James Somerset

James Somerset was the enslaved man whose case established that slavery could not be enforced in England, and almost nothing is recorded of him afterwards. He was bought in Virginia by a Boston customs officer, Charles Stewart, brought to England in 1769, and baptised in London in 1771 with three godparents who then acted for him. He escaped, was recaptured after two months and put in irons aboard a ship bound for Jamaica to be sold. His godparents applied for a writ of habeas corpus, which required the captain to produce him in court and to justify holding him, and Granville Sharp took up the funding and the argument. Lord Mansfield tried repeatedly to have the case settled out of court and said openly that he feared the consequences of deciding it. His judgment in June 1772 was narrow: slavery was so odious that nothing could support it but positive law, and no such law existed in England, so Somerset could not be forcibly removed. It did not abolish slavery, did not apply to the colonies, and did not free the estimated fifteen thousand enslaved people then in England - but it was reported on both sides of the Atlantic as though it had, and it was cited by American slaveholders as evidence of what London intended. Somerset was discharged and disappears from the record. The name attached to the case is the one that survives of him, which is the ordinary condition of the people such cases are named for. Charles Stewart went back to Boston and was there for the Tea Party. Scotland reached the same conclusion in the Knight case of 1778, and more broadly. Mansfield died in 1793, five years after the abolition campaign began in earnest.

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