Slave Nation
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* * *
Notes
* * *
CHAPTER 1
SOMERSET’S JOURNEY SPARKS THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1. Details of the lives of Somerset and Stewart have recently been unearthed by our colleague Mark Weiner in “New Biographical Evidence in Somerset’s Case”: 121–36; and in Black Trials. Weiner has reported that the correct spelling of Stewart’s name is Steuart, but the conventional spelling has been retained.
2. Weiner, Black Trials, 77
3. Gerzina, Black London, 1–68
4. Fielding, Extracts from Penal Laws, 142–144
5. Gerzina, Black London, passim
6. Fryer, Staying Power, 71–72 . See www.eastlondon history.com/wilkes.htm
7. Weiner, Black Trials, 79; Gerzina, Black London, 90–132
8. See Wiecek, Antislavery Constitutionalism, 20–61; Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain. Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts 1221–45
9. Landon Carter, the owner of the most slaves in Virginia, expressed similar feelings in his diary when some of his trusted slaves left to join the British in 1776. Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, 3–15
10. Habeas corpus is an ancient form of order requiring a person to explain to the court the reasons for the detention of another person.
11. Blackstone, Commentaries (1765), 123, repeated on 412. Blackstone modified this statement in his 1768–69 revision by adding at the end that, “the master’s rights to his service may possibly still continue.” Blackstone, Commentaries (1768–69), 424–425. See Wiecek, Antislavery Constitutionalism, 27
12. Mansfield was hated in the colonies after 1765 when he rejected the colonial claim of “no taxation without representation” by stating that the colonies were fully subject to the will of Parliament in all matters. During debate on the repeal of the Stamp Act and adoption of Declaratory Act, he took the position that the colonists were subject to the power of Parliament without limitation, and that there was no difference between internal and external taxes and that “when the supreme power abdicates, the government is dissolved.” Gipson, Coming of the Revolution, 113–114. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) 200–202 on the English attitude toward Parliament as reflected by Blackstone. See Beverly Zweiben, How Blackstone Lost the Colonies (Garland Publishing Co., 1990), suggesting that Blackstone’s assertion of Parliamentary supremacy bore some responsibility for hardening the position of the British government.
13. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 488-501,
discusses the Somerset decision as part of an emerging free-labor philosophy. See Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 7, for a general perspective on the period in England.
14. Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield” 45-65 at 48
15. Gerzina, Black London, 88-89
16. Ibid. 66–67
17. Ibid. 120, quoting Granville Sharp, New York Historical Society, 186
18. Somerset v. Stewart, Howell’s State Trials, Vol. 20, 1, 80 (1771–7).
19. Edward Fiddes, “Lord Mansfield, and the Somerset Case,” Law Quarterly Review 50, (1934), 508–509
20. General Evening Post, May 26, 1772 , p. 4, col. 3 (p. 2 of May 28 section). Stewart acknowledged that the West Indian planters and merchants had taken over control of the case. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 480–81n20.
21. Howell’s State Trials, Vol. 20, 82 (1771–7). There is some dispute over the exact language used in Mansfield’s opinion. See Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield.” The dispute does not affect the point that the decision was interpreted at the time as freeing the slaves in England. A clear summary of the uncertain status of slaves in England prior to the Somerset decision appears in Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 313–355. The restrictive interpretations of the decision of Somerset in England after the 1780s are discussed at 356–358.
22. Contents of the British papers and magazines are described in Gerzina, Black London, 130. Contents of the American colonial papers are discussed in Chapter 2. The initial interpretations of the decision by other courts in Britain confirmed the breadth of the ruling. Two opinions of lower British courts, one in 1773 and one in 1776, were preserved by Sharp. A lower court decision in 1773, Cay and Crichton, Prerogative Court, May 11, 1773, held that an executor of an estate need not report a slave as property of his dead master. The High Court of Admiralty decided that one who had been wrongly held as a slave aboard ship was entitled to recover from his master the value of his services, since the state of slavery did not exist. Rogers alias Riggs v. Jones, High Court of Admiralty, June 29, 1776. The Rogers decision posed an additional threat to slave owners; the possibility of back-pay liability to the slaves that were freed by the Somerset decision. Reports of both cases appear as appendices 10 and 11 to Granville Sharp, “The Just Limitation of Slavery,” (1776), which appears in “Tracts on Slavery, Including Just Limitations of Slavery in the Laws of God, References to and Extracts from Mansfield’s judgment, etc,” by Granville Sharp. Vol. 23 of a collection of pamphlets bound by Thomas Binns, London, in the 1830s, in possession of Antislavery International, 4 Stableyard Broomgrove Road, London, SW9,9tl. Scottish law followed this broad interpretation of Somerset. Wiecek, Antislavery Constitutionalism, 33
23. Fielding, Extracts from Penal Laws, 3.
24. See Gerzina, Black London, 123–132, 165–204 for a discussion of the post-Somerset issues concerning slavery in England.
25. Benjamin Franklin, “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” London Chronicle, June 20, 1772.
26. Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield,” 65–66.
27. Fryer, Staying Power, 203–207, describes how British slaves emancipated themselves by walking away from their masters.
28. Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) 218
CHAPTER 2
THE TINDERBOX
1. Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, 68–80 provided the basis for the following table.
