansfield and Sir William Blackstone, were content to help build an imperial legal order in which the colonies made laws that conflicted with English common law. That difference in law reflected a difference in identity that, for the most part, those who remained in England—including ambitious Scots—were happy to maintain.	12
A conflict-of-laws approach to Somerset's Case reveals multiple imperial identities reflected in, or performed in, conflicting laws. Even the most abolitionist of Somerset's advocates admitted that slavery was an unfortunate "necessity" in the colonies.²⁹ It was not necessary at home, and a large reason why they opposed its importation was that for them the harsh labor institution was a synecdoche for arbitrary governance. The West Indian planters returning to England with slaves created a problem—the practice of slavery in England—and were symbols of a greater problem—they personified despotism in their treatment of slaves and the way that they used their wealth to obtain support for that oppression.³⁰ Although some observers, like Benjamin Franklin, dismissed this distinction as hypocritical,³¹ it fitted within the traditional ideology of empire in which expansion was the means of greatness yet also sowed the seeds of corruption.³²	13
In his argument before King's Bench, Francis Hargrave warned that slavery corrupted the "manners in the master" and "debase[d] the mind of the slave." In addition, the institution would "revive" the other "mischiefs of mere utter servitude." Those mischiefs were governmental rather than private and at odds with the "mild and just" English constitution, which was "ill adapted to the reception of arbitrary maxims and practices." To drive the point home, Hargrave asked, "In England, where freedom is the grand object of the laws and dispensed to the meanest individual, shall the laws of an infant colony, Virginia, or of a barbarous nation, Africa, prevail?"³³ His colleague John Alleyne continued this theme, asking the court to "preserve that liberty by which we are distinguished by all the earth." Allowance of slavery was an evil in itself, but he expressed even more fear of what might follow: "The horrid cruelties, scarce credible in recital, perpetrated in America, might by the allowance of slaves amongst us, be introduced here." He used the example of corporal punishment. Social historians know, as Somerset's lawyers must have known, that physical discipline was still central to labor relations in eighteenth-century England. But certain disciplinary tools distinguished slavery from ordinary servitude. One bright line was the whip. Alleyne asked the court to imagine the specter of masters whipping their slaves in fields just outside London. Would Englishmen become inured to such violence? What would follow from this loss of sensitivity? Instead of promoting gradual abolition, Alleyne warned of gradual political slavery in England, as the incidents of the institution "might by time become familiar [and] become unheeded by this nation."³⁴ Denying the West Indians who resided in England of their colonial prerogatives—the "high dominion" of physical control over their slaves—would reduce the threat of political despotism.	14
Somerset's lawyers were certainly trying to protect, even liberate, black servants in England. It is possible that they wished to abolish the slave trade or slavery itself across the empire. Their primary goal at King's Bench, though, was to keep slavery an ocean away. The judges agreed with that argument. The gift of liberty to each person, even a perpetual servant, was a sign of England's virtue. It was nothing but liberty; but liberty was, they claimed, so much.³⁵ The loss of even one individual's liberty to remain in England meant that everyone was endangered.	15
It is in this universalism—this premise of human rights—that Van Cleve rightly finds something new in Somerset's Case.³⁶ Somerset's humanity gave him legal protection from being physically removed from England by Stewart. This human right was not qualified by his race, birthplace, or subjectship. Any servant, of any race from anywhere, would presumably benefit from English protection against severe punishment and deportation by a master. In this sense, the case contributed to the abstraction of English liberty into a human right. Still, it remained a liberty available to people in England rather than everywhere, including the royal territories of Virginia and Jamaica. The empire's legal pluralism allowed Mansfield to rationalize the brutality of slavery while locating it offshore, thus facilitating the coexistence of slavery and freedom.	16
Eventually this coexistence ceased.³⁷ That, however, was the work of abolitionists and advocates of a later day.³⁸ I think it reads too much into Mansfield's remarks to conclude that his "studied avoidance of the larger questions," as James Oldham describes his opinion, was designed to promote abolition throughout the empire.³⁹ For Mansfield, any further resolution demanded Parliamentary legislation—his answer to all the imperial conflicts of the 1770s. In the end, his opinion mattered less than the continental colonists' jealousy of their internal government, for the loss by the West Indians' of their North American trading partners, after a revolution caused in part by Parliament's insistence on the supremacy that Mansfield championed, did more to devalue slave property in the British Empire than any remarks in Somerset's Case.⁴⁰ And when emancipation did come six decades later, it came in the form of Parliamentary legislation.	17
Daniel J. Hulsebosch is a professor of law at New York University School of Law <daniel.hulsebosch@nyu.edu>. He is grateful to the participants of the New York University Atlantic World History Workshop, November 2005, and Alfred L. Brophy for commenting on a draft. He also thanksWangui Kaniaru for research assistance Notes ^1.� George Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective," Law and History Review 24 (2006), 645. ^2.� Ibid, 644. ^3.� Christopher L. Brown argues similarly that the issue in Somerset's Case was "not only whether Africans in England could be slaves but also whether England would remain English and free." Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 97. ^4.� For political "slavery," see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 232–34; David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 377, 402, 453. I agree with Eliga H. Gould's observation that Mansfield sought to "insulate" England from a colonial "contagion," but a conflict-of-laws analysis demonstrates that the problem facing British legal thinkers was more complicated than a conflict between separate zones of law and violence. Cf. Gould, "Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 60 (2003): 471–510. ^5.