Granville Sharp

Granville Sharp brought the cases that made slavery unenforceable in England and spent forty years as the most persistent abolitionist of his generation. He was a linen-draper's apprentice with no legal training who taught himself law after meeting Jonathan Strong, an enslaved man beaten and abandoned in London by his owner in 1765; Sharp's brother, a surgeon, treated him, Sharp found him work, and when the owner reappeared two years later to seize him, Sharp fought the claim and won. He then looked for a case that would settle the question in principle, and found it in James Somerset, who had been brought from Virginia and put in irons on a ship bound for Jamaica. Lord Mansfield's judgment in 1772 was narrower than it is often remembered as being - it held that no master could forcibly remove a slave from England, not that slavery was abolished - but it was read at once by both sides as the end of slavery on English soil. Sharp also took up the Zong case in 1783, in which the crew of a slave ship threw more than a hundred and thirty Africans overboard and the owners sued their insurers for the value of the cargo; he failed to have anyone tried for murder, but the case was used by abolitionists for decades. He was a founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 with Thomas Clarkson, and of the Sierra Leone settlement, which he intended as a home for the black poor of London and which failed badly at first. He wrote on Greek grammar, biblical scholarship and parliamentary representation as well. He died four years before the trade he fought was abolished across the empire. He refused to take a salary for any of it and lived on a small government pension until he resigned that too, over the American war. The Somerset ruling did not touch the colonies, where slavery continued for another sixty years. Sierra Leone became a Crown colony in 1808.

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