Eliga H. Gould

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Eliga H. Gould | Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.3 | The History Cooperative

Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772

ON June 22, 1772 before a packed courtroom in London's Westminster Hall, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield delivered his now-famous opinion that James Somerset, an enslaved man who had escaped after accompanying his master from Boston, could not be forcibly returned to Jamaica (as his master intended) and "must be discharged." In finding for Somerset, Mansfield refused to rule on the underlying legality of owning slaves in England. Nonetheless, to justify such a significant alteration in status, Mansfield declared that slavery was "odious" and could only be supported by "positive law," which England lacked.¹ According to the Morning Chronicle, blacks who witnessed the proceedings from the gallery left "shaking each other by the hand" and congratulating themselves on the "happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England."² Less ebullient, the West Indian planter Edward Long agreed that, whatever his stated purpose, Mansfield had made it legally impossible to reclaim a "fugitive slave" living in England.³ As Seymour Drescher has written, Somerset v. Stewart heralded a decisive shift in the metropolitan "class struggle between masters and black servants." Although owning slaves remained legal until abolition in 1834, Mansfield's opinion opened the way for a substantial broadening of rights for the country's 10,000–20,000 people of African descent.⁴

If Somerset "delivered a deadly blow to slavery in Britain," its effects were anything but lethal in the colonies where most slaves lived.⁵ Although rumors of blacks fleeing to Britain abounded in the decision's aftermath, the ruling did nothing to alter the fact that slavery was "authorized by the laws and opinions of Virginia and Jamaica."⁶ Despite the British government's increased assertiveness in many areas of colonial governance, Britons who happened to live in the colonies remained free to engage in a practice whose consequences were "absolutely contrary to the municipal law of England."⁷ As Thomas Clarkson wrote of the decision's consequences, "the poor African ... walked by the side of the stately ship, and he feared no dungeon in her hold," but, Clarkson might have added, only if the ship were anchored in an English harbor.⁸ According to David Brion Davis, the ruling effectively sanctioned the operation of two "systems of law," with British courts taking care in subsequent cases (until 1834) to endorse "no principles that undermined" colonial slavery.⁹

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