Jonathan Strong

Jonathan Strong was beaten nearly to death by the man who claimed to own him, and the case that followed turned Granville Sharp into an abolitionist. He had been brought to London from Barbados by David Lisle, a lawyer, who in 1765 pistol-whipped him about the head until he was blind in one eye, unable to walk, and dying, and then put him out on the street as useless. Sharp's brother William was a surgeon who gave free treatment to the poor, and Strong queued at his door; the two brothers had him admitted to St Bartholomew's for four months and then found him work as an errand boy for an apothecary. Two years later Lisle saw him in the street, recognised that he was now healthy and therefore valuable, had him seized by two officers and held in the Poultry Compter, and sold him to a Jamaican planter for thirty pounds. Strong got word to Granville Sharp. Sharp went to the Lord Mayor, who found that Strong had been taken without a warrant and had committed no offence, and discharged him in open court while the planter's agent laid a hand on him and claimed him as property. Lisle challenged Sharp to a duel and then sued; the action was dropped in 1768 with costs against him. Sharp spent the intervening years teaching himself law and produced the argument he later used in the Somerset case of 1772. Strong never recovered his health and died in 1773, aged about twenty-five. Sharp published his findings in 1769 as A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery. Lord Mansfield, who decided Somerset, had declined to rule on the principle in Strong's case. Strong's name appears in Sharp's own manuscript record of the affair, which is the only reason anything is known about him at all.

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