by Simon Schama
This is what Lisle planned for Jonathan Strong. Even before he caught up with Strong, Lisle had already traded him to a Jamaican planter, James Kerr. In a fit of uncharacteristic candour, Lisle may have admitted that Strong was perhaps not in prime condition, and accepted £30 for him in a seller’s market in which “stout Negroes” fetched, on average, at least £50. Or perhaps Lisle was himself needy for funds, since he also accepted Kerr’s condition that the money would not be handed over before the black in question was safely aboard a ship.
It remained, of course, for Lisle to secure his property. Keeping out of sight, he had followed Strong to a public house. Two days after first seeing him in the street attending on Mrs Brown, Lisle hired two Lord Mayor’s officers to accost him in the pub, informing him only that a certain gentleman wished to speak with him. Either over-complaisant from his two years of liberty, or perhaps easily intimidated, Jonathan Strong went with the men, only to be startled by the appearance of his old persecutor. All pretence at politeness dropped, Strong was manhandled to the prison of Poultry Compter in Giltspur Street in Cheap, where, among felons and vagrants picked up by the sheriff’s men, he could be detained before being conveyed as a recovered chattel to the ship. But this was not the end of the story. Two years of being treated like a human being had given Jonathan Strong a modest degree of fighting self-respect and, more decisively, a modest degree of education. The fate of blacks in Britain—and America—hung on this one puny but improbable fact: that lame, half-blind Jonathan Strong could read and write. He sent out a series of notes, first to Brown, the apothecary, signalling his predicament. Brown promptly dispatched a servant who, however, was refused admission or any kind of communication with Jonathan Strong.
When Brown himself arrived at Poultry Compter he was so browbeaten by Lisle, ranting that he had been robbed of his goods and waving a bill of sale, that the apothecary retreated lest he be arrested himself for theft as Lisle threatened. In extremis, Jonathan Strong sent a second note, this one to his old saviour, Granville Sharp. But Sharp’s head was full of more pressing matters—a scheme to introduce the Anglican Church into the kingdom of Prussia, for example; the preparation of his Short Introduction to Musick…; a second brief treatise called “On the Pronunciation of the English Tongue”—and the significance of the name Strong momentarily escaped him. It was not long, though, before it came back with guilty urgency. It was Sharp’s turn now to send a messenger to the prison, and when no reply was received by return he went to see Strong for himself. There, in the ante-rooms and bare cells of Poultry Compter, with the creak of bare wood and iron performing sporadically gloomy music, he recalled everything. For the first time in his life, in matters that were not ecclesiastical nor military nor musical, Granville Sharp acted, insisting more from instinct than authority, that since the black had committed no offence he could not possibly be legally detained. He had enough of the air of a learned gentleman to persuade the officers that, should they make the mistake of releasing Strong to a third party before his case had been heard by the Lord Mayor, they would risk their own incrimination.
