Episode 15: The Heavens Fall

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 15: The Heavens Fall

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published May 31, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE: The ship the Earl of Halifax rose and fell with the swells as it crossed the North Atlantic in the waning weeks of September 1771. It had sailed from New York City on Monday, the 16th, headed for Falmouth, England, a journey that would eventually take twenty-nine days. Packet ships like the Halifax regularly ferried mail, passengers, and cargo to distant ports in Great Britain’s vast Atlantic empire. They were the ships that made the ocean small.

AMBUSKE: Scipio was aboard the Halifax for this September crossing. He probably slept on the floor of his cabin, one he shared with Henry Laurens of Charleston, South Carolina, his owner, who rested on the bed. The oldest and the youngest of Laurens’ three sons shared the cabin as well.

AMBUSKE: Like many South Carolinian plantation masters, the widowed Laurens believed that the colonies were ill-suited for his sons’ education. Only schools in the Mother Country, in London or Edinburgh would do. It was in England, after all, where Laurens learned the merchant trade, lessons that would help him build a Carolina empire of his own in rice, indigo, deerskins, and slaves.

AMBUSKE: Laurens agreed to take Scipio “home” as British Americans like him often called England. It took some convincing on Scipio’s part. A year earlier, Laurens had sent his enslaved footman to Georgia on an errand to deliver a letter and wait for its answer. It should have taken two days. Scipio had other ideas. He returned to Charleston a week later, and without the reply.

AMBUSKE: Still, Laurens would need a servant while in London and he had little desire to pay the wages for an English one. Besides, with Scipio at his side, dressed in fine fashionable livery, clothing that projected his wealth and the power he possessed over his enslaved man, Laurens could hold his own among the West Indian planters residing in London, men and women with whom he shared more in common than he did a British American from Boston or even Virginia.

AMBUSKE: Somewhere on those swells in the middle of the Atlantic, Scipio came to a final decision. His name was not really his own. In a perverse display of their mastery, enslavers had long given enslaved people names from the greatest figures of the ancient world, names like Pompey, Caesar, Cato, or Hercules. Scipio was one such name, tying the man on board the Halifax to Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who had beaten Hannibal and defeated Carthage in the 2nd Punic War.

AMBUSKE: The name “Scipio” would not do well in London. Though he had never been to the capital of British America, Scipio knew enough about the cosmopolitan city at the empire’s heart to know that a slave’s name would close certain doors for him, that a new one would open others. 

AMBUSKE: He informed Laurens that he was Scipio no longer. He would now go by the name “Robert.” It wasn’t really a request, but the courtesy of information.

AMBUSKE: The Laurens family landed at Falmouth, on the southwest coast of England on October 9th. The day after, Henry wrote of his sons and of Robert in a letter to his brother:

HENRY LAURENS: “Jacky and Jemmy are both well, Robert (some time Scipio) is well too, & hitherto has behaved very well and promises fair to continue good and dutiful. If he keeps that Promise, I shall hold myself much obliged to him, for no Stranger could serve me so acceptably as he can.”

AMBUSKE: Soon, they set out for London, passing first through Bristol, riding in carriages and over roads that jostled their bodies as well as Henry’s nerves. When they arrived at the outskirts of the capital on October 21st, it marked the beginning of a three-year stay for the Charleston merchant and planter. But before entering the city, they spent several weeks in Chelsea. Neither Jemmy nor Robert had immunity from smallpox. First, they would have to be inoculated.

AMBUSKE: Having survived the ordeal with mild symptoms, the Laurens family entered London in late November. They settled into their lodgings on Fludyer Street, just around the corner from Downing Street where Frederick, Lord North, the prime minister resided, and not far from Buckingham House, where King George III and Queen Charlotte could often be found. As they made the home on Fludyer Street their own, Henry Laurens was confident in his property rights in the man now called Robert, though not always assured of his ability to control him.

AMBUSKE: Indeed, as those early days stretched into weeks and then into the early months of the new year, Robert began to see the world differently. London was a place of possibility, with a growing Black population of its own, free and enslaved, including many Black British Americans like him.

AMBUSKE: And there was something more. A subtle shift in the common winds that carried enslaved Africans to the New World, and enslaved people like him to Britain.

AMBUSKE: Just as Robert Laurens arrived in England, a West African-born enslaved Virginian named James Somerset was on a journey of his own.

AMBUSKE: As Robert walked the London streets, Somerset was just nearby, languishing in the ship Ann and Marybound for Jamaica. His owner, Boston Customs Collector Charles Steuart, had brought Somerset to London in 1769. He fled Steuart two years later, the very October that Robert first made landfall in England. Now, having recaptured Somerset and clapped him in irons aboard the Ann and Mary, Steuart wanted to rid himself of the enslaved man and sell him to work in the sugar fields of Britain’s wealthiest colony.

AMBUSKE: But Somerset had influential friends and benefactors. And they believed that his plight was more than just about the injustices done to any one man; it was a moment, a means to attack the very foundations of slavery itself.

AMBUSKE: As Robert escorted the Laurens boys to school, ran errands for his master, and began imagining a new life for himself in London, Somerset and his allies set in motion events that could not be undone. They petitioned England’s most important court, led by its most powerful judge, to answer a fundamental question that would shape the fortunes of them all: Did slavery exist in the laws of England? And they prayed that justice would be done, though the heavens may fall.

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution.

AMBUSKE: Episode 15: The Heavens Fall

AMBUSKE: In December 1771, two months after Robert Laurens first stepped foot on English soil, James Somerset’s supporters challenged his detainment on board the Ann and Mary. Elizabeth Cade, Thomas Walkin, and John Marlow, who had become Somerset’s godparents upon his conversion to Christianity, pleaded to the Court of King’s Bench for a writ of habeas corpus to secure Somerset’s release.

AMBUSKE: The Great Writ, as it is often known, has its origins deep in the medieval past, with its modern form taking shape in the seventeenth century. By the 1770s it had become, in the view of Sir William Blackstone, the “great and efficacious writ” for the protections it afforded the king’s subjects “in all manner of illegal confinement.” The writ commanded those who received it to “show the body,” to bring their prisoners before the court, and justify their detainment.

AMBUSKE: The court granted Somerset’s plea in early December. Captain John Knowles of the Ann and Mary brought him before the court on December 9th. The Lord Chief Justice, William Murray, Earl of Mansfield then set a hearing for early in the new year, to decide whether Somerset had been illegally detained and whether Charles Steuart had the power to remove his enslaved man from England. Until then, Lord Mansfield released Somerset on his own accord.

AMBUSKE: Enslaved people had sometimes turned to courts in Great Britain and the colonies to challenge their imprisonment or sue enslavers for harm, but by the 1760s, as white Britons on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated their place in an Empire of Liberty, enslaved people and their allies began contesting the legality of slavery itself.

AMBUSKE: Yet, a final judgement remained elusive. British Americans regularly brought enslaved people like Robert Laurens or James Somerset from the colonies, where laws supporting people as a form of property were clearer, to England and Scotland, where they were not. Somerset’s supporters, including the abolitionist Granville Sharp, hoped that his case would resolve a question few wanted to ask and many white Britons on both sides of the Atlantic had long struggled to avoid.

CHRISTOPHER BROWN: It's a really important moment in this history.

