The Virginia Gazette had six stories, starting on May 7, with reports of several preliminary hearings. On November 12, 1772, it also published a critique of the decision that had been circulated in England.2 This critique, signed “A West Indian Planter,” marshaled the arguments against the release of Somerset which had been submitted in Somerset’s case. The critique argued that Somerset’s case had been wrongly decided and would have disastrous consequences.
The South Carolina Gazette had one major report on August 13. Another on September 15 reported “the substance of Lord Mansfield’s speech on the Negro cause,” under a dateline of June 24. The report included the following:
The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by courts of justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political….And in a case so odious as the condition of slaves must be taken strictly, the power claimed by this return was never in use here; no master was ever allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he had deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatever; we cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom, therefore the man must be discharged.3
The next week, the Gazette reported on the party in London attended by two hundred “blacks and their ladies” that celebrated the decision.4
These publications warned southern slave holders that if the Somerset decision became the law in the colonies, their society would be at risk. These risks included greater supervision of colonial action, perhaps taxation of slavery that had now been declared “so odious” that it could not exist in England, and direct parliamentary control of colonial slavery.
Decisions about slavery could be made by Parliament, or the courts, or perhaps even the king, without consultation with the colonists themselves. If Britain hesitated to free slaves in the colonies because of the incomes the slaves produced, the government still might impose taxes on the sale or purchase of slaves and control the export of products they produced, providing needed revenues for the mother country’s treasury.
This was a serious worry. The Somerset decision reached the colonies in the second year of a thaw in the strained relations with Britain stemming from the taxation issues of the 1760s. Every colony had been established by a document from the king that authorized a colonial legislature to enact laws for the colony so long as they were “not repugnant to the laws of England.”5 Thus the British government retained a kind of superintending power over the colony’s behavior. This was well known in the colonies.6 This power was exercised by the Privy Council, an organization of senior advisors to the crown. The Privy Council acted through its Board of Trade and Plantations. The power to invalidate colonial legislation had been exercised against three colonial acts in the years immediately preceding 1772 when the Somerset case was decided.7 By that year, colonial suspicions that Britain was trying to “milk” the colonies of their hard earned incomes by taxation had been exacerbated by British actions beginning in 1763, the year in which the French and Indian war ended.
The British promptly established a “proclamation line” to prevent colonials from seeking to settle west of the Allegheny mountains for fear of inciting further conflict with Native Americans. In 1765, the British imposed the Stamp Act, requiring the colonists to buy stamps that taxed common paper goods like playing cards and writing paper, as well as deeds, wills, and lawsuits. The British imposed the tax assuming that the colonists would be grateful for the British efforts during the French and Indian war. They were not. Every level of society was directly affected by this tax. The colonial reaction against “taxation without representation” was spearheaded by Massachusetts; it was spontaneous among the colonies and it was effective. In every colony people refused to use stamps and reduced their purchase of British goods.
Colonial lawyers like John Adams in Boston and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia pressed the view that the colonists should not be taxed because they were not represented in Parliament. Samuel Adams, more a man of the streets and back rooms than his cousin John, occasionally invoked mob action to “encourage” merchants to boycott British goods. The same scenes were played out from Boston to Virginia. Those individuals who had prepared to sell the stamps were vigorously persuaded to withdraw.
The fury of the people caught at least two of the founding fathers off guard: Benjamin Franklin, then in London, and Richard Henry Lee in Virginia, one of Jefferson’s aspiring political companions. Franklin had sought the position of stamp commissioner for a friend, whose house was nearly destroyed by a mob in Philadelphia that also had threatened Franklin’s wife and home.8 In Virginia, Lee had initially applied for the commissioner’s job before he felt the temper of the community and withdrew.9 The temper was furious. A mob of property owners and merchants coerced George Mercer to resign as stamp distributor for Virginia and threatened to tar and feather a ship owner who publicly stated he would obey the Stamp Act.10 In Boston, Governor Hutchinson’s house was torn down by an angry mob, leading to the stationing of British troops there.11
Under pressure from British merchants who lost business because of the boycott, Parliament repealed the taxes in 1766. At the same time it adopted the Declaratory Act asserting that Parliament had authority to govern the colonies, “in all cases whatsoever.”12 Most of the colonists did not worry about the abstract claim that Parliament had unlimited power over them. The claim appeared to be merely a facesaving device to cover up the failure of the Stamp Act. The boycott was abandoned, the mobs went home, and life in the colonies and among the merchants and the citizens returned to normal, except that the seeds of distrust of Britain had been planted in the colonists. They would sprout in 1767 when the British tried once again to tax the colonies with taxes devised by British chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend. These were taxes on paper, glass, paint, and tea imported into the colonies.13 These “indirect” taxes aroused another storm of protest and boycott, once more spearheaded by Massachusetts. The state assembly issued a “circular letter” to all the colonies to harmonize the protests against the tax. London overreacted, and required governors to dissolve or refuse to call colonial assemblies unless they rejected the Massachusetts letter. The colonial assemblies resisted this call, and once again the British retreated. In March of 1770 they repealed all the Townshend taxes except a small tax on tea to preserve the principle of parliamentary supremacy in the Declaratory Act. The colonists who normally drank smuggled tea anyway ignored the tea tax.
