Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. According to one reported version of the case, Lord Mansfield decided that:
Slavery had never been authorised by statute within England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield found it also to be unsupported within England by the common law, although he made no comment on the position in the overseas territories of the British Empire. The case was closely followed throughout the Empire, particularly in the thirteen American colonies. Scholars have disagreed over precisely what legal precedent the case set.
Facts
James Somerset, an enslaved African, was purchased by Charles Stewart (or Steuart), a customs officer when he was in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, a British crown colony in North America.
Stewart brought Somerset with him when he returned to England in 1769, but in October 1771 Somerset escaped. After he was recaptured in November, Stewart had him imprisoned on the ship Ann and Mary (under Captain John Knowles), bound for the British colony of Jamaica. He directed that Somerset be sold to a plantation for labour. Somerset's three godparents from his baptism as a Christian in England—John Marlow, Thomas Walkin and Elizabeth Cade—made an application on 3 December before the Court of King's Bench for a writ of habeas corpus. Captain Knowles on 9 December produced Somerset before the Court of King's Bench, which had to determine whether his imprisonment was lawful.
The Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Lord Mansfield, ordered a hearing for 21 January; in the meantime he set the prisoner free on recognisance. Somerset's counsel's request to prepare arguments was granted, and so it was not until 7 February 1772 that the case was heard. In the meantime, the case had attracted a great deal of attention in the press and members of the public donated money to support the lawyers for both sides of the argument.
Granville Sharp, an abolitionist layman who continually sought test cases against the legal justifications for slavery, was Somerset's real backer. When the case was heard, five advocates appeared for Somerset, speaking at three hearings between February and May. These lawyers included Francis Hargrave, a young lawyer who made his reputation with this, his first case; James Mansfield; Serjeant-at-law William Davy; Serjeant-at-law John Glynn; John Alleyne; and the noted Irish lawyer and orator John Philpot Curran, whose lines in defence of Somerset were often quoted by American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapter 37.
Somerset's advocates argued that while colonial laws might permit slavery, neither the common law of England nor any statutory law made by Parliament recognised the existence of slavery, and that slavery in England was therefore unlawful. They also argued that English contract law did not allow for any person to enslave himself, nor could any contract be binding without the person's consent. The arguments focused on legal details rather than any humanitarian principles. When the two lawyers for Charles Stewart put their case, they argued that property was paramount and that it would be dangerous to free all the black people in England (who, according to Lord Mansfield's later judgment in the case, numbered 14,000 or 15,000).
Judgment
After hearing oral arguments, Lord Mansfield proposed that Stewart could avoid the potentially far-reaching effects on slave-owners' profits if he were to allow Somerset to go free and not to insist on the court issuing a final judgment. Otherwise, Mansfield said that would give judgment, and "let justice be done whatever the consequence":
Stewart opted to continue with the case, and Mansfield retired to make his decision, reserving judgment for over a month. He gave his judgment on 22 June 1772. (This version is transcribed from a letter to the General Evening Post, reporting on the trial. It has modern paragraphing.)
Significance
After the decision
Somerset was freed and his supporters, who included black and white Londoners, celebrated. Whilst argument by counsel may have been based primarily on legal technicalities, Lord Mansfield appeared to believe that a great moral question had been posed and he deliberately avoided answering that question in full, because of its profound political and economic consequences.