Against the odds, Jonathan Strong got his hearing. Sir Robert Kite, like most lord mayors of the 1760s and 1770s, could not possibly have held that office without the favour of the patrician merchants of the sugar interest. Yet whilst he would have not recognized himself in any way as a particular friend to blacks, the mayor was bound by an ingrained respect for due process. And the City of London was still a small enough community for the mayor to know all about the brothers Sharp. James, after all, sat in the City’s assembly, the Common Council. So when Granville came to see Sir Robert and recited the facts of the case he received a fair and even sympathetic reception. A hearing was ordered, which was convened on the 18th of September at the Mansion House and attended by the Sharps, Laird, the captain of the ship in which Strong was to be conveyed, and Macbean, the lawyer for the new owner, James Kerr. As the arguments between Sharp and Macbean turned furious, Strong, who was not at all convinced of a happy outcome, became distraught, weeping and shaking with fear. After listening to both sides Sir Robert Kite made up his mind, saying, as Sharp reported in his casebook, that “the lad had not stolen anything and was not guilty of any offence and was therefore at liberty to go away.”5 Evidently Captain Laird was not listening, since after the mayor had withdrawn he grabbed Strong, claiming him physically as the property of Mr Kerr. The action was so brutally sudden and so disconcerting that for a moment it threatened to succeed—even Granville Sharp was dumbfounded into inaction. But the City coroner, Thomas Beech, still present in the room, stepped quickly towards Sharp and whispered urgently to him, “Charge him!” Novice at the law though he was, Sharp responded: “Sir!” he shouted at Captain Laird in the clear voice that was to characterize the new Granville Sharp. “I charge you with assault.”6
For the moment it was enough. The slaver captain paused and Strong, still weeping, shook off Laird’s grip. A few days later later Lisle, by no means reconciled to the decision, issued a writ against Granville Sharp and his older brother James for theft of his slave. But the law seemed less friendly to Lisle’s interest than he had assumed. On an afternoon when he knew the Sharps to be at Mincing Lane he arrived at the house, was announced and admitted, whereupon he issued a personal challenge to Granville for “Gentlemanlike satisfaction because I had procured the liberty of his slave Jonathan Strong. I told him that as he had studied law so many years he should want no satisfaction that the law should give him.”7
The words hit their mark. Strong’s body may have still carried the marks of his beatings by Lisle, but, more crushingly, Lisle the lawyer had been beaten by the law. However, Greeny Sharp, as he was known to his brothers and sisters, was no longer so green in the ways of the courts as to dispense with the services of lawyers in case Lisle and Kerr should press their suit. Through the connections of his older brothers he retained the City recorder, Sir James Eyre, to advise him. Granville’s boldness in rescuing Jonathan Strong from the clutches of Lisle had been coloured by the instinctive certainty that neither Christian propriety nor the majesty of English Common Law could possibly countenance the reduction of a person to a property. Imagine his shock and despondency, then, when Sir James brought him the opinion of the former Lord Chancellor Yorke and Solicitor-General Talbot in 1729, which judged otherwise: that persons brought to England from places where they had been slaves remained in that state of bondage, notwithstanding their baptism. When Yorke confirmed the opinion in 1749, it became the guiding rule by which owners seeking the recovery of their human property were usually upheld in their claims. Although there was now a new Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, before whom most of these cases were heard, was known to accept Yorke-Talbot. Sharp was advised that his fancy that Common Law could not accommodate slaveholding in England was merely sentimental.
This was the view not just of Sharp’s lawyer, but of many others whose opinion he sought in 1767 and 1768, virtually all of whom wrote off his chances of successfully defending himself against the impending lawsuit for theft. But for all the weight of their authority, Sharp remained unconvinced. Neither God nor English antiquity (which for him amounted to much the same) could possibly permit such abomination in His Chosen Land. So he resolved to make himself his own authority on the legal history of slaves in Britain: “Thus forsaken by my professional defenders I was compelled through the want of a regular legal assistance to make a hopeless attempt at self-defence, though I was totally un-acquainted either with the practice of the law or the foundations of it, having never opened a law book (except the Bible) in my life until this time.”8 A page was turned, and for the lives of blacks in Britain and across the broad ocean nothing would be the same.
There had not been much to suggest that of the fourteen children of Archdeacon Thomas Sharp it would be Granville who would become famous as the apostle of freedom. True, he had been remarkable for his prodigious powers of concentration. As
a child, he had sat in an apple tree to read the entirety of Shakespeare. But financial assistance from the family came in direct proportion to one’s seniority in it. Even had Granville been brilliant (which he wasn’t), the fact of his being born twelfth precluded much in the way of archdecanal help. After acquiring rudimentary learning at Durham Grammar School and a little more from a tutor, he had been apprenticed, at the age of fifteen, to a Quaker linen draper in London; then, after the Quaker’s passing, to a Presbyterian and finally to a Roman Catholic, all in the same line of trade. This parade of sects passing before the young and insatiably curious Greeny gave him a compressed but valuable course in comparative theology, which he turned to good use when a Jewish fellow apprentice, seeing that Sharp had no Hebrew, was bold enough to ridicule his pretensions to biblical exegesis. Stung, Granville immediately set about mastering the ancient language, succeeding so well that he not only confounded his Jewish disputant but scored a knock-out by publishing, at sixteen, a (presumably short) essay demolishing the opinion of Rabbi Elias on the derivation and usage of the Hebrew consonant “Vav.”