As before, the boycott faded away and matters returned to normal.14 Even the Boston Massacre of that year, where British troops fired on a crowd that was taunting them and killed five men, including Crispus Attucks, did not revive revolutionary fervor.15 John Adams defended the troops and their captain in court on grounds of self-defense against a mob of “saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish jacktars.”16 Boston juries acquitted the British soldiers and the streets remained calm.
The thrust toward independence had ended, except for a few who could not convince their countrymen that the British claim to control the colonies was serious.17 These repeated efforts at taxation did increase the atmosphere of distrust between Britain and the colonies, as the British increasingly believed the colonies were bent on independence, and the colonists increasingly believed the British intended to exploit them by either taxation or repression. John Dickinson, a Philadelphia landowner and political figure, had pressed the “no taxation without representation” issue in 1768 in his widely published articles entitled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.”18
But these mutual resentments subsided after the Townshend taxes were repealed in 1770. Business between the colonies and Britain resumed. The period from 1770 to 1773 is described by historians as a “calm,” a “pause,” an “uneasy truce,” or “the quiet years,” in the movement toward revolution.19 It is difficult to realize that what is now called a pause looked like peace at the time. The Some
rset case, arriving as it did against a background of efforts by the British government to tax and otherwise interfere with colonial governments between 1763 and 1770, gave the southern colonists yet another reason to be concerned with British meddling in their affairs. The “repugnancy clauses” in colonial charters authorizing only legislation that was not contrary to British laws, and the Declaratory Act claiming parliamentary power over “all cases whatsoever” in the colonies combined to make thoughtful southern leaders exceedingly nervous.20 Once Lord Mansfield had pronounced slavery “so odious” that “it is not allowed or approved by the Law of England,” the prospect that the repugnancy clause might be used in the future to challenge colonial slavery became a serious risk. As historian Richard Hildreth asked in 1846:
How, then, were those [colonial] assemblies competent to legalize a condition, many of the consequences of which are pronounced by Mansfield “absolutely contrary” to English law?21
While these complex details of British colonial relations may not seem to be the stuff of which revolutions are made, the fact is that much of the political leadership in the colonies consisted of lawyers, and in the southern colonies these lawyers were often also planters, slave owners, and land speculators.22
Historian Jack Greene has analyzed the occupations of the one hundred ten leaders in the Virginia House of Burgesses between 1720 and 1776:
Most of the one hundred ten leaders of the house were, of course, planters. Indeed, at least ninety-one were directly involved in planting and raising tobacco, although a third of these engaged in planting only as secondary occupation. The lawyers—most of whom were planters on the side—were the next most numerous professional or occupational group. Thirty-nine of the one hundred ten were practicing lawyers, but they were far more significant than their numbers would indicate….They had precisely those talents required in framing legislation and carrying on the business of the Burgesses, and throughout the period under consideration they were conspicuous by their presence at the top level of power. Of the four men who served as speaker, John Holloway, Sir John Randolph, and Peyton Randolph—were lawyers.
Nearly all the leaders of the house had secondary economic interests….Their most important secondary occupation was land speculation. Over two-fifths, and perhaps more, speculated in western lands—a profitable avocation.23
These lawyer-planter-slave-owner-speculator-politicalleaders would view events through the lawyer’s lens— “How will this event affect my clients?”
Henry Laurens of South Carolina, a wealthy former slave trader turned plantation owner who would later become president of the Continental Congress, was in London when Lord Mansfield announced his decision in Somerset. After the decision, Laurens, writing to a friend, was critical of the argument of John Dunning, who was counsel to Somerset’s owner, Charles Stewart:
I will not say a word of Lord Mansfield’s judgment in the case of Stuart v. Somerset [sic] until we meet, save only that his lordship’s administration was suitable to the times. The able Dunning set out on the defendant’s [slave owner’s] part by declaring that he was no advocate for slavery, and in my humble opinion he was not an advocate for his clients nor was there a word said to the purpose on either side.24
Why was Laurens so cautious in expressing his view about the Somerset decision? Mail was insecure and Laurens was already a major political force in South Carolina. Perhaps he believed that the best course was to blame the lawyer. Laurens’s letter implies that the decision was the result of poor advocacy by Dunning, the slave owner’s lawyer. Laurens’s negative attitude toward the decision was consistent with his reliance on slave labor as the basis for his two fortunes as slave trader and planter.25 He was also consistent in the protection of slavery whenever he had an opportunity.