BROWN: I'm Christopher Brown. I'm a professor of history at Columbia University.

BROWN: The basic conflict is this. Although historians disagree about how to interpret it, the English as they settled the Americas created an institution of human bondage that did not exist in England at the time. They devise systems of slavery that had precedents in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. But they did not exist in recent English history, there's certainly no institutional transfer. So they were devising a slave system largely out of whole cloth. Now, there are some scholars who have pointed out that they were drawing on certain resources that were in the English, legal and constitutional tradition. And I think there's some merit to that. But the fact of the matter is, there was no slave law in England. And so what that meant was that slaveholders in the colonies in Virginia, and South Carolina, Barbados, wherever they came from Boston, when they arrived in England, the status of the people that they brought with them, who were their slaves, was very, very, very uncertain, because on one hand, they had clear property rights. On the other hand, those property rights were not recognized in English law, and even more, the extent to which England could be expected to enforce the rights of slaveholders when they were in England was very much in question.

 AMBUSKE: For white British Americans in the colonies as well as Britons at home who were heavily invested in slavery and the slave trade, the uncertainty of slavery’s legality in English law raised troubling questions beyond England’s borders, for an empire whose economic and social life was deeply intertwined with it. 

AMBUSKE: But equally important, for enslaved and free Black Britons on both sides of the Atlantic, that uncertainty created pathways to contest enslavement and advocate for their rights and liberties.

AMBUSKE: So, why did legal challenges to slavery emerge in England in the years after the Seven Years’ War? And how did anti-slavery debates throughout the British Atlantic world call into question the property in human beings?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll remain first in the capital, to explore how slavery shaped Robert Lauren’s London world. We’ll then head into the Court of King’s Bench, to witness James Somerset and his friends argue for his freedom in England, before sailing back to British America, to consider the consequences of Lord Mansfield’s ruling in the case, for Black British Americans, and for the empire.

AMBUSKE: When Robert Laurens settled in London in November 1771, it was a city that many British Americans had never seen, yet one that had a powerful influence over all of their lives.

JULIE FLAVELL: I like to suggest that London was actually the greatest city America ever had, because in it were united the centers of commerce, government and culture.

FLAVELL: Julie Flavell, independent scholar.

FLAVELL: London was the seat of government, with the court in Parliament and the financial capital with the Bank of England and the city.

AMBUSKE: It was also enormous. Although we don’t have Robert’s own first impressions, we can imagine his wonder at the city’s size and its grandeur.   

FLAVELL: During the 18th century, London was coming into its own as one of the world's great cities, which is, of course, how it's known today. And it experienced continuous growth throughout the century, but especially after Britain emerged victorious from the Seven Years’ War in 1763 which in America as a French and Indian War. And Britain came out of this war with huge new possessions in India, the Caribbean, and of course, North America, the British had taken Canada from the French. London received a huge boost from all this, a post war boom. It was the Empire's biggest seaport. And of course, it was the financial capital. And in fact, it was the largest city in the western world at this time, 20 times the size of colonial cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Just to give an idea of what was big in those days, in 1760, London had about three-quarters of a million people. It was going to pass a million at the turn of the century. And after 1763 there was rapid expansion of housing in London, because the English middle classes suddenly decided they could afford to move into London for the season. And the London season was when Parliament was in session between October and April every year. And at that time, a vibrant nightlife emerged in London, plays, concerts, balls, and pleasure gardens, masquerades.

AMBUSKE: The vibrancy of the city’s cultural life and its imperial reach were made possible in part because London:

FLAVELL: Also had the critical mass of talent needed to achieve excellence in the arts. So books, famous authors like Dr. Johnson, Henry Fielding, these were all well known in the colonies. If you came to London in the 18th century, you could often see these people. If you could find out what their favorite aunts were, their favorite coffee houses. You could see Dr. Johnson walking down Fleet Street. Books were consumed avidly in the colonies, and they almost always came from London. Newspapers: The colonists had their own newspapers by now, but London articles were widely reprinted in the colonial press. You could hear superior performances of music. Everyone wanted to go to see the London stage and to see Garrick perform. If you wanted to be an artist and reach the highest level of achievement in the 18th century, you simply had to come to London. It was at this time that Benjamin West came to London, the Pennsylvania artist. He helped found the Royal Academy of Arts in 68 and in 1771 he really made his name painting The Death of Wolfe, which was his depiction of Wolfe dying on the Heights of Abraham at the moment of British victory in 1759, and of course, it's significant that that was an American subject, and this picture was immensely popular. He made a fortune off selling the prints as well, and it made him history painter to the king in the next year. And of course, London also set the scene for fashion luxuries, and it might be thought that these things in America were mostly bought by the well to do. But in fact, people were surprised to see London fashions, London luxuries, being purchased even on the frontier.

AMBUSKE: British Americans traveled to London as part of ships’ crews, as tourists, and by force as enslaved people.

FLAVELL: Trade increased during the period. Merchant vessels with American crews were coming in ever bigger numbers. And of course, the American crews emptied out into the London streets. It's hard to find out about them, though, but the American tourists, increased after 1763, and I think that's partly because travel was more secure and reliable, but it's also that following the Seven Years’ War, Americans were very proud to be British. They'd helped with the victory, and more than ever, they wanted to travel to London just to experience a life, if they had the money for education, to conduct business. And the largest number of these Americans were wealthy planters who often came with family members, wives, children, and they brought their enslaved servants as well.

FLAVELL: The wealthy Americans usually took up places to live, settled in the wealthy West End of London. And they were probably somewhere between 800 and 1,000 of these American types in London in any one year.

AMBUSKE: The wealthy and the lower sort who ventured to London in the eighteenth century saw, tasted, and smelled unmistakable evidence of slavery’s importance to the city and the empire, including:

FLAVELL: American commodities. The biggest commodities were, of course, sugar, and tobacco. Sugar coming from the West Indies, tobacco from the Chesapeake. They were the most noticeable. And since the 17th century, tobacco shops had become a familiar sight in the streets of London, and they sported American icons and emblems outside of them that the wooden Native American, sometimes paintings of enslaved black field workers. And in those days, you could spot a tobacco shop because smoke billowed out of the open doors, if you can imagine anything that horrible, and pubs and coffee houses also became totally smoke-filled. Sugar and its byproduct rum were consumed everywhere, and sugar had a significant knock on effect on three beverages, tea, coffee, and chocolate, which of course, was also American. Milk Chocolate was said to be invented in the 17th century by mixing in milk and sugar. Coffee houses were a very common sight in London by the 18th century, and sugar was associated with this.

AMBUSKE: Coffeehouses were central to London life in the eighteenth century.

FLAVELL: The coffee houses were places where people went to read newspapers, eat, drink, meet people. They had business meetings. You could get a private room in a coffee house.

AMBUSKE: Merchants from South Carolina, ship captains from Boston, Jamaican plantation masters, and others met in certain London coffeehouses to negotiate contracts, discuss politics, hear the latest news, renew ties with fellow British Americans abroad, and forge new connections with their fellow British subjects across the empire.

FLAVELL: There were these colonial coffee houses, like a New England coffee house, a Pennsylvania coffee house. There were coffee houses for the various provinces of England too. And there were also coffee houses that people of certain trades went to when they came into London, because that's how you made your connections. If you were a tailor who was working in clothes and fashion, you might make your way to a certain coffee house.