As his familiarity with the Talmud waxed, Sharp’s interest in cambric and calico waned. After the death of his father in 1757, when Granville was twenty-two, his older brothers judged that the time had come to see if he had the makings of a merchant-manufacturer. A few months of unhappy incompetence gave them their answer: Granville was not destined to do for textiles what James was doing for ironwares. So the studded doors of the Ordnance Department in the Tower were opened to him, where, for six hours a day, during a time when Britain was fighting a war against the French on three continents, he could compile inventories and write and dispatch letters to junior officers regarding boot blacking and wig powder, even as his mind drifted to the doings of Hezekiah and the sayings of Habakkuk. In the evenings there were, as always, the family assemblies at Mincing Lane.
The Sharp establishment in Mincing Lane was a little academy, populated by music-lovers who happened also to be men and women of substance, learning and budding renown. So for all Granville’s inexperience in the law, guidance on where to begin his researches would not have been missing. He was, himself, a natural antiquarian, in thrall not just to the chronicles of Omri and Bashan but, like many of his generation in Hanoverian England, to the Anglo-Saxon antiquarianism that was in romantic vogue. “Rule Britannia” had originally been written for The Masque of Alfred, performed in front of the Prince of Wales, and the cult of King Alfred as the fount of everything imperial and yet free had reached its eighteenth-century apogee. Granville Sharp believed that among other blessings brought to ancient England was the institution of Frankpledge, which, to his dying day he believed to be the most perfect, popular yet responsible form of government ever devised. Frankpledge was built on the primary unit of ten households, the “tithing,” which then combined in a multiple of ten into a “hundred.” Each tithing elected a tithingman, and ten tithingmen together chose a hundredor. That Sharp also believed Frankpledge to have been the form of government practised by the biblical Israelites (on the recommendation of Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses) and thus sanctioned directly by the Almighty did not, of course, do anything to compromise its appeal.
It was well known that Frankpledge and Anglo-Saxon liberty had been brutally damaged by the Norman Conquest, which had introduced alien forms of despotism and servitude into old free England. Yet its spirit, Sharp thought, had not been altogether extinguished; had lived on, indeed, in the immemorial revulsion against true slavery in the island kingdom. Villeinage—bonded labour in the fields—with the villeins denied the freedom to depart from the manor or even marry without the lord’s consent, there had certainly been; although it was long extinct, as Sharp found. But even villeins had never been, so far as he could see from his plunge into the legal histories, negotiable chattels, transferable through sale. In 1547, in the reign of Edward VI, a law had been passed for the curbing of vagabondage, and this did provide for the enslavement of repeat offenders; but such was its alien character that it had been repealed two years later. In the reign of Elizabeth (in which, after all, the African slave trade had been promoted and aggressively practised by sea captains such as John Hawkins), Sharp nonetheless found what he wanted. In 1569, according to Rushworth’s Historical Collections, a certain Captain Cartwright had brought a Russian serf-slave to England and, when he had “scourged” the slave without cause and been brought to book for it, had been told by the justice ruling on the case “that England was too pure an air for Slaves to breathe.” The precedent conformed exactly to Sharp’s own convictions about British freedom: that all subjects in the land, irrespective of rank, were equally subject to the king’s laws and equally entitled to his protection.
