Rough Crossings Page 7

  Three hours later (fellow-Serjeant Glynn, a notorious sufferer from gout, was mercifully briefer), Mansfield allowed himself a heavily judicial sigh and observed that since “this thing seems, by the arguments probable to go to a great length…let it stand over to the next [legal] term.” But if Mansfield imagined that in the three intervening months passions might subside, he was mistaken. On the 7th of May his alter ego, James Mansfield, gave possibly the most shamelessly theatrical speech in the entire trial, in which he adopted the persona of James Somerset himself: “It is true. I was a slave, kept as a slave in Africa. I was first put in chains on board a British ship and carried from Africa to America…never from the first moment of my life to the present time, have I been in a country where I had a power to assert the common rights of mankind. I am now in a country where the laws of liberty are known and regarded and can you tell me the reason why I am not to be protected by those laws, but to be carried away again to be sold?” No one could. The negro Somerset was a man, was he not? Well, then, it was impossible that he could ever be a slave in England unless through the introduction of some sort of new property law yet unknown to the national constitution.

  A week later it was the turn of the junior team, Francis Hargrave and John Alleyne, and they too showed no embarrassment about beating the patriotic drum. Whilst less histrionic than James Mansfield, Hargrave was shrewd enough to play to public patriotic sentiment about the singularity of English Common Law as the bedrock of liberty. Whatever villeinage might or might not have been, it had little in common with modern slavery, which demanded perpetual, unconditional and coerced labour, a bond dissolvable only at the owner’s will; which carried with it absolute power of arbitrary punishment, which was unbreakably hereditary and which made a human a negotiable thing. Warming to his lecture, Hargrave added a little sermon about the damage done to masters by the practice of slavery: the corruption of their morals; their endangerment from a state of permanent hatred on the part of the slaves; and the insidiousness by which slavery made an entire society degenerate, dispensed as it was from the nourishing incentives of industry and ingenious enterprise. Slavery was, in short, alien to everything that England and Britain was. Allowing foreign laws, whether Virginian, Turk, Polish or Russian, to be enforceable in England was tantamount to introducing a new species of “domestic slavery” in the very bosom of the land of liberty. Whatever was the case in ancient empires, absolute monarchies or, indeed, American colonies to this day, “it is contrary to the genius of the English law to allow any enforcement of agreements or contracts by any other compulsion than that of our courts of justice.” “The laws of England,” Hargrave declared, making his (successful, as it turned out) bid for the acclaim of his profession, “confers the gift of liberty entire and unencumbered; not in name-only but really and substantially.”

  In a breathtaking reversal of rhetorical expectations, Alleyne added that the task now was to preserve the English law from foreign, that is to say American, contamination. “Ought we not…to guard and reserve that liberty by which we are distinguished by all the earth!…The horrid cruelties, scarce credible in recital perpetuated in America, might by allowance of slaves amongst us, be introduced here.” Unless Britain in effect declared in this year, 1772, judicial independence from America, it would all be over and Middlesex would turn into barbaric, tyrannical Virginia! “Could your Lordship…endure in the fields bordering on this city, to see a wretch bound for some trivial offence to a tree, torn and agonizing beneath the scourge…?” No wonder Benjamin Franklin, who saw the proceedings from the throng in Westminster Hall, was first bemused, then unamused, then scandalized.

  As if helping a lame defence over a stile, Lord Mansfield at this juncture began to wonder out loud about the social and economic consequences were every enslaved black in Britain to suppose he had got his freedom along with Somerset. Dunning gratefully took this line of anxiety even further by painting an alarmist picture of chaos in the colonies, in which, drawn by the prospect of British freedom, “they will flock over in vast numbers [and] overrun this country and desolate the plantations.” Dunning’s motive in sounding an alarm bell was entirely tactical. How could he know that just three years later, in the midst of the American war, his prophecy would prove at least partially accurate?

  Concluding for Somerset, Davy was at his most bullish. Drawing a devastating line through case histories that (unlike Yorke-Talbot) had found slavery inadmissible in Common Law, Lord Mansfield interrupted, commenting: “If what you say is true then I had better burn all my law books.” “My Lord,” Davy coolly replied, “had better read them first.”14

  YET ANOTHER MONTH WENT BY. A sullen pause for the moment prevailed in America, during which Patriots in Boston, such as Sam Adams, denounced the insidious dumping of cheap East India tea, while attempting to collect a paltry excise, as: SLAVERY!

  In his chambers Lord Mansfield, hard pressed to come to judgement at last on what his personal picador, Granville Sharp, called the Cause, shifted and fidgeted for ways to avoid it, more fearful of the damage he might inflict than of the justice he might mete out. He tried again to persuade various parties to buy Somerset’s liberty. Failing, he grasped at the straw that young Hargrave had given him (so very apt, these novices, and yet so charmingly passionate; he had been bound to commend them). Hargrave had said that even were slavery to be upheld as some sort of fact in England, it would still be wholly inconsistent with the right usages and custom of the law for any such person, be he slave or no when he came into the country, to be plainly forced against his will out of it to some other place, and out of the land of liberty. So might he, the Lord Chief Justice, then rule against such a particular transportation without presuming to judge the matter at large?

