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May 16 - June 15, 2019
informed readers of his notice that the young man could also be distinguished by ‘a long scar down the middle of his Forehead’. Repeatedly advertisements for Africans who had absconded from slavery in Britain listed the scars and disfigurements they bore on their bodies.
A few notices of rewards offered for the return of runaway slaves describe them as bearing branding marks.
marked out as human property by slave collars. These were usually brass or copper, occasionally silver, and were riveted or padlocked around the neck and could not be removed.
There were said to be fifty thousand servants in London alone, one in thirteen of the population, and the plans and layouts of middle-class Georgian homes demonstrate that servants were the engines of domestic life. They worked in hot cellars and kitchens and slept in cold, small attics, while the rich and even the middling classes lived in the more spacious middle floors.
The sight of poor white people performing menial tasks or suffering hardships may have been an epiphany for slaves who had lived in the West Indies where even the least wealthy whites shirked any forms of service or manual labour. The magistrate Sir John Fielding believed that placing black slaves in positions comparable to those occupied by white servants lay at the root of a social problem.
The practice of importing Negroe servants into these kingdoms is said to be already a grievance that requires a remedy, and yet it is every day encouraged . . . the main objections to their importation is, that they cease to consider themselves as slaves in this free country, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment, nor more willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people, and if put to do it, are generally sullen spiteful, treacherous, and revengeful.
suggested that the least damaging strategy was to allow slaves who had rejected their condition in Britain to ‘go about their business’, rather than return them to slavery in the West Indies.
It is a species of inhumanity to the blacks themselves,’ Fielding concluded, ‘to bring them to a free country.’42
Freed from slavery, most were imprisoned by poverty. Few had skills with which they might build new lives and they lived in fear of recapture and deportation to the Americas.
many of those who were recorded in the newspaper notices as having escaped were rather old to begin a seven-year apprenticeship.44
His 1772 biography A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by himself is especially useful as he lived not just in London but also in Portsmouth, Colchester and Kidderminster.
living among the poor of Georgian London, Colchester and Kidderminster the couple and their two mixed-race children seem to have encountered little direct racial prejudice, or at least none is reported.
As black people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain were what today is called a ‘visible minority’, they would have been aware of one another and in a position to potentially cooperate.
These collective experiences, as well as their shared racial identities, will naturally have drawn them together.
The Yorkshire Stingo, a pub in Marylebone, was said to serve a largely black clientele and
How typical were men like Francis Barber and Jack Beef? Both enjoyed considerable freedom and were respected and valued by their employers for their talents.
how strong a sense of community might there have been between black servants who occupied such comfortable positions in the homes of the rich, and could afford to have guests call or be found out at night on their master’s return, and members of London’s hungry and illiterate black poor?
the black poor was fragmented, coming together only on rare occasions, and even then not in great numbers, reports of gatherings of black people were enough to convince some propagandists of racism that they were a threat to Britain.
These attacks slipped into the tone and the language of the immigration panics that repeatedly flare up throughout British history and are as old and established a British tradition as immigration itself.
Families who were short of money were tempted to sell black slaves, men and women whose lives had in most respects begun to look and feel very much like those of white servants,
So feared was transportation that in 1773 an escapee who had been recaptured and separated from his English wife shot himself while on a boat on the Thames, rather than face a life of slavery.
The reason for deportation could be petty as well as pecuniary. Pageboys who had grown too old to play their allotted role of glamorous accessory were sent back to the West Indies.
life within the household of their master, despite being one of unfreedom, was safer and more desirable than any realistic alternative.
The street might offer freedom but also starvation and danger.
In the last decades of the century accounts of black slaves or servants who had performed years of loyal service, or demonstrated conspicuous skills or qualities, were deployed by the opponents of slavery to counter the spread of such stereotypes.
The biographies of many of the best-known black Georgian figures show that they received some education while enslaved.
shows how complicated relationships could be between people who were ostensibly slaves and people who were ostensibly slave owners.
Sancho’s later achievements, his published letters and musical compositions and the place he came to occupy within Georgian society were made possible by the opportunities for learning that he wrested from those around him, sometimes in the face of considerable opposition.
The focus in much of the propaganda of Edward Long and others on the dangers and immorality of racial mixing, combined with the vicious cartoons that lampooned black sexuality, seem not to have convinced some people that relationships with black people should be taboo.