AMBUSKE: Robert Laurens visited the coffeehouses, heard the chatter, and smelled the smoke as he accompanied his master Henry around the city and ran errands on his behalf. And as he did so, Robert could see himself in London. By the early 1770s, people of African descent had maintained a presence in Great Britain for over 200 years. This was especially true in London.

FLAVELL:  It's estimated that there were about 15,000 people of African descent, living in London at that time. That made London the place with the largest urban Black population in the English-speaking world. There was probably an imbalance in the sex ratio in favor of males, probably because quite a number of people of African descent were there as an off pouring of the slave trade in London, or because they came as American or West Indian servants, but there were also London born Blacks by this time, and there was a native London Black population.

AMBUSKE: Free and enslaved men and women of African descent frequented London coffeehouses, drove carriages through its streets, married, and baptized their children, worshipped in its churches, labored as domestic servants in London homes, and unloaded cargo down on its docks.

FLAVELL: Colonial American enslaved servants like Robert would have a lot in common with the servant class in London. They were trained as servants, and so for Robert, it was a great new environment.

FLAVELL: He was Henry Laurens’ footman. He'd go from Henry Laurens’ house in Fludyer Street to deliver messages that would take several hours. Fludyer Street was right up near White Hall. So you can imagine walking from White Hall into the city with a message. I mean, you could stop and chat to people look at street shows or whatever. London was filled with street shows.

FLAVELL: He'd have access to money, all sorts of variety entertainment.

FLAVELL: There were dedicated servants’ pubs that Robert and his fellow servants, white servants in Fludyer Street would have known and gone to. It was common to tip servants in London. So Robert would have gotten tips. Henry hated having him get money, because every time Robert got money, he became difficult to control. I don't think Robert drank or gambled. I don't think he had any vices. I just think that, like most London servants, once he got some money in his pocket, he found better things to do than to hurry up and do what his master had told him to do.

AMBUSKE: War also brought Black soldiers and sailors to London. Here’s Christopher Brown:

BROWN: One of the things that happens is after the Seven Years’ War, there is a fair number Black men who ended up as sailors in the Royal Navy in one form or another, either as slaves or free people serving on British forces during the during that conflict. And after the war, as sailors and soldiers, they're discharged and there many of them are discharged in London. And so all of a sudden, there are thousands of Black men in London. Who building an emerging kind of Black community.

AMBUSKE: Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was one of them. Gronniosaw served in the 28th Regiment of Foot and fought in the Caribbean campaigns near the end of the Seven Years’ War. He did so as a free man, though for much of his early life he had been enslaved. In the early 1720s, a 15-year-old Gronniosaw was taken captive in Bornu, in modern Nigeria. Enslaved first in Barbados and then New York, Gronniosaw’s owner freed him in his will. His service in the military was a means of protecting that freedom. He later settled for a time in London, married an English weaver named Betty, and with her had several children. With patronage support from Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, an evangelical aristocrat swept up by the Great Awakening, Gronniosaw published his memoirs in 1772.   

AMBUSKE: Like Gronnoiosaw, Olaudah Equiano served in the Seven Years’ War, though not as a soldier, but as a sailor. Unlike Gronnoiosaw, Equiano served as an enslaved man. His tale is a remarkable odyssey.

AMBUSKE: Equiano was born in an Igbo village also in modern Nigeria in the mid-1740s. According to the memoir he published years later, he was kidnapped by enslavers in the mid-1750s and shipped first to the sugar island of Barbados. He survived the horrors of the Middle Passage, but when no one purchased him, he was carried to Virginia, where he became the property of a planter. Soon, a Royal Naval officer named Michael Henry Pascal bought him and took Equiano to sea with him during the war. That took him to London in 1759 where he was baptized in St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey.

AMBUSKE: Equiano learned to read, write, and navigate during the war, but service did not earn his freedom. He was sold back to the West Indies in 1763, where a Philadelphia Quaker named Robert King purchased him. Equiano labored for King’s merchant business, a trade that sent Georgian and South Carolinian produce to the West Indies to feed enslaved people working the     sugar fields. King permitted Equiano to trade on the side, and by 1766, he was able to buy his own freedom. A year later, he sailed for London. For years after, Equiano labored as a free mariner, one of the thousands of Black mariners who served aboard ships sailing from Europe to North and South America.

AMBUSKE: For many white Londoners, the infusion of Black soldiers and sailors after the war, and the presence of free and enslaved people more generally, was a cause for concern.

BROWN: There's real anxiety among those who care about the racial makeup of London that there are too many Black people here. And that slaveholders, if they keep bringing them, there's going to be even more people here.

AMBUSKE: Robert Laurens’ ability to enjoy London life was tempered by how others perceived him.

FLAVELL: In terms of Robert's experience, the attitude of the lower orders of London, who were the people Robert would have the most to do with towards race is it's a bit murky. For that period, there certainly were what we'd call racist attitudes. But the scientific racism of the 19th century, where people articulated pseudo-scientific ideas about Nordic superiority and so forth, simply hadn't emerged in the 18th century. There certainly was racism. But 18th century Britons, who encountered new peoples and cultures in the Imperial context, were more preoccupied with the issue of levels of development.

 AMBUSKE: By the eighteenth century, European thinkers had developed a view of human history that imagined peoples as passing through stages of development, from savagery on the one end to civility on the other. Those philosophies became entangled with emerging ideas about race, providing    of the intellectual justifications for the continued enslavement of African peoples, and the social and economic power that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade made possible.

AMBUSKE: But by the 1770s, a small but growing anti-slavery movement had emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, although not for the reasons we might think.

BROWN: It's important to understand that anti-slavery, and anti-slavery movements were not movements for racial equality. Their objectives were not 20th century objectives. They were 18th century objectives. They took racial difference and they took the superiority of European peoples over African peoples largely for granted. They were concerned about the institution of slavery, rather than the institutionalization of racial differences. It's a really important distinction.

BROWN: The problems that slavery presented, especially in the British Atlantic world, tended to fall along a number of different lines. One was about safety and security. There was the feeling in many colonies, that a disproportion of African laborers compared to white laborers endanger the social environment, made the possibilities of slave revolts much higher, discourage the emigration of white workers who might want to come to the colonies.

AMBUSKE: For Herman Husband, an evangelical Quaker, and one of the leaders of North Carolina’s Regulator Rebellion in the late 1760s, slavery had a corrupting influence on white settlers. Reflecting on what he witnessed in Barbados during a trade voyage there a decade earlier, Husband feared the spread of slavery in North Carolina.

HERMAN HUSBAND: “The white people cannot nither increase nor thrive where the treasure of a country is carried from them to purchase those blacks”     

BROWN: There's also a series of religious objections, but not on the grounds that slave holding is against the faith.

BROWN: The vast majority of religious ministers, Protestant ministers in the whether they be representatives of the Church of England, whether they're later Baptist or Presbyterians, in later Methodist, whether they're Congregationalist Puritans, almost all of them in one way or another take the system of slavery for granted.

BROWN: But more from the standpoint that slaveholders in the British colonies tended to regard the men and women they held as slaves as not deserving of conversion to the faith. They did not want to see them become Christians. And so a lot of British missionaries objected to slavery, because the people that it created the slaveholders it created blocked the expansion of Christianity. And so their objections were as much about the ways that it interfered with the spread of the gospel.