In 1777, as president of the Continental Congress, Laurens presided over an amendment to the Articles of Confederation that prevented the Somerset decision from being applied anywhere in the new states.26 In 1783, his major contribution as a United States representative in Paris at the treaty of peace with Britain was to insist on a provision in the treaty requiring Britain to return Negroes who had joined them during the war.27 Laurens did not further commit his views on the Somerset decision to writing. However, he wrote three letters relating to arrangements to send a slave named Cato to Charleston from England in 1772. The editors of Laurens’s papers suggest that Cato had been brought to England by Laurens’s former partner and was being sent back post haste to “avoid the difficulties that arose in the case of James Somerset.”28
Charles Stewart, Somerset’s owner, held the same view of Dunning’s argument: “Dunning was dull and languid, and would have made a much better figure on the other side.”29
Not only were the slave masters concerned about the Somerset decision, the slaves learned of it too. Some of them ran away to find a ship that would take them to England and freedom because they heard about the Somerset case. One advertisement for the return of a runaway in 1774 read:
Run away the 16th instant, from the Subscriber, a Negro man named BACCHUS, About 30 Years of Age, five feet six or seven inches high, strong and well made…He was seen a few Days before he went off with a Purse of Dollars, and had just before changed a five Pound Bill; Most, or all of which, I suppose he must have robbed me of, which he might easily have done, I having trusted him much after what I thought had proved his Fidelity. He will probably endeavour to pass for a Freeman by the Name of John Christian, and attempt to get on Board some Vessel bound for Great Britain, from the Knowledge he has of the late Determination of Somerset’s Case. Whoever takes up the said Slave shall have 5£ Reward, on his Delivery to GABRIEL JONES.30
The possibility of a British rejection of slavery anywhere in the empire appalled the plantation owners and their representatives because slavery was a necessary underpinning of their prosperity.31 Slavery was the foundation of the economic and social environment that their leaders represented and protected.
The riches that flowed from slave ownership were threefold: the value of the slaves themselves, both as capital and as security for loans; the value of the product they produced, including more slaves; and the value of the land that they cleared and planted.32 Slavery in the southern colonies made white slave owners the wealthiest group on the mainland, as economist James A. Henretta has described:
The average free wealth holder in the South had total physical resources of £395 in 1774 as compared to £161 for those in New England and £187 for the Middle Colonies….Yet the economy of the South was not more productive than the economies of other regions....Per capita wealth—land, livestock, producer and consumer goods —was almost exactly the same in 1774 in every region of the country. White southerners had more wealth than white northerners only because black southerners had none.33
The importance of slavery to the southern colonists had its roots in the pre-Revolutionary period. As a result of a rebellion by poor whites in 1676, Virginia shifted its labor force from a mix of black slaves and white indentured servants to slaves alone.34 Most whites owned one or two slaves, not the much larger numbers owned by the major planters. But these few slaves were crucial to their masters in easing the daily labor necessary for an agricultural existence. For example, owning slaves enabled white children to have some schooling, or enabled ill or disabled family members to bear lighter loads. In addition, the existence of black slaves provided the poor white slave owner with a status that connected him with his betters and distinguished him from those destined to labor forever. These conditions gave most poor whites an incentive to protect slavery that was equivalent to or exceeded the more obvious interests of those who held a greater number of slaves.35
Planters were constantly in debt to their merchants as long as tobacco was the primary crop, and slaves could not only be sold, they could be mortgaged or pledged. Tobacco depleted the soil, requiring the clearing of new land; cultivation of the crop demanded the use of slaves.36 The result was an economic spiral in which
most slave owners were compelled to continue to invest in more slaves, consuming capital which, in the North, had begun to flow into industrial and commercial activities. Although northern states possessed fewer slaves, the slave trade supported their shipbuilding and commercial activities.
All of these considerations combined to make southern political lawyers anxious about their property in slaves that was threatened by the Somerset decision.37 Taxation may have taken some of their property; Somerset threatened to take it all.
The colonial upset over British taxation had ebbed with the withdrawal of all taxes except that on tea in 1770. News of the Somerset decision reached the colonies in the summer and fall of 1772.
During those “quiet years,” John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia had not yet met each other. Even so, they had much in common. They were well-educated, thoughtful, and successful lawyers who had entered the political arenas of their respective colonies.38 They were both concerned with perceived British intrusions into colonial life and economy.
There were also sharp differences between them, both in appearance and background. Jefferson, the younger of the two, was a tall, thin, soft-spoken aristocrat; a wealthy man by inheritance and marriage, owning about two hundred slaves. He was not a strong public speaker, but the clarity and style of his prose was recognized by all.
Adams was short, stout, and talkative; the product of generations of Massachusetts farmers, his modest wealth was the result of his successful law practice and farming. He frequently spoke at length, seeking to persuade others through reasoning of what he thought was obvious. He was direct rather than diplomatic.
Regardless of these differences in culture and background, Jefferson and Adams were both disappointed that the colonial revolutionary movement had collapsed in 1770.
Jefferson wrote in his autobiography:
Slave Nation Page 3
