The Judgment That Freed One Man and Left Slavery Standing

In June 1772 Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench in London, ruled that James Somerset, an enslaved African, could not be forcibly taken out of England and sold in Jamaica. Somerset had been brought to England by his owner, Charles Stewart, had escaped, and had been recaptured and placed on a ship. Supporters, among them the campaigner Granville Sharp, obtained a writ of habeas corpus to test the lawfulness of his detention.

The judgment is popularly remembered as the end of slavery in England. Mansfield said nothing of the kind. He held that slavery was so odious that nothing short of an enacted law could support it, and that no such law existed in England. A master therefore could not use force to remove a person from the country.

The ruling was deliberately narrow. Mansfield is reported to have urged the parties to settle, and he decided only the question before him, which was whether the forced removal was lawful. He did not declare that all enslaved people in England were free, and he did not touch slavery in the colonies, where statutes supported it. The popular line about the air of England being too pure for a slave is not found in the judgment as reported.

Its influence was nevertheless large. Newspapers presented the case as a victory for liberty, abolitionists used it to build public feeling, and many enslaved people in England acted as if they were free. Parliament ended the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery across most of the empire in 1833. The case shows that a narrow technical holding can change what a society believes to be lawful far beyond the facts decided.

The case shows that a narrow technical holding can change what a society believes to be lawful far beyond the facts decided.

Whether Mansfield foresaw this, or hoped the law would be forced to say more than he was willing to say himself, historians have long debated.