BROWN: The Quakers are unusual in that there did develop a dissenting tradition within the religious community of men and women who really believed that holding and holding slaves, purchasing slaves, owning slaves, selling slaves, violated the tenets of their religious witness. That was a minority point of view. The vast majority of the Quaker elite bought slaves, own slave, trade slaves. Quakers were not abolitionists from the moment they arrived in the Americas, but unlike the other Protestant denominations, there was real debate within the Society of Friends.

AMBUSKE: The transatlantic slave trade came under criticism as well.

BROWN: The Slave Trade becomes the first target in the North American movement in the beginnings of American anti-slavery. It's not the principal subject on the British side at all. In fact, the main way that the issue of slavery in the Atlantic world arises in Britain is around the questionable virtue morals of American settlers. It takes a while for British activists to actually focus on the British slave trade itself. Opposition to the slave trade is more of a North American complaint than it is a British complaint.

BROWN: On the American side, the objections to the slave trade serve a variety of political and polemical purposes. But there are also real worries at different points in the 18th century, about a unregulated unrestricted arrival of Africans directly from West Africa. Where on the one hand, the labor is welcomed. But on the other hand, there is the feeling among many that the social and cultural order that was dangerous to bring in so many Africans, and even in the 1750s 1760s, there are discussions about the preference for a North American society that will be for whites, where the Black population will be very small. And you even see this in Benjamin Franklin back in the 1750s, where he makes an argument against the import of enslaved Africans on the grounds that we don't want to corrupt the racial order that we might build here. There are lots of different reasons why the slave trade gets opposed in different times. But immigration control is one of them.

 AMBUSKE: In Virginia, wealthy planters attacked the slave trade to counter Parliament’s attempts to impose its authority on the colonies. In 1767 and 1769, the colony’s House of Burgesses passed laws that doubled the customs duties on imported enslaved people. King George III vetoed both. When Virginians joined a wider colonial resistance movement in response to Parliament’s passage of the Townshend Acts, the new duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, leading Virginians included slaves among the many “goods” they would not purchase until Parliament backed down.

AMBUSKE: But wealthy Virginia planters in the tidewater had additional incentives for taking action. By the early 1770s, colonies like Virginia and Maryland had less need for the transatlantic slave trade than they once did. While the brutality that sugar slavery wrought on Black bodies in Jamaica and Antigua required constant infusions of enslaved people from West Africa, the relatively healthier environments in the Chesapeake enabled greater natural reproduction of Black populations.

AMBUSKE: For tidewater planters then, cutting off the transatlantic slave trade served two different ends. It would ensure higher property values in their existing enslaved people, and it would permit them greater social and economic control over smaller farmers in the Virginia Piedmont. By this point, small planters were purchasing more enslaved people from West Africa than the Tidewater elite. And small planters frequently violated the non-importation movement by purchasing additional slaves forcibly carried from Africa or the West Indies. By eliminating the transatlantic trade, wealthy planters could remind them all of who ruled at home.

AMBUSKE: When the House of Burgesses petitioned George III in April 1772, they argued that the slave trade threatened the colony’s security and its future prosperity:

HOUSE OF BURGESSES: “The Importation of Slaves into the Colonies from the Coast of Africa hath long been considered as a Trade of great Inhumanity, and, under its present Encouragement, we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very Existence of your Majesty’s American Dominions.”

HOUSE OF BURGESSES: “We are sensible that some of your Majesty’s Subjects in Great Britain may reap Emoluments from this Sort of Traffick, but when we consider that it greatly retards the Settlement of the Colonies with more useful Inhabitants, and may in Time, have the most destructive Influence, we presume to hope that the Interest of a few will be disregarded when placed in Competition with the Security and Happiness of such Numbers of your Majesty’s dutiful and loyal Subjects.”

BROWN: All of these things, though notice are not principally about the welfare of Africans, their judgments about the institutional, social, cultural order of the colonies, which is not to say that individuals and groups are not occasionally concerned, too, with the pain that enslaved men and women suffer. But that's not what principally motivates people when they are expressing anti-slavery views.

AMBUSKE: The king ignored the petition, and vetoed this latest attempt to restrict the slave trade.

AMBUSKE: The Virginians’ use of the word “inhumanity” in their petition to the king suggests a more fundamental anti-slavery argument: that slavery and the slave trade were violations of the laws of nature.

AMBUSKE: In 1764, Boston lawyer James Otis, Jr. argued as much in his pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Otis wrote to challenge Parliament’s claim of right to impose the Sugar Act of 1764 and the impending Stamp Act of 1765 on the colonies, and as he did so he argued against slavery:

JAMES OTIS, JR: “The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white and black…..Does it follow that ‘tis right to enslaved a man because he is black?....Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant.”

AMBUSKE: In other words, in the state of nature, all people were created equal. But as they gathered together in societies, created governments, and made laws, the few who acquired power could oppress – even enslave – the many. Otis knew this intimately. His father owned slaves.

AMBUSKE: Otis attacked slavery to illuminate liberty’s absence, or the threat of its loss, when proper safeguards were not in place to prevent a body like Parliament from passing new laws that claimed greater power and authority over the colonies than most British Americans believed it had.

AMBUSKE: But for Granville Sharp, the laws of man were equally troubling. In the colonies, somes statutes governing the enslavement of human beings were as plain as day. Some, like certain laws in Virginia, were more than a century old. And in his mind, the failure of Parliament and English judges to clarify the nation’s own laws made slavery in England a serious imperial problem.

BROWN: Granville Sharp, I think needs to be regarded as the first mover in the British anti-slavery movement. He is responsible for bringing the Somerset case to the courts. He works throughout the 1760s, to raise the question of the legality of slaveholding. In England, he's basically alone in doing that, in the 1770s. He's at once criticizing American slaveholders. And the British government for its support of the slave trade. He's basically the only person in the Anglo-American world who's saying, the 18th century equivalent of pox on both of your houses.

AMBUSKE: Sharp’s awareness of a London he rarely noticed before began in 1765 when he encountered a bruised, battered, and nearly blind enslaved man named Jonathon Strong teetering on the brink of death. He found Strong on Mincing Lande outside the home of his brother Dr. William Sharp. Strong was around seventeen years old. His master, a Barbadian lawyer and slave trader named David Lisle, had beaten him.

AMBUSKE: The Sharp brothers managed to get Strong to the hospital. When he recovered, they helped him gain employment in an apothecary. But two years later, Lisle found him. Keen to recover his investment in his enslaved man, he had Strong detained with the intention of selling him to a ship bound for Barbados. Strong managed to get word to Granville Sharp about his predicament, who persuaded the Lord Mayor of London and the city’s coroner to intervene and secure Strong’s release.

AMBUSKE: David Lisle and others claimed they had clear property rights in Jonathan Strong, whether in England or in Barbados, and that they were free to remove Strong from England as they pleased. Granville Sharp’s reading of English law suggested otherwise. As he argued in a 1769 treatise:

GRANVILLE SHARP: “the practice of importing Slaves into this kingdom, and retaining them as such, is an innovation entirely foreign to the spirit and intention of the laws now in force.”