� There are studies of Privy Council review of colonial legislation and judicial decisions against the standard of "repugnancy" to the laws of England. See Mary S. Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Joseph H. Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Elmer B. Russell, The Review of American Colonial Legislation by the King in Council (1915; New York: Octagon Books, 1976); Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Colonial Appeals to the Privy Council," Political Science Quarterly 28 (1913): 279–97, 433–50. The Privy Council never used this power to adjudge slavery "repugnant" to English law. William M. Wiecek, "Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World," University of Chicago Law Review 42 (1974–75): 86, 112–13. ^6.� Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case," 623. ^7.� Ibid., 614. ^8.� Even then the fiction functioned only to give the court jurisdiction; the substantive law remained foreign or colonial law. See, e.g., Fabrigas v. Mostyn, 20 State Trials 81, 98 Eng. Rep. 1021 (Exchequer Chamber, 1774). See also Campbell v. Hall, 20 State Trials 239, 98 Eng. Rep. 1045 (K.B. 1774) (cases arising in Minorca and Grenada stipulated as arising in London). For the Bill of Middlesex, see J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (London: Butterworths LexisNexis, 2002), 42. ^9.� At least not until the nineteenth century. See William Burge, Commentaries on Colonial and Foreign Laws Generally, and in Their Conflict with Each Other, and the Law of England (London, 1836). ^10.�Somerset v. Stewart, 20 State Trials, 2, 60 ( K.B. 1772) (citing Huber). Cf. Alan Watson, Joseph Story and the Comity of Errors: A Case Study in the Conflict of Laws (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 67–70. ^11.�Somerset v. Steward, 98 Eng. Rep. 499, 504 (K.B. 1772). ^12.� 98 Eng. Rep., at 510. ^13.� Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case," 638 (stating that "this holding ... deliberately applied both to England and to its colonies"). ^14.� Thus, Campbell v. Hall, 20 State Trials 239, 98 Eng. Rep. 1045 (K.B. 1774), does not stand for the proposition that the common law courts had jurisdiction, or that the common law operated, in overseas colonies. See above, note 8. Cf. Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case," 641, 605 n. 13. ^15.� See James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 2:1230; Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 478. Mansfield derived these categories of civilized law and municipal law from the law of nations, which he argued was part of the common law. ^16.� See Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws, 5th ed. (Boston, 1857), 162 n. (concluding that slavery had "crept in" by "universal custom, prevailing through the European colonies, in the West Indies, and on the continent of America, and which was fostered and encouraged by the commercial policy of the parent State"). ^17.� The continuation of servitude followed from the limited decision itself. Mansfield clarified this holding a decade later. Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case," 635–36; Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, 2:1236. ^18.� Mansfield distinguished the French case from this one: there, "France was not bound to judge by the municipal law of Spain; nor was to take cognizance of those offences supposed against that law" (98 Eng. Rep., at 502). Here, by contrast, there was a closer relationship between the laws of England and those of the colonies. ^19.� He used the example of a slave leaving Virginia to "the adjacent country, where there are no slaves, if change to a place of contrary custom was sufficient," and implied that this was not sufficient. 98 Eng. Rep., at 504. ^20.� Ibid. ^21.� Ibid. ^22.� On imperial master-servant law, compare Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, Introduction to Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 54–58, with Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 478. ^23.� See Jonathan Bush, "The British Constitution and the Creation of American Slavery," in Slavery and the Law, ed. Paul Finkelman (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1997), 379–418 (arguing that the "conquest doctrine allowed all the colonies a private space in which planters and merchants could deploy slave labor with little oversight from England"). ^24.� Edward Fiddes, "Lord Mansfield and the Sommersett Case," Law Quarterly Review 50 (1934): 499, 501–2. ^25.� George Chalmers, comp., Opinions of Eminent Lawyers on Various Points of English Jurisprudence (Burlington, Vt., 1858), 206–07. Yorke co-authored one of these opinions, too. ^26.� For the latter, see Craw v. Ramsey, 174 Eng. Rep. 1072 (K.B. 1670) (refusing to recognize Irish naturalization in England). ^27.� See Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), 3–33 (quotation at 15). ^28.� See, e.g., Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council, 576–77 (examining the Privy Council's treatment of partible inheritance statutes). ^29.� 98 Eng. Rep. 499 (Hargrave). ^30.� Granville Sharp, the abolitionist behind the Somerset litigation, warned that if private interests succeeded in obtaining public protection for their claims of human property, no poor Englishmen would be safe. Granville Sharp, 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 (London, 1769), 90–91, 110, 132–34. ^31.� Wiecek, "Somerset," 88. ^32.� See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125–45. ^33.� 98 Eng. Rep., at 500 (Hargrave). ^34.� 98 Eng. Rep., at 502 (Alleyne). ^35.� Cf. Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983) (exploring the ambiguities of emancipation in post-slavery societies). ^36.� Van Cleve, "Somerset's Case," 636. ^37.� Which is not to say that emancipation brought full legal liberty. See, e.g., Mary Turner, "The British Caribbean, 1823–1838: The Transition from Slave to Free Legal Status," in Masters, Servants and Magistrates, ed. Hay and Craven, 303–22. ^38.� See Ruth Paley, "After Somerset: Mansfield, Slavery and the Law in England, 1772–1830," in Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830, ed. Norma Landau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 184. ^39.� Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, 2:1222. ^40.� Cf. Reginald Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), 209–14 (arguing that the Revolution deprived the West Indians of their North American allies in the battle against abolition).

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FORUM: COMMENT

Nothing But Liberty: Somerset's Case and the British Empire

DANIEL J. HULSEBOSCH

Notes