2. Wiecek, Antislavery Constitutionalism, 40
3. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, Tuesday, Sept. 15, 1772
4. Ibid. September 22, 1772
5. All of the early charters contained restrictions on colonial legislation which echoed these statutes prohibiting legislation which was repugnant or contrary to, and permitting legislation which was agreeable to, the laws of England. The charters are collected in Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions. The Virginia charter appears in Vol. 7, p. 3806; North Carolina charter at Vol. 5, 2755; Georgia charter at Vol. 2, p. 770. The Maryland charter of 1632 required laws to “be consonant to reason and be not repugnant nor contrary, but (so far as conveniently may be done) agreeable to the laws…of England.” Vol. 2 p. 1681. Similar statements appear in the charters of Pennsylvania, vol. 5 p. 3038; Massachusetts (1620) Vol. 3, p. 1833, (1629) vol. 3, p. 1833, (1691) Vol. 3, p. 1882; New Jersey (1664) Vol. 5, p. 2538, (1712) Vol. 5, p. 1712; Rhode Island (1663) Vol. 6, 3215; Connecticut (1662) Vol. 1, p. 533.
6. Those in Virginia would have remembered the extensive litigation involving a Virginia law that allowed debtors to pay debts based on an artificially low value of tobacco, adopted because of the skyrocketing value of tobacco due to a bad crop in 1758. The clergy, whose salary had previously been fixed at the weight of tobacco, were—along with other creditors—denied the benefit of the increase in price. They appealed to the board of trade to invalidate the law as inconsistent with the previously fixed rate.
The Board of Trade eventually concluded that the law was disallowed but was not clear on whether the disallowance was retroactive to cover the period of the parsons’ complaint. The parsons then sued in local courts to recover their loss. Some were thrown out on grounds that the disallowance was not retroactive, but one court held that the law was retroactive. It then empanelled a jury to determine how much the parsons should recover. This case was Patrick Henry’s introduction to Virginia politics. He was so persuasive that the parsons should be treated like all other creditors that the jury awarded one cent in damages. Mayer, Son of Thunder, 59–66; Goebel, Cases and Materials, 80–81. Randall, Thomas Jefferson, 160–167 suggests that Jefferson’s thinking about the relation between Britain and the colonies had crystallized while working on a case that involved parliamentary control over divorce
7. South Carolina act regarding payment of monies, 1770; New York omnibus act adopting English statutes, 1770; New Jersey inheritance law, 1771. In 1772 the Privy Council struck down a North Carolina anti-riot act, and a Dominica act regarding tax bills. Goebel, Cases and Materials, 72n102.
8. Brands, First American, 363–370
9. Chitwood, Richard Henry Lee, 36–37; McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, 77–78
10. McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, 77–78
11. Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 365–369
12. The Declaratory Act of 1766 asserted:
“that the said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto and dependent upon the imperial crown and Parliament of Great Britain, and that the King’s majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” Commager, Documents, 60
13. Morrison Oxford History, 256–258
14. Rakove, National Politics, 4
15. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Foner, Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 411–12
16. McCullough, John Adams, 67
17. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 220–26, describes the continuing efforts to keep the public focused on British misdeeds during this period.
18. Ferling, Leap in the Dark, 68–70
19. “uneasy truce,” Alden, History of the American Revolution, 125. “quiet years,” Egnal, A Mighty Empire, 247–269. “In reality, for most of the last three years [1770–1773] the government paid little attention to the colonies.…[Lord] North was content to let colonial affairs drift, as long as they drifted quietly.” Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 208–209.
20. Andrews, Colonial Background, 152, “The years from 1770 to 1773 were a time of comparative calm. Business revived, commercial prosperity returned, the moderates had the situation well in hand, and the Sons of Liberty, who had greeted the collapse of the non-importation movement with vexation of spirit, were for the moment
discredited and under a cloud.”
See also, Miller, “The Decline of the Revolutionary Movement,” Origins of the American Revolution, 315–325; Robert McCluer Calhoon, Revolutionary America: An Interpretive Overview (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976) 52, “time of quiet in imperial colonial relations.”
21. Hildreth, History of the United States, 567
22. Greene, Negotiated Authorities, 259–318
23. Ibid. 240–241
24. Rogers, Papers of Henry Laurens, 435–6. Dunning was Stewart’s lawyer in the Somerset case. See Davis, Problem of Slavery, 472,493–94, 498
25. Laurens may have obsessed over the Somerset decision. On September 21, 1773, the South Carolina Country Journal published an advertisement for four slaves who had run away from the plantation of Henry Laurens in September and December 1772, “the following NEW NEGROES, viz. SOMERSET, his country name Massery, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high, slim, long visage, and very black, of the Mandingo country.” Rogers, Papers of Henry Laurens, Vol. 7, 109
26. Laurens’ opposition to slavery was stated in 1776. “I abhor slavery,” he wrote in a letter to his son John of August 14, 1776 and indicated his intention to begin manumission of his hundreds of slaves. Philip M. Hamer Ed. Papers of Henry Laurens, (Columbia, SC: University of SC Press, 1979) Vol. 1 99–100
27. Lindsay, “Diplomatic Relations,” 391–419
28. Rogers, Papers of Henry Laurens, v8,464. See letters from Laurens to Appleby, 464; to Appleby, 466; to J. Clay, 468n6. Laurens evidently kept his own black servant with him in England.
29. “Mass Hist. Soc. Proceedings XLIII,” in Davis, Problem of Slavery, 494n44
30. Virginia Gazette (P & O) June 30, 1774
31. See discussion in Finkelman, Imperfect Union, 39, “It is clear that this quotation [slavery is so odious] was widely circulated and believed in Britain and America. Americans and Englishmen, including the knowledgeable Granville Sharp, interpreted Somerset as ending slavery in England.” See also, Wiecek, Antislavery Constitutionalism, 20–39