AMBUSKE: He could find no Act of Parliament, no case in equity, no precedent in the common law of England to sustain legal slavery in the country. The assertion of property rights in others was, in his view:

GRANVILLE SHARP: “An innovation of such an unwarrantable and dangerous nature, that besides the gross infringement of the common and natural rights of mankind, it is plainly contrary to the laws and constitution of this kingdom.”

AMBUSKE: Sharp began searching for a case that he could bring before English courts to test his arguments, a case that would result in a precedent that finally resolved the question of slavery’s legality in England. Judges like Lord Chief Justice Mansfield were not eager to address the question directly. In two earlier cases involving enslaved people, Mansfield and the juries decided the cases while avoiding the question. But with James Somerset’s confinement aboard the Ann and Mary in December 1771, Sharp believed he had finally found a contest that even Mansfield could not ignore.

AMBUSKE: Like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, and Jonathan Strong, James Somerset had lived an Atlantic life, though one not always of his choosing.

AMBUSKE: Somerset was born in West Africa sometime around 1741. He was eight years old when he was sold into slavery. We don’t know the name his family gave him. It was lost in the waters of the Middle Passage. He was shipped to Virginia, where a Scottish merchant named Charles Steuart purchased him in Norfolk on August 1, 1749. Somerset became Steuart’s personal servant. The surviving evidence suggests that during his time in British America, he was known only as Somerset, and not James.

AMBUSKE: During his life in Virginia, Somerset ran errands for Steuart and forged relationships with other Virginians both Black and white. He witnessed at least one other of Steuart’s enslaved people run away. And he was probably aware of the case of an enslaved man named Jack who sued his master for his freedom in a Virginia court, although we don’t know how that case ended.

AMBUSKE: In 1764, the Crown named Steuart to the position of Receiver-General of Customs in Boston. He took Somerset with him to Massachusetts Bay.

AMBUSKE: Slavery was ever present in the New England colony, though it was not as essential to its economic and social fabric as it was in Virginia.

CHERNOH SESAY: Historians estimate that by mid-century, Boston's Black population numbered around 15,141 people, and this was maybe 10 to 15% of the city's population, which numbered just over 15,000.

SESAY: My name is Chernoh Sesay Jr. I am an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University and an historian of early America.

SESAY: However, by the late 1760s Boston's Black population had declined, probably to about half, and so two distinct waves of earlier importation had increased the city's enslaved population from roughly 400 people at the start of the century to its mid-century high of around 1,500 and then to deal with too many enslaved arrivals, from 1750 to 1760 Bostonians again sold approximately half of their Black population away from the city, to other American ports, or to the Caribbean.

AMBUSKE: By the early 1760s, enslaved and free people were suing in courts for their rights and liberties in greater numbers.

AMBUSKE: Aided by sympathetic white colonists, Black Bostonians challenged slavery and injustice using the law.

SESAY: There's a great deal of ambiguity in Massachusetts law, and, more broadly, New England law, about the status of enslaved people. Again, despite the fact that this was a society with slaves. This was a society that had completely legitimized the institution of slavery. Massachusetts does grant certain freedoms to its enslaved population, while at the same time, also, in very instances, invoking the color line to acknowledge that that slavery could be passed on through lines of racial dissent.

AMBUSKE: Somerset would have read in the newspapers and overheard in local taverns the stories of enslaved people like Jenny Slew.

SESAY: Jenny Slew's mother was white and her father was enslaved. And so beginning in 1765 Jenny sues her master John Whipple twice, and then two years later, Jenny actually wins her case. She wins it on the second try. Her argument effectively was that her status should follow that of her mother, and given that her mother was white, Jenny should not be enslaved and that she was, quote, restrained of her liberty, liberty without any lawful right or authority to do so, she is able to have her freedom recognized on the basis of this mixed parentage.

AMBUSKE Somerset no doubt knew about James:

SESAY: In 1768 James, who apparently was free at the time, attested that Richard Lechmere had quote with force and arms assaulted the said James imprisoned and restrained him of his liberty and held him in servitude.

SESAY: Chief Justice Francis Dana of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature actually rules in favor of James and argues that Richard has had to pay some money in reparations. Richard never winds up paying that money because James doesn't appear to court to claim the money. But nonetheless, this court case is important because on the one hand, it makes reference to this 1641, rule in Massachusetts law that defined an enslaved person only as somebody who is a, quote, lawful captive taken in just war. So James is able to use this idea to argue that, in fact, that didn't apply to him. He was always a free person, and in fact, damages were done to his body and his person by Richard Lechmere. And so, you know, given the paradox of kind of personhood and property in this particular case, the Massachusetts court argues that James was, in fact, never property, and by virtue of being free that that he actually was owed some recompense for having experienced this violence at the hands of a white person

AMBUSKE: Somerset carried that knowledge with him on the next phase of his Atlantic journey.

AMBUSKE: In the summer of 1768, Charles Steuart wrote to London complaining of exhaustion. He requested permission to return home. Steuart had little interest in dealing with Bostonians who were rioting in response to the Townshend Duties either. He brought Somerset with him to London in the fall of 1769, confident of his property rights in his enslaved man.

AMBUSKE: Like Robert Laurens who came after him, Somerset encountered a London of possibility. He had some independent movement in England, with occasional journeys that took him from London to Bristol while running errands for his master. Like Laurens, Somerset found a community of his own among the various London coffeehouses and other haunts. And he found religion. Some Christians believed that by converting to Christianity, the enslaved became free. In August 1771, Somerset was baptised in the Church of St. Andrew in Holborn. He adopted the first name “James.” Elizabeth Cade, Thomas Walkin, and John Marlow stood as his godparents.

 AMBUSKE: Two months later, on October 1, 1771, Somerset ran away from Steuart.

AMBUSKE: Fifty-six days passed before the men Steuart hired to hunt down James Somerset finally found him. Here’s Julie Flavell.

FLAVELL: It wasn't necessarily as easy as you'd think to run away and get freedom in Britain. There were no fugitive slave laws, of course, the way there were in the colonies, but nevertheless, if you didn't qualify for parish relief, you could literally end up starving to death. I found one story of a Maryland slave who ran away, and he ended up going back to theto another planter who was a friend of his master, and saying, can you please speak for me so I can go back, because he was just starving to death. And of course, that happened to native born English people who came into London too and couldn't get any relief. Black Americans were sometimes kidnapped and forced back to the to the plantations or to America, but sometimes because they were escaped slaves, but sometimes they were free Blacks who, you know, somebody just thought they could make money off. So there was that risk.

AMBUSKE: Steuart had Somerset confined in Captain John Knowles’ ship, the Ann and Mary, a ship bound for Jamaica, where he would be sold to work the sugar fields.

AMBUSKE: When they learned of his imprisonment, Somerset’s godparents sought legal counsel. On December 3rd, they petitioned Lord Mansfield, the Scottish-born chief justice of England’s Court of King’s Bench, for a writ of habeas corpus.

AMBUSKE: That evening, as Mansfield read the petition in his chambers, the legality of slavery in England was very much on his mind. The Chief Justice had only just overseen the criminal trial of a man called Stapylton, who stood accused of attempting to forcibly deport a Black man he claimed to own named Thomas Lewis. Granville Sharp was one of the instigators of the case. Though the jury found Stapylton guilty, they did so under instruction from Mansfield, who directed that they must find him guilty if Stapylton could produce no hard evidence that he actually owned Lewis. Much to Sharp’s disappointment, this allowed the court to avoid the more vexing question. And as Mansfield noted at the trial’s conclusion:

LORD MANSFIELD: "whether [slave owners] have this kind of property or not in England has never been solemnly determined."

