page_title: Somerset v Stewart
section_title: Domestic effect
hierarchical_section_title: Somerset v Stewart / Significance / Domestic effect
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825). The original is in Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland. Français&#160;: Portrait des deux cousines Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay et Elizabeth Murray, petites nièces de Lord Mansfield, qui est à l'origine de l'interdition de l'esclavage sur le sol anglais. Le tableau se trouve à Scone Palace, Perthshire, Ecosse.
context_page_description: Somerset v Stewart 98 ER 499 is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772 relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. Lord Mansfield decided that:
  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 [statute], 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.
  Although Britain participated extensively in the Atlantic slave trade and in establishing and governing slave colonies, slave holding within England itself had not been authorized by statutory law, and Lord Mansfield found it also to be unsupported in England by the common law.
context_section_description: While Somerset's case provided a boon to the abolitionist movement, it did not end the holding of slaves within England. It also did not end British participation in the slave trade or slavery in other parts of the British Empire, where colonies had established slave laws. Despite the ruling, escaped slaves continued to be recaptured in England. Just a year after the Somerset ruling, there was a newspaper report of a runaway being recaptured and committing suicide in England. In addition, contemporary newspaper advertisements show that slaves continued to be bought and sold in the British Isles.   
  It was not until 1807 that Parliament decided to suppress the slave trade, not only outlawing the practice by British subjects but also seeking to suppress the trade by foreigners, through the sea power of the Royal Navy. Although the slave trade was suppressed, slavery continued in various parts of the British Empire until it was abolished by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The slave merchants who funded Stewart's defence were not anxious about James Somerset or the relatively limited number of slaves in Great Britain but about how abolition might affect their overseas interests. In the end, merchants could continue trading slaves for 61 years after Lord Mansfield's decision. Commentators have argued that the decision's importance lay in the way it was portrayed at the time and later by the newspapers, with the assistance of a well-organised abolitionist movement.
  Abolitionists argued that the law of England should apply on English ships even if not in the Colonies. Stewart's counsel, funded and encouraged by the slave merchants, argued that the consequence of a judgment in Somerset's favour might be to free the slaves in England, said to be 14,000 in number. As Lord Mansfield said in the case report, "The setting 14,000 or 15,000 men at once free loose by a solemn opinion is much disagreeable in the effects it threatens". He tried to persuade Stewart to settle by releasing Somerset and so avoid a decision, as he had done in other cases.
  In 1780, Mansfield's house had been firebombed by a Protestant mob because of his judgments in support of rights for Catholics. In the Thames Ditton case Lord Mansfield appeared to seek to limit the influence of the Somerset case.
  Lord Mansfield freed James Somerset by his ruling and did so in the face of the 1729 opinion of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General, men whom Mansfield in the Somerset case described as "two of the greatest men of their own or any times". The prominence of the case emphasized the issues to the public. It was widely, and incorrectly, interpreted as ending slavery in Great Britain. Even Mansfield himself considered slavery to be legal in England. When Mansfield died, his 1782 will granted his mulatto grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, "her freedom" from a slavery that clearly still existed.
  Nonetheless, abolitionists considered this case to be Lord Mansfield's legacy and a watershed in the abolition of slavery. It is an example in English law of the maxim he quoted as a warning to the parties in the case before he began his months of deliberation, "Let justice be done though the heavens fall".
caption: Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle with her cousin Elizabeth Murray, who lived with Lord Mansfield.
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