Long’s hysterical rantings about racial mixing and the comments by other writers who were disturbed by the sight of mixed-race children might be taken as evidence that what they really feared was white people who did not share their racism.
Racism does not seem to have been a major issue in the lives of the Sancho family. In the lives of other black Georgians, poverty and the constant struggle to fend it off consumed much more attention.
Equiano’s biography saved its ire for the slave trade and slavery, not British racism, but perhaps he was prioritizing and choosing his battles. Eighteenth-century Britain was a ferociously xenophobic society in which it was extremely unwise to appear disloyal or unpatriotic, and black British writers tended to stress their loyalty to Britain.
The ruling in this case – cited in a Star Chamber trial of 1637 – was that ‘England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.’ But what did that really mean; that slaves could not be beaten by their masters in England or that no one could be a slave in England?
In 1694 a judge concluded that a ‘Negro boy’ could be regarded as merchandise because black people were ‘heathens, and therefore a man may have property in them’.
Jonathan Strong had himself been baptized after his escape from David Lisle in 1765, and among the letters he wrote from his cell at the Poultry Compter were notes to his two godfathers, both white.
He claimed his freedom specifically on the grounds that, ‘being baptised according to the rite of the Church’ he had been ‘thereby made Christian, and Christianity is inconsistent with slavery’.
As soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free. One may be a villein in England but not a slave.’
This was the maze of case law, precedent, contradiction and vested interest into which Granville Sharp suddenly found himself thrust in 1765.
At this point Sharp could have ended his legal studies and returned to his flute and his monotonous job at the Ordnance Office. But he did not. In 1769, he published his book, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. Arranged across four parts it weaved together case law with notions of natural law and Sharp’s deeply held Christian morality.
Sharp predicted that any toleration of slavery in Britain would allow the cancer of unfreedom to spread and undermine the liberties of other groups, ‘when any part of the community, under the pretence of private property, is deprived of this common privilege [rights under the law], ’tis a violation of civil liberty, which is entirely inconsistent with the social principles of a free state.
The legal case that seemed to offer the promise of advancing his cause arrived in July 1770. It concerned the abduction and attempted deportation of Thomas Lewis, a black man who was regarded as a slave by a retired ship’s captain named Robert Stapylton.
‘I don’t know what the consequences may be’, he stated, ‘if the masters were to lose their property by accidentally bringing their slaves to England. I hope it never will be finally discussed; for I would have all masters think them free, and all negroes think they were not, because then they would both behave better.’27
By Dunning’s reckoning the cost of freeing all the black slaves currently in England would exceed £800,000. Mansfield himself, at one point in the trial, remarked that ‘setting 14,000 or 15,000 men at once loose by a solemn opinion, is very disagreeable in the effects it threatens.
Referring to the Cartwright case of 1569, which had famously resolved ‘That England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in’, Davy, addressing Mansfield, commented that, ‘I hope, my Lord, the air does not blow worse since. But, unless there is a change of air, I hope they will never breathe here; for that is my assertion,—the moment they put their foot on English ground, that moment they become free. They are subject to the laws, and they are entitled to the protection of the laws of this country, and so are their masters, thank God!’36
To reinforce the fact that the fates of real, flesh-and-blood human beings were at stake, Sharp, rather brilliantly, had James Somerset hand-deliver documents to these notables. Somerset even delivered a package of documents from Sharp to Lord Mansfield himself.
On the day that Mansfield was giving his judgement, Horace Walpole complained, with some incredulity, that ‘One rascally and extravagant banker has brought Britannia, Queen of the Indies, to the precipice of bankruptcy! . . . He has broken half the bankers.’
Lord Mansfield was never able to rein in the misinterpretation of the judgement for which he is best remembered today. Yet whatever the scope of the judgement the startling fact was that James Somerset was no longer a slave.
Ultimately the exact terms of his judgement and intentions became less significant than the popular understanding, or misunderstanding, of it. This popular interpretation overpowered and overwhelmed the dry letter of the law.
In May 1772 the slave owners had asked Parliament to pass an act to end all uncertainty and legalize the holding of slaves in England. When Parliament refused, the slave owners took that decision as an indication that the anti-slavery mood in Britain was beginning to gain traction.
The threat of deportation, the most powerful of the tools used to compel obedience on slaves in England – the ship as opposed to the whip, as one historian put it – had been taken from them. After Mansfield slaves in England could, in effect, free themselves by running away, and the slave owners knew