AMBUSKE: Ironically, determining the answer to that solemn question had implications for Mansfield’s own family. Since the mid-1760s, Lord Mansfield and his wife Elizabeth had been raising their great niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle. Dido was born enslaved, the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew, Royal Naval officer Sir John Lindsay, and an enslaved West Indian woman named Maria Belle. Sir John was notorious for forcing himself on enslaved women and girls. Belle was only 15 years old when she gave birth to Dido in 1761.

AMBUSKE: When Sir John brought Dido and Maria to Lord Mansfield’s estate in 1765, Dido began working on Mansfield’s English farm. Later, she served as his scribe. In a painting completed years later, we see evidence of Dido’s nebulous existence between slavery and freedom. Dido appears with her white cousin, Elizabeth, who occupies the center space and faces the viewer. Elizabeth is wearing a pink dress adorned with lace. A garland of flowers crowns her head.

AMBUSKE: But it is Dido who catches the viewer’s eye. A young mixed-race woman of 17 emerges from out behind her cousin, wearing a pale blue silk dress that catches the sunlight. She has a turban on her head made of the same silk, affixed with a dark blue feather plume.   Dido wears a single, thick strand of pearls around her neck, and teardrop pearl earrings. She gives the viewer a knowing look with a subtle smile, as if we are all in on a good joke. It is the portrait of two aristocratic women, except one of them could be certain of her freedom beyond England’s shores, and the other could not.

AMBUSKE: Whatever his personal feelings may have been as a great uncle, Mansfield the lord chief justice wished to put off the question for as long as possible. He believed in the rule of law, but also the sanctity of private property rights. He knew that even a narrow ruling could have consequences he did not intend. And unlike previous cases, there was clear evidence that Somerset had been enslaved, facts he could not avoid.

AMBUSKE: On December 9th, Somerset appeared before Lord Mansfield, who ordered him released from the Ann and Mary. The chief justice scheduled a hearing for the new year to consider the legality of Somerset’s detainment. In the meantime, Somerset ventured to Granville Sharp’s home, knocked on his door, and asked for his help.

AMBUSKE: Sharp sensed a moment, one that could turn the tide. In the weeks that followed, he helped assemble and finance Somerset’s legal team, numbering five lawyers in all.

AMBUSKE: Charles Steuart, however, had his own attorneys. They were backed by wealthy West Indian planters who often brought enslaved people from the sugar islands with them to England.

AMBUSKE: Judges often ruled on habeas petitions fairly quickly. That the contest between Somerset and Steuart lasted for six months, spanning four separate hearings, tells us much about the importance all parties gave to the case and the preparation required to argue either side of it.  

AMBUSKE: As The London Evening Post reported in early February, the case had been brought:

LONDON EVENING POST: “with a view of trying the point how far a negro, or other black, is a slave in England, and consequently entirely at his master’s disposal.”

AMBUSKE: From January to June 1772, Somerset and Steuart’s lawyers delivered oral arguments for hours in front of a four-judge panel led by Lord Mansfield, and the spectators who watched from the gallery in Westminster Hall. Londoners followed along in the newspapers, and heard the latest in their coffeehouses.

AMBUSKE: Somerset’s case turned on whether English law permitted slavery on English soil, and whether colonial laws followed masters and slaves to England. Focusing on Somerset’s enslavement in Virginia, one of his lawyers argued:

SOMERSET LAWYER: “If the laws of Virginia reach here, and continue him a slave, all the laws of Virginia may as well reach here and so we are governed by the laws of Virginia, and not our own, at least all laws affecting his state as a slave.”

AMBUSKE: Putting a finer point on it, another argued that it wasn’t a question of whether slavery was lawful in the colonies, but whether it was legal in England. And even more to the point, “upon what principle is it that a man can become a dog for another man?”

AMBUSKE: The arguments by Somerset’s lawyers left Steuart’s attorneys scrambling to counter them. They tried to invoke old feudal laws, pointed to others regulating masters and servants, and noted that slavery was practiced in much of the world. But as the weeks passed, they failed to persuade Lord Mansfield and his fellow judges.

AMBUSKE: The case went to the judges for a decision on May 14, 1772. Even then, Mansfield tried to persuade Steuart that if he simply freed Somerset, there’d be no need for a ruling at all. Steuart, and the West Indian planters who supported him, were unmoved.

AMBUSKE: Londoners followed the case closely as they waited for a decision. So did Robert Laurens. And for a brief moment, we hear his own opinions on the impending decision, or at least what he wanted his master Henry to hear. In late May, Henry wrote to a friend in Charleston:

HENRY LAURENS: “They say Supper is ready, otherwise I was going to tell a long and comical Story, of a Trial between a Mr. Stuart and his Black Man James Somerset at King’s Bench, for Liberty. My Man Robert Scipio Laurens says, the Negroes that want to be free here, are Fools.”

AMBUSKE: The court reached a unanimous decision more than a month later. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield issued the court’s opinion, with Somerset present, and a number of other Black Britons watching in the gallery. Mansfield spoke from the bench, concluding that:

MANSFIELD: “The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.”

AMBUSKE: When Mansfield finished speaking, Somerset and the other Black observers approached the bench, bowing first to the Lord Chief Justice, and then to the lawyers, in what one person described as “Symptoms of the most extravagant Joy.”

AMBUSKE: Somerset rushed to tell Granville Sharp of the result. Sharp had waited for the judgment at home, fearing that his presence in court would antagonize Mansfield.

AMBUSKE: Despite the “extravagant Joy” some felt in that moment, we must be clear on what Mansfield’s decision in the case of James Somerset vs. Charles Steuart did, and did not, do. Christopher Brown helps us understand its nuances:

BROWN: The judgment of Lord Mansfield is that the rights that slaveholders want to exercise in England are not recognized under English law. The court does not saying that slavery does not exist. But the things that are required to enforce the right are not recognized by law, until parliament passes a law.

AMBUSKE: Mansfield found no precedent in common law to support Charles Steuart’s arguments, nor any positive law, or act of Parliament, to sustain Steuart’s claims either.

BROWN: So in other words, for example, you can't ship someone out of the kingdom, you can't seize somebody on the streets, imprison them, and then expel them from the country and send them back to their plantations in voluntarily. It's a violation of habeas corpus rights. From the standpoint of the courts, they're in England, they're subject to English law, nobody's subject to English law can be forced out of the kingdom, against the will of the crown.

AMBUSKE: Mansfield’s ruling had no bearing on colonial laws governing slavery nor English laws regulating the transatlantic slave trade. It didn’t lead to mass emancipation in England.  Nor did it affect the state of slavery in Scotland, a nation with a legal system of its own. Moreover, Mansfield intended his decision to have a narrow effect: to free Somerset from his illegal confinement only. Should Somerset ever leave England, Steuart might have a strong legal claim to him.

AMBUSKE: The ruling produced mixed reactions among white British Americans in North America, especially colonists heavily invested in slavery and slaving.

