Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 10: The Somerset (Mansfield) Decision of 1772 and the American Revolution

One of the arguments used to support the notion that preserving slavery was a key motivation for the American Revolution has to do with the 1772 decision by William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield, in the case of Somerset vs. Stuart in Britain’s highest count, the King’s Court Bench. It “decided only that an escaping slave [James Somerset] could not be forcibly removed from England for retributive punishment in a colony.”¹

Barbara Alice Mann² makes a case for the large, shocking effect the ruling had on slaveowners in the American Colonies. She describes part of Mansfield’s decision this way:

According to Lofft, Mansfield declared, “The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law.” No such English law authorizing slavery existed, however. Following instead the precedents of Rushworth, Holt, and Sharp, Lofft’s Mansfield found that slavery was not “allowed or approved by the law of England” but was “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it.” Therefore, Mansfield concluded, the “black must be discharged.”

This is an illustration of the effect that the liberal, natural-law approach in English political philosophy and the legal system could have in expanding rights, in this case the right to freedom of escaped slaves. That same tradition was also that of British colonies in North America.

But as Karl Llwellyn noted in the summary quoted above, the decision did not declare that chattel slavery was banned forever and everywhere in the British Empire. It stated that there was no law in force in England and Wales at that time that allowed slavery. And, as Mann explains, that ruling was itself based on a British court decision from eight decades earlier in 1692.

George Van Cleve even observes, "The English courts may have begun to grapple with the problem of conflict of laws on slavery as early as the 1560s in Cartwright’s Case, which is thought to have involved a slave brought to England from Russia."³ But he also argues:

The most striking thing about Mansfield’s decision in Somerset is that it decisively rejected this eighteenth-century drive for uniform “imperial” treatment of slave property by creating a new means to defend the legal diversity between England and the colonies where slavery was concerned.

In other words, it was quite clear that the Somerset decision did not apply to the status of slavery in the entire British Empire of the time, only to England and Wales. But that doesn’t mean it had no relevance to slavery in the colonies. There was the example that Mansfield set in his reasoning about natural law rights. “In Somerset, Mansfield took limited but decisive steps in the progress toward human freedom in England and its colonies,” he writes.

And as Van Cleve also notes, it did make ownership rights in human property more uncertain for British citizens: “It was this English need for legal predictability that largely accounted for the eighteenth-century effort to create a uniform imperial legal regime governing slavery.” That “uniform” status being part of what the Somerset decision explicitly rejected.

Mann writes of the immediate reaction in the American Colonies:

Abolitionists in the colonial north expressed disgust that Mansfield had not gone further with his order. Benjamin Franklin waxed snide, noting the “hypocrisy” of England. On the one hand, it continued the “detestable commerce” by legally “promoting the Guinea trade” (i.e., African slavery) while on the other hand, it “piqued itself on its virtue, its love of liberty, and the equity of its courts, in setting free a single negro.” For his part, the editor of the North American Review, Edward Everett dismissed Mansfield’s decision as a half-measure. Mocking Rushworth’s 1637 pronouncement that “the air of England” was “too pure for a slave,” Everett observed that England had no apparent trouble “resorting to the labor of slaves” when it came to crops like tobacco and cotton that could not be grown in Norfolk, England (as opposed, say, to Norfolk, Virginia).

On the pro-slavery side, planters were downright volcanic in their reproaches. Of the 24 surviving colonial newspapers, 22 reproduced arguments in the case at length as it went along, the clear implication being that it would impact slavery in the colonies. In 1774, a pamphlet of “Fugitive Thoughts” appeared, purportedly by “A Black Settler” in South Carolina, with both puns (fugitive and black setter [sic]) conjuring up southern Slaveholder fears of slave escapes. Declaring that Mansfield would “complete the Ruin of many American Provinces,” by engendering a “general Manumission of Negroes,” Mansfield was derided as “badly calculated for the Meridian” of the Americas (capitalizations and italics in the original). [my emphasis in bold]

Slaveowners knew their control of their human property was in some way inherently precarious, so it’s not surprising that in the 1770s they would react with “volcanic” rhetoric. Southern slaveowners’ fondness for such rhetoric would only increase in the coming decades, fueling a self-destructive tendency to mistake bluster for good judgment.

