Somerset v Stewart (1772): Lord Mansfield's Slavery Ruling

Somerset v Stewart was a landmark case heard in the Court of King’s Bench in London, decided by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, on 22 June 1772. It freed James Somerset, an enslaved African man whose owner had tried to ship him to Jamaica for sale. The ruling was narrower than legend suggests, but it became a turning point in the British debate about slavery and was closely watched in the American colonies.

Background: slavery in 18th-century England

By the 1770s several thousand Black people lived in Britain, many of them brought by planters, officials and ship captains returning from the Caribbean and North America. Contemporary estimates of 10,000 to 15,000 were often repeated, though historians treat them with caution. Some were free servants or sailors; others were held as slaves, bought and sold in London and the ports.

English law had never clearly settled whether slavery could exist in England. In 1729 the Attorney General and Solicitor General, Philip Yorke and Charles Talbot, gave an opinion that baptism did not free a slave and that a master could compel an enslaved person to return to the colonies. Planters relied on this opinion for decades. Against it stood a growing number of habeas corpus cases, in which courts were asked to free people held against their will.

The most persistent challenger was Granville Sharp, a civil servant and self-taught legal scholar. After helping an injured young man named Jonathan Strong in 1765, Sharp began bringing cases on behalf of Black people threatened with removal, and in 1769 published a pamphlet arguing that slavery had no basis in English law.

James Somerset and Charles Stewart

James Somerset (sometimes spelled Sommersett) was born in West Africa and bought in Virginia in 1749 by Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant who later became a senior customs official in Boston. Stewart brought Somerset to England in 1769. In February 1771 Somerset was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, and his godparents later played a key part in his case.

On 1 October 1771 Somerset left Stewart’s service and did not return. He was seized on 26 November 1771 and put aboard the Ann and Mary, a ship commanded by John Knowles and bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold. His godparents, Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade and John Marlow, applied to Lord Mansfield for a writ of habeas corpus, which ordered the captain to bring Somerset before the court and explain why he was being held.

The hearings

The case was argued over several sessions between February and May 1772. Somerset’s counsel, assembled with Sharp’s help, included William Davy, John Glynn, James Mansfield, John Alleyne and Francis Hargrave, a young barrister whose argument was later printed and widely read. They argued that English law did not recognise slavery, that villeinage (medieval serfdom) had died out, and that no man could be sent abroad against his will.

Stewart’s side was represented by John Dunning and James Wallace, and was reportedly backed financially by West India planters and merchants, who wanted a clear ruling that their property rights survived in England. They warned that freeing enslaved people in England could affect thousands of individuals and large sums of money.

Mansfield, a cautious judge, repeatedly urged the parties to settle, and suggested that Parliament might be the proper place to decide the question. Neither side withdrew, and he was obliged to give judgment.

What Lord Mansfield decided

Mansfield delivered his judgment on 22 June 1772. The surviving report, compiled by Capel Lofft, records his view that slavery was “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law”, meaning a specific statute. Since no Act of Parliament authorised a master to seize a servant and send him abroad, the cause returned to the writ was insufficient. Somerset was therefore discharged.

The decision answered a limited question. It did not declare slavery illegal in England, did not free other enslaved people in Britain, and said nothing about slavery in the colonies, which rested on colonial statutes. In a later case, R v Inhabitants of Thames Ditton (1785), Mansfield himself said the ruling went no further than establishing that a master could not compel a slave to leave the country.

Reactions in Britain and America

Many people read far more into the judgment. Black Londoners reportedly celebrated the result, and newspapers often reported it as meaning that any slave who set foot in England became free. In practice the ruling made forcible removal risky and slavery difficult to enforce, and it encouraged enslaved servants to leave their masters. Some masters, however, continued to treat Black servants as property for years afterwards.

In the American colonies the case was reported in newspapers from Virginia to Massachusetts during 1772. Some enslaved people tried to reach England in the hope of freedom, while slaveholders worried about its implications. Historians debate how far such fears influenced Southern attitudes in the run-up to the Declaration of Independence. The fugitive slave clause written into the United States Constitution in 1787, which required the return of people who escaped across state lines, addressed a problem that the Somerset principle had highlighted.

Scotland, with its own legal system, reached a broader conclusion in Knight v Wedderburn (1778), when the Court of Session ruled that Scots law did not recognise slavery at all.

Myths and facts

The most famous myth is that Mansfield declared that the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe. The phrase was used by counsel in argument, drawing on a saying attributed to a 16th-century case, and was never part of the judgment.

Another common belief is that the case abolished slavery in Britain. It did not; there was no statute ending slavery in England until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which addressed the colonies. Interest in Mansfield’s own views has also been fed by the presence in his household of his great-niece Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman and a naval officer, though there is no evidence she influenced the case.

Legacy

The Somerset case gave Granville Sharp and his allies a public victory and a legal principle to build on. Fifteen years later Sharp helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Mansfield would again preside over a slavery case in 1783, the insurance dispute arising from the Zong massacre.

Hargrave’s printed argument and Lofft’s report circulated widely and were cited by lawyers and abolitionists in Britain and the United States for generations. The case is still taught as a classic example of how a court can use a narrow question, here the power to remove a person from the country, to make a principle of wide moral significance.

Timeline

• 1749: Charles Stewart buys James Somerset in Virginia.
• 1769: Stewart brings Somerset to England.
• 1771, February: Somerset is baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, in London.
• 1771, 1 October: Somerset leaves Stewart’s service.
• 1771, 26 November: He is seized and confined aboard the Ann and Mary, bound for Jamaica.
• 1771, December: Lord Mansfield grants a writ of habeas corpus.
• 1772, February–May: The case is argued before the Court of King’s Bench.
• 1772, 22 June: Mansfield gives judgment and Somerset is discharged.
• 1778: Knight v Wedderburn reaches a broader result in Scotland.

Why it matters

Somerset v Stewart showed that English courts would not lend their power to the forcible removal of an enslaved person, and it turned a single man’s escape into a national argument about liberty. Its real legal effect was modest, but its symbolic effect on abolitionists in Britain and America was large and lasting.