BROWN: I think it was an irritant. I think the outcome of the case was widely disliked. In many parts of the 13 colonies. I think it felt among those who were slightly more suspicious, it felt ominous.

AMBUSKE: Even then, despite Parliament’s recent attempts to impose new taxes on the colonies, and exercise greater authority over British America, few imagined that Parliament would intervene in North American slavery. Not when slavery and the slave trade powered so much of the Atlantic economy.

AMBUSKE: Nor did West Indian planters believe they had much to fear. Trevor Burnard, the late Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull explains:

TREVOR BURNARD: They felt that Somerset decision was a very bad decision, because it was a way of threatening property rights, by slaveholders in slaves. The two major arguments were that that was that Britain had always mandated slavery had been part of the laws forever. So they were they're entitled to own property in slaves. And they were English, there is English as anybody else that was English as people in Sussex or people in Yorkshire. They could do those sort of things. But the second thing is that they worried that any sort of attack on slavery whatsoever, any sort of any sort of way in which this plant of rights over and slave property would be limited, was going to get them very annoyed. So the leading intellectuals in the West Indies, Samuel Estwick in Barbados, Samuel Martin in Antigua, and Edward Long in Jamaica, all wrote lengthy denunciations for Somerset act. But I think just such as in North America, Somerset was important, but it was theoretical, it wasn't real. It wasn't that there was any real attack on slavery.

AMBUSKE: But as Mansfield himself knew, judgments once issued became open to interpretation, and some doors once opened, could never again be closed.

AMBUSKE: Somerset understood this more than most.

AMBUSKE: Eighteen days after the decision, John Riddle, a merchant, wrote to his friend Charles Steuart that he was about to set out for Weymouth on England’s southern coast. However, Riddle’s enslaved man, Dublin, had gone missing:

JOHN RIDDLE: “I am disappointed by Mr. Dublin, who has run away. He told the Servants that he had recd. a letter from his Unkle Sommerset acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their freedoms, & he was determined to leave me so soon as I returned from London which he did without even speaking to me. I don’t find that he is gone off with anything of mine. Only carried off all his own Cloths which I don’t know whether he had any right so to do. I believe I shall not give my Self any trouble to look after the ungrateful Villain.

AMBUSKE: Dublin’s escape is the last moment we hear from James Somerset. After the summer of 1772, he disappears from our view. But word of his case spread to British America, carried on packet ships blown by common winds that made the ocean small.

AMBUSKE: By mid-summer, newspapers in Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere were publishing updates on the case and Mansfield’s final judgement. In taverns and coffeehouses, and through word of mouth, enslaved and free people heard about Somerset’s triumph. And like Somerset’s advice to Dublin, at least some enslaved people began to believe that if they could make it to England, they would be free.

AMBUSKE: In late September 1773, John Austin Finnie placed an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette offering a reward for the recapture of two enslaved people who had fled from his home in Surry County. The one, a woman named Amy, was about 27 years old. She may have been born in the colonies, and had “a mild soft Way of speaking.” Finnie believed she was hiding in Portsmouth, a coastal port town just to the east, and passing as a free woman under the assumed name Sukey Jones. The other, Bacchus, an African-born man of 19 who spoke broken English, was reportedly laboring nearby as a free man.

AMBUSKE: Finnie “had some Reason to believe they will endeavour to get out of the Colony, particularly to Britain, where they imagine they will be free.” It was a belief, he feared, that was now “too prevalent” among enslaved people. 

AMBUSKE: Nine months later a different Bacchus, about 30 years old, fled from Gabriel Jones in Augusta County. Bacchus absconded with more than just himself, he took two white coats, a pair of blue plush breeches, a cloth pompadour waistcoat, white shirts, neat shoes with silver buckles, a fine hat, “sundry other Wearing Apparel,” and a great deal of cash. Jones suspected that Bacchus was concealing his identity by using the name John Christian.

AMBUSKE: Perhaps that was simply the new name that Bacchus had chosen for himself in hopes of living a new life abroad. Jones believed that John Christian was heading for Williamsburg, looking to board a ship bound for Great Britain, “from the Knowledge he has of the late Determination of Somerset’s Case.”

AMBUSKE: Hundreds of miles to the north, in Massachusetts Bay, some enslaved men turned to a different strategy. Felix was one of them. He was born in Africa in the early 1740s. In 1750, at age seven, he was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and transported to Boston where he was given a new name. Young Felix became the property of Mary and Abiha Holbrook, the headmaster of the Boston South Writing School.

AMBUSKE: Here’s Chernoh Sesay, Jr.

SESAY: Felix Holbrook was a man of African descent whose name appears first as the sole author of a petition written to the Massachusetts legislature in 1773 and this particular petition is really important. It stands out. It's the first anti-slavery petition of the Revolutionary era written in North America by a person of African descent.

AMBUSKE: Although we have no way of knowing if James Somerset and Felix knew each other, both came of age in a Boston world in which enslaved people challenged their enslavement. And Felix certainly knew about Somerset’s trials in England.

SESAY: There are several direct and indirect connections between England's Somerset case decided in 1772 and Felix's petitions. Felix, certainly knew about this ruling, because it was much detailed in Boston newspapers.

AMBUSKE: In early 1773, Felix built on the foundations of this recent history when he petitioned Governor Thomas Hutchison and the provincial assembly directly for freedom.

AMBUSKE: In a short petition, dated January 6, 1773, one drafted with the help of white allies and very carefully worded to advocate for his rights without offending the sensibilities of provincial officials, many of whom owned enslaved people, Felix stated quite plainly, that as enslaved people, legally:

FELIX HOLBROOK: “We have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country!”

SESAY: Felix never mentions explicitly the Somerset case, however, he expressly mentioned anti-slavery efforts, quote, “on both sides of the water.”

AMBUSKE: Felix asked for mercy and grace on behalf of his fellow enslaved, lobbying the legislature to pass new laws that provided for their relief. Yet, knowing his audience all too well, he asked that this be done in a manner least burdensome to enslavers.

AMBUSKE: In April 1773, Felix went one step further. Encouraged by public support for his first petition, Felix, along with Sambo Freeman, Peter Bestes, and Chester Joie, now presumed the right to instruct their town representative, making a claim to citizenship in the king’s province. Referencing the legislature’s recent efforts to resist the Townshend Duties and the Stamp Act, to prevent, as some white colonists argued, Parliament’s attempts to enslave British America, the petitioners:

PETITIONERS: “Cannot but wish and hope, Sir, that you will have the same grand object, we mean civil and religious liberty, in view in your next session. The divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast on this continent, except such as are bribed to assist in executing the execrable plan.”

AMBUSKE: As he had in January, Felix and his fellow petitioners appealed to white sensibilities. They pledged to emigrate to Africa should they be freed and asked for no more than reasonable financial relief.

AMBUSKE: Two months later in June, they were more explicit.

SESAY: The tone of the petitions becomes much more impatient. And I also think there's a kind of refinement of the argument.

AMBUSKE: In a third petition, they argued that though they were held in bondage by the laws of men, by the laws of nature, they ought to be free:

PETITIONERS: “That your Petitioners apprehend thay have in common with other men a natural right to be free and without molestation injoy such Property as they may acquire by their industries or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men.”