  On Monday the 22nd of June 1772, at 11 o’clock in the morning, all of London and beyond seemed to have come to Westminster Hall, spilling from the coffee-houses and taverns, the law courts and mercantile establishments, the shops and exhibition rooms, coming by carriage and sedan chair and horse and foot, from the trim new squares to the west and the clattering City streets to the east. Since 1740, the interior of the ancient Gothic chamber had been divided by an elaborate wooden screen. On one side were the two courtrooms of the King’s Bench and Chancery; on the other, a vast public space, a field of stone where people stood, sat, perused the shops at the walls and, when judgement was to be given, halted and listened. Among that crowd this day were black faces who greeted Mansfield and Justices Ashton, Willes and Ashurst as the four long wigs passed through the screen and into King’s Bench, carefully ascending the low steps where once the judges of Charles I had hectored the deposed king, and took their high-backed seats. Silver-Tongue appeared, for the moment, tongue-tied, uncharacteristically leaden, his habitual affability oppressed by the burdensome expectations of history. More than ever the hall seemed not merely a court of law, his court of law, but as it had been centuries before, the true curia regis, the court of the king and the kingdom. England glowered in a summer chill, and for once the Lord Chief Justice wore his famous learning moodily.15

  But, in the dim and stony silence he proceeded, his Perthshire lilt lost to many as it floated through the wooden screen and out into the dusty vastness, where at first it competed with the hubbub of people browsing the pen and wig stalls that lined the hall’s perimeter. But then it became understood that judgement was to be given and there was a hush. Mansfield resumed. It was not, he said, as some, indeed many, might suppose, some great and general issue that was to be judged, but merely whether or not there was sufficient cause for the “return”—Captain Knowles’s reply to the writ of Habeas Corpus charging that he and Mr Stewart, not the negro, had been the victims of an unlawful act. If there were cause, then, the negro must be detained; if not, not; it was as plain as that. Unease rippled through the hall. For some time the Lord Chief Justice made his way through not just this case but others concerning similar escapes and detentions, and became warm when affirming, somewhat im
probably given all that had been said against it, that Yorke and Talbot had stated that neither the fact of a slave coming into England, much less his or her baptism, could be held to set the rights of masters at naught. And yet (the public heard this shift), while slavery had been and was many things in “different ages and states…the exercise of the power of a master over his slave must be supported by the Laws of particular Countries; but no foreigner can in England claim such a right over a man; such a claim is not known to the laws of England…the power claimed never was in use here or acknowledged by the Law…no Master ever was allowed here to take a Slave by force to be sold abroad because he had deserted from his service or for any other Reason whatever, we cannot say the Cause set forth by this Return is allowed or approved of by the Laws of this Kingdom; therefore”—the Lord Chief Justice made sure not to pause—” the Man must be discharged.”16

  He rose, and so did Justices Ashton, Willes and Ashurst. But, before they disappeared through the low door at the side of the hall opening on to the robing room, something happened that stirred even the jaded sentiments of the port-and-pipe hacks there in force from the Gazettes, Chronicles and Posts (Morning and Evening) and the Daily Advertiser. As Mansfield and his colleagues emerged through the screen, the group of blacks in the public space “bowed with profound respect to the Judges.” Then they shook hands vigorously with each other, congratulating themselves “upon their recovery of the rights of human nature, and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England.” “No sight upon earth,” wrote the reporter for the Morning Chronicle, “could be more pleasingly affecting to the feeling mind than the joy which shone at that instant in these poor men’s sable countenances.”17

  It was a scene that, perversely, Granville Sharp himself missed. But later that morning there was a knock at his door in Old Jewry, where his new life had so abruptly begun seven years earlier. “James Somerset came to tell me,” he wrote, almost laconically, in his journal, “that judgment was today given in his favour,” and then, as if writing the history of some quite other notable person, “Thus ended G. Sharp’s long contest with Lord Mansfield, on the 22nd June, 1772.”18

  Perhaps Sharp ought to have been present in person at Westminster Hall, for then he might not have declared victory prematurely. For although it is quite true that, in the interests of a clear-cut moral and legal drama, the press and public opinion in London had all taken the freeing of Somerset to vindicate Serjeant Davy’s axiom that “as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground he becomes free,” that was not, in fact, what Mansfield had said; indeed, he had inflicted contortions on himself to avoid saying it. What he had said was that the power of a master to transport his slave against his will, out of England and to a place where he might be sold, had never been known or recognized under Common Law. And that, indeed, was the ground on which Somerset had been liberated.