What was more, notwithstanding Yorke-Talbot (which, Sharp discovered, had not been a ruling given on a court case at all, but merely an informal opinion voiced after dinner at Lincoln’s Inn when the gentlemen were at their ease with pipes and wine), there was evidently an alternative legal history that did seem to assert the irreconcilability of slavery with the custom and practice of English Common Law. In 1679, during the reign of Charles II, for example, a law enacted for “the better securing of the Liberty of the Subject” had plainly stated that property in a black could only be upheld if proprietors could prove that the slave “is neither man, woman nor child.” The reduction of a man to a beast, it was further said, was “unnatural and unjust.” Faithful to that tradition, in 1706 Lord Chief Justice Holt had ruled that “as soon as a Negro comes into England he becomes free,” and as recently as 1762 the Lord Chancellor Henley, had invoked (in Shanley versus Harvey) the Cartwright case in dismissing a claim to a negro as an item of property in a contested inheritance. As if to clinch matters, the most authoritative word on English Common Law, the Commentaries of William Blackstone, the Vinerian Professor at Oxford, published in 1765, stated quite categorically that “the spirit of liberty is so deeply implicated in our constitution and rooted even in our very soil that a slave or negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws and in regard to all natural rights becomes eo instanti [from that moment] a freeman.”
Sharp, then, had every reason to assume that Blackstone, both in print and in person, could be recruited to what he was already calling the Great Cause and wrote a personal letter seeking his support. To his dismay, Blackstone was anything but supportive, deferring to Yorke-Talbot’s opinion. Granville Sharp, alas, had bought the first edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, failing to notice that the second and third editions altogether omitted anything that could be construed as jeopardizing the rights of masters who happened to bring their slaves to England. In an elaborately courteous reply in 1769 Blackstone was careful to insist (as he had in the later editions of his published work) that he was not judging the propriety or even legitimacy of a master’s right to enslave; only that, if that right had been exercised in some other place, it could not be set aside by the mere fact of both master and slave arriving in England. The long-term submission of the unfree, he said, was in no qualitative sense different from the submission apprentices owed to their masters and that was of course binding wherever their place of residence.
This change of mind was especially discouraging to Sharp given the fact that Blackstone was the protégé of the man who, as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, represented the highest jurisdiction of Common Law: William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield. Mansfield had been decisive in procuring for Blackstone the Vinerian Chair at Oxford when it seemed that the younger man would advance no further in the profession. Murray, born in Perthshire, but educated in the entirely English institutions of Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, was the living embodiment of Scottish pragmatism. Harassed by the Scotophobic press as a secret Jacobite sympathizer, he decided to prosecute its supporters (including members of his own clan) with such unimpeachable ardour that he was elevated, while a sitting Member of Parliament, first to Solicitor-General, then, in sh
ort order, to Attorney-General. A dependable client of the parliamentary connection of the Duke of Newcastle, “Silver-Tongue Murray,” with his nimble wits and easy-going eloquence, the close friend of Pope, Reynolds, Dr Johnson and his fellow Scot, James Boswell, was, in every sense that the word could convey, judicious. In the 1760s, which had begun with a fresh outbreak of Scotophobia when George III had made his favourite and tutor, the Marquis of Bute, first minister, Mansfield survived by an adroit combination of political pragmatism, social geniality and judicial intelligence. In court, typical of his affected nonchalance, Mansfield would interrupt laboured arguments with his own pithy summation of the essential issue at dispute and, having delivered the insight, continue to preside over the proceedings with his nose stuck in a gazette. Yet these antics aroused admiration rather than outrage. The full measure of his success was that it seemed to most people uncontroversial that it was a Scot who, as Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, was the high guardian of English Common Law.
The silver tongue was, then, at all times governed by a sensible wit. So what sense could it possibly make to alienate the rich and powerful sugar interest by determining, at the bidding of some well-meaning crank and double-flute virtuoso—no more than a clerk really—that the countless black body servants, footmen, porters, musicians and so forth were as other men and women in the kingdom? Did not Mansfield himself own a property in Virginia, where, doubtless, the negroes were treated with more tenderness than if left to their own devices in the brutish wilds of Africa? Why, the distress and ruin of acting upon sentiment was not to be thought of. There were, Mansfield had been told, as many as fifteen thousand bonded blacks in England alone, which would put the economic damage, should they be emancipated all at once, at some £700,000 to £800,000. And it was with these concerns weighing on his mind that Mansfield, in all likelihood, had prevailed upon William Blackstone to excise the embarrassing passages concerning the illegitimacy of slaveholding under Common Law from the later editions of his Commentaries.