AMBUSKE: The provincial assembly deferred debate on the June petition until the following January. When the House of Representatives finally considered it in early 1774, they incorporated the petition’s arguments into a new act banning the importation of slaves into the province. Although the bill did not call for abolition, it was an important moment, a clear sign of enslaved voices shaping political events. Similar efforts to ban the trade had failed in the recent past. Unfortunately, this new bill suffered the same fate.

AMBUSKE: In early March 1774, Governor Hutchinson prorogued the assembly.  A new imperial storm was on the horizon, leaving the colony’s government in disarray, and British America on the precipice of disaster. For the moment, questions of slavery and freedom in Massachusetts Bay would have to wait.

AMBUSKE:  Three thousand miles from Boston, Henry Laurens was making arrangements to leave “home” and return to South Carolina. Whether Robert Laurens would be coming with him, was another matter.

AMBUSKE: In the fall of 1772, months after the Somerset decision, Henry and some companions set off for Geneva on a tour of the continent. The journey took the party through France on their way back to England and Robert went with them as Henry’s servant. Despite occasional difficulties controlling Robert’s time and behavior, and the implications of Somerset’s case, Henry was mostly confident in his mastery over his enslaved man, and certain of his property rights in him.

AMBUSKE: A year later, the winds were blowing in a different direction. In April 1773, Henry once again ventured to Geneva, this time leaving Robert to serve Henry’s friends at Aston Hall in Shifnal, a town in the English countryside. Robert, it seems, was no longer in Henry’s good graces.

AMBUSKE: Months later, in February 1774, both men were back in London. Henry busied himself tying up loose ends before sailing back to British America, settling accounts with merchants in Bristol, and negotiating a new shipment of enslaved people with merchants in London on behalf of a planter in Charleston. He sent Robert on an errand back to Aston Hall, but Robert had no intention of ever leaving England again. He broke into Aston Hall, stole a ham among other things, before he was caught and arrested. Here’s Julie Flavell:

FLAVELL:  Henry was absolutely beside himself, and he thought, somehow, I have to find a way to get him back to Carolina.

AMBUSKE: Perhaps Robert simply wanted money for himself; more likely he wanted it to start a new life with an English woman with whom he had fallen in love. And he may have realized that despite Somerset’s victory, his own life was still in danger.

AMBUSKE: Robert was convicted of the theft in March. Yet, Henry believed he had found a way to keep hold of his enslaved man.

FLAVELL: What Henry wanted to do, he figured Robert would get transported for the theft. So he wanted to do something which, in my research, I've discovered was done by a number of other planter families. He would then go to the authorities and offer to pay for Robert's transportation, which meant that when he got back to Carolina, he would still be Henry's bondsman.

AMBUSKE: In Great Britain, subjects convicted of certain crimes were often sentenced to transportation to the colonies, where they might be put to better use expanding the king’s new dominions, instead of corrupting the old ones. Henry believed he could convince the authorities to release Robert to his custody and allow him to transport his enslaved man back across the Atlantic.

FLAVELL: But Robert wasn't sentenced to transportation. He was sentenced to a year in jail, and of course, there was nothing Henry could do to get at him while he was detained at His Majesty's pleasure. Henry had to leave. He had to leave Robert behind in Britain, and the two men never saw one another again. So Robert actually managed to get free.

AMBUSKE: On June 17, 1773, Phillis Wheatley completed her second Atlantic crossing when she arrived in London.

AMBUSKE: Her first voyage had been very different. Twelve years earlier, the captain of a slaving ship out of Boston, owned by the merchant Thomas Fitch, purchased the captive girl who would become Phillis in Senegambia. She was probably eight years old.

AMBUSKE: Phillis spent months aboard the ship. She was one of 75 enslaved people who survived the journey. The voyage west began with a cargo of 96. She arrived in Boston in the summer of 1761, where she was eventually purchased by John Wheatley as a servant for his wife Susanna. The Wheatleys named her Phillis, after the ship that carried her to British America.

AMBUSKE: The Wheatleys taught her to read and write English. She learned ancient Greek and Latin, reading the works of some of the greatest writers of the ancient world. It quickly became clear that she had a knack for letters and verse. Soon, she began writing poetry of her own. In December 1767, at age 13, Phillis appeared in print for the first time with a poem in the pages of Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury. More soon followed. By 1772, Phillis was making plans to publish a book of poetry.

AMBUSKE: Publishing most books in the eighteenth century required patrons. That was difficult enough under normal circumstances, to say nothing of a young woman enslaved. Despite supporters in Boston, Phillis and the Wheatleys believed that her best chance was in London, the heart of the British publishing world.  

AMBUSKE: In the summer of 1773, Phillis accompanied the Wheatleys’ son, Nathaniel, to England. They arrived one year after the conclusion of James Somerset’s case.

AMBUSKE: Armed with letters of introduction from some of Boston’s leading men, Phillis gained the support for the publication of her book from prominent Britons such as Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and Lord Dartmouth, one of His Majesty’s Secretaries of State. She had an audience with Benjamin Franklin, who had been living in London for years, lobbying the British government on behalf of several colonies. She may have nearly had one with the king.

AMBUSKE: Like many British Americans before her, she toured the British Museum, visited the Tower of London, and marvelled at Westminster Abbey. On more than one occasion, her tour guide was one of Somerset’s chief advocates, Granville Sharp.

AMBUSKE: By the summer of 1773, Phillis was not only a gifted poet, she was also a shrewd businesswoman with a strong negotiating hand. Surely, she knew of Somerset’s victory before she left Boston; surely, she knew that once in England, Nathaniel Wheatley could not force her to return home.

AMBUSKE: At the close of their six-week visit to London, Phillis gained a promise from Nathniel that if she returned to Boston, the family would free her. Phillis began her third and final voyage across the Atlantic on July 26, 1773. It was very different from the first two.

AMBUSKE: Back home in Boston that October, Wheatley wrote to David Worcester, a correspondent in New Haven, Connecticut, recounting her visit to London and her new life as a free woman. She had taken no chances, sending a copy of her manumission papers to friends in London, for safekeeping. 

AMBUSKE: But now, to business. Phillis’ book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, had been published in London. It was the first book of poetry published by a British American of African descent. Copies were now on their way, and the sale of those volumes would help support her now that she was free. As she informed Worcester: 

PHILLIS WHEATLEY: “I expect my Books which are publishd in London in Capt. Hall, who will be here I believe in 8 or 10 days. I beg the favour that you would honour the enclos'd Proposals, & use your interest with Gentlemen & Ladies of your acquaintance to subscribe also, for the more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage as I am to have half the sale of the Books, This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon.”

AMBUSKE: Phillis underestimated the arrival of the ship Dartmouth by several weeks. The ship, captained by James Hall, did not put into the port of Boston until November 28th. Phillis had no way of knowing what else the ship carried in its hold.

AMBUSKE: The Dartmouth was headed for Boston with 114 chests of East India Company tea.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

AMBUSKE: ​Learn how you can support the series at r2studios.org, where you’ll also find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. ​

AMBUSKE: Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.

AMBUSKE:  Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Christopher Brown, Julie Flavell, Trevor Burnard, and Chernoh Sesay Jr. for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE: Special thanks to Grant Stanton.

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Amber Pelham, Anne Fertig, Gillian MacDonald, Norman Roger, Craig Gallagher, and Adam McNeil

AMBUSKE: Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.