It should also not be surprising that some of them reacted with “paranoia,” another chronic tendency of the owners of other human beings:

The depth of slaveholders’ paranoia can be seen in a story in the South Caroline Gazette. On September 15, 1772, the Gazette ominously reported that “two hundred blacks and their ladies” banqueted in London to celebrate the liberation of the slaves.44 In response to such a thought, horrifying to planters, the pro-slavery polemicist Edward Long wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of the Mansfield Decision. Following his learned arguments from history and law, Long’s pearl-clutching clincher was to describe the West Indies as so “destructive to Europeans in those climates,” that “Negroes” from “Guiney” were an “absolute necessity.” The “utter inaptitude” of Europeans to withstand all that heat meant that they either had to continue African slavery or “abandon” their plantations, an unimaginable option.

American slaves were as aware of the Mansfield decision as were the slaveholders, with slaves initiating their escapes to British soil as soon as Mansfield’s decision hit the papers. One “servant” named Dublin told his fellow slaves that his “Uncle Sommerset” had written to let him know that “Lord Mansfield had given them their freedom.” Dublin took his clothes and left his sometime master sputtering in ire at his audacity. Following the decision, escaped slaves inundated London, which soon saw 15,000 “starving and freezing exslaves” who had fled “plantations in the Americas.”

But blustering propaganda is just that. The Somerset decision hadn’t freed a single slave physically in the American colonies. And slaves escaping did not begin with that British court decision, either. When the escaped slave Crispus Attucks died leading armed rebels against British troops in what became known as the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Somerset decision hadn’t even been handed down yet. Slaves generally prefer not to be slaves.

Then, in the final paragraph, Mann makes what in the context of her essay looks like a leap of faith to make the American Revolution about preserving slavery:

In the end, fecit caelum ruinam; Mansfield did make the heavens fall, for immediately as his ruling hit American shores, editors, pamphleteers, abolitionists, and slaveholders ran mad, largely denouncing his decision. Within two years of his decision, the American colonies had declared their Independence from Great Britain; within three years of his decision, the battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought; and within four years of his decision, pitched warfare had erupted between the Revolutionaries and the Crown. By the end of 1782, a mere decade later, the colonies had broken free of England, retaining their “peculiar institution” of slavery for another 80-odd years.

Sean Wilentz addresses the claim of Nikole Hannah-Jones in the 1619 Project about supposed rising British antislavery threats in the 1770s. She doesn’t specifically blame that supposed activity on the Somerset decision there. But Wilentz’ point gets to the argument that a dread of British antislavery ideas being imposed on the American Colonies was in itself a major motive for the American Revolution:

“In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade,” Hannah-Jones continued. But the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired, as [Christopher Leslie] Brown demonstrates in great detail, by American antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and ’70s. There were no “growing calls” in London to abolish the trade as early as 1776.

“This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote. But the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials. The colonials’ motives were not always humanitarian: Virginia, for example, had more enslaved black people than it needed to sustain its economy and saw the further importation of Africans as a threat to social order. But the Americans who attempted to end the trade did not believe that they were committing economic suicide.⁴ [my emphasis]

And he notes of the effects of Somerset:

[A]part from the activity of the pioneering abolitionist Granville Sharp, Britain was hardly conflicted at all in 1776 over its involvement in the slave system. Sharp played a key role in securing the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart ruling, which declared that chattel slavery was not recognized in English common law. That ruling did little, however, to reverse Britain’s devotion to human bondage, which lay almost entirely in its colonial slavery and its heavy involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Nor did it generate a movement inside Britain in opposition to either slavery or the slave trade. [my emphasis]

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1756-1783)

1. Llewellyn, Karl Nickerson (2023): William Murray, 1st earl of Mansfield: English jurist. Britannica Online 03/16/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Murray-1st-Earl-of-Mansfield#ref206621> (Accessed: 2023-27-03).

2. Mann, Barbara Alice (2022): Though the Heavens Should Fall: The Mansfield Decision (1772) In: Johansen, Bruce & Akande, Adebowale, Get Your Knee Off Our Necks: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter, 313-325. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

3. Van Cleve, Goerg (2006): Mansfield’s Decision: Toward Human Freedom. Law and History Review 24:3, 666. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248000000845> (Accessed: 2023-18-03).

4. Wilentz, Sean (2020): A Matter of Facts. The Atlantic 01/22/2020. <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/> (Accessed: 2023-11-03).