  But aside from the exceptionally attentive, neither party—neither the West Indian sugar interest, which now launched a furious lobby for legislation to recognize their property rights when in England, nor the elated crusaders for negro freedom—took the measure of Mansfield’s fastidiousness. Both sides did, in fact, think he had made slavery illegal in England. Many owners continued, nonetheless, to act as if the Somerset judgment had never happened. Auctions and sales were advertised and held, not just in London but in the provincial centres of colonial trade. Runaways were still hunted down. In May 1773 a newspaper reported the case of “a black, servant to Capt. Ordington, who a few days ago ran away from his master and got himself christened with the intent to marry his fellow-servant, a white woman; being taken and sent on board the captain’s ship in the Thames, took an opportunity of shooting himself in the head.” The twenty-four-year-old Thomas Day, future moralizing novelist and utopian educator, currently (and ephemerally) a law student, saw the story, grieved and, together with his friend John Bicknell, was moved to write a poem entitled “The Dying Negro,” in effect a long suicide note in verse:

  Arm’d with thy sad last gift—the pow’r to die,

  Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy…

  Better in th’untimely grave to rot

  The world and all its cruelties forgot

  Than, dragg’d once more beyond the Western main,

  To groan beneath some dastard planter’s chain.

  What Day and Bicknell undoubtedly lacked in poetic talent they more than made up for with a flair for high-strung sentimental melodrama of the kind that struck directly at the post-Somerset generation’s hearts. “The Dying Negro” tracked the African back to the place of his original abduction, then to the horrors endured by plantation slaves who “Rouz’d by the lash, go forth their chearless way.” Borrowing heavily from Othello, Day then has the negro woo and win the love of the white servant girl (“Still, as I told the story of my woes / With heaving sighs thy lovely bosom rose”) only to move the story to its tragic denouement. Deceived in his hope that baptism would save him, the negro angrily confronts the God who abandoned him while seemingly preserving his captors, and before killing himself curses the slave-ship, prays for its wreck and asks that “while they spread their sinking arms to thee / then let their fainting hearts remember me!”

  Published in 1773, Bicknell and Day’s poem was an immediate popular sensation. Its second edition, printed in 1774, added an essay that harangued American hypocrisy—notwithstanding the fact that Day thought of himself, as did Sharp, as the friend of America against the coercion of Lord North’s government. “Such is the inconsistency of mankind,” Day exclaimed, that “the men whose clamours for liberty and independence are heard across the Atlantic Ocean” yet insist on owning slaves. There was at least one young American on whom the message was not lost: John Laurens, the son of a South Carolina businessman, rice planter and future president of the Continental Congress, Henry Laurens. Sent to London to study law at the Middle Temple, John had been placed in the Chancery Lane chambers of Charles Bicknell, younger brother of the co-author of “The Dying Negro.” Charles the lawyer may have been “the merest machine, the most barren in Conversation and the least calculated to improve of any Man I was connected with,” but John Bicknell was another story.19 The story young Laurens heard was that of Granville Sharp’s crusade. It changed his life, and five years later it almost changed America.

  Few Americans were so receptive to being sermonized, even (or especially) when they were declared friends to the negro. Benjamin Franklin, for one, in London during the Somerset trial, thought the British, not the Americans, were the hypocrites for indulging themselves so heavily in an orgy of self-congratulation on their “virtue, love of liberty and equity in setting free a single negro”20 while remaining deaf to the pleas of colonies such as Pennsylvania that were petitioning the government for an end to the importation of slaves. And the Quaker Anthony Benezet, whose letter congratulating Granville Sharp on his efforts arrived on the very morning of the Somerset judgment, hoped rather for a union of British and American friends of the negro, rather than a common cause soured by mutual recrimination. In fact Sharp would become so agonized by the British decision to wage war in America that he would resign his post at the Ordnance Office.

  But beyond the finger-pointing, beyond the mutual accusations of greater or lesser hypocrisy, beyond Lord Mansfield’s obstinately tortured efforts to duck the great issue, the liberation of James Somerset had done something startling to the society of the free and the enslaved that stretched across the Atlantic. It had made the idea of British freedom a germ of hope. On the evening of the 22nd of June 1772, blacks in London had no doubt at all that there was reason to celebrate, and they did so at a “frolick” for some two hundred people at a London tavern. And Charles Stewart, Somerset’s erstwhile owner, received confirmation—if he needed it—of the effect of Mansfield’s ruling when he heard from one of his remaining slaves that “he had rec’d a letter from his Uncle Sommerset acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their fre
edom & he was determined to leave me as soon as I had returned from London which he did without even speaking to me. I don’t find he has gone off with anything of mine. Only carried off all his own cloths which I don’t know that he had any right so to do. I believe that I shall not give myself any trouble to look after the ungrateful villain.”21