Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 140.pdf/463

454 already in very bad health, and died after being in office eight months. "Two things," he said on his death-bed, "I wish to see accomplished: peace with Europe, and the abolition of the slave trade; but of the two, I wish more the latter." He had to bequeath the completion of this work to his successors. Lord Grey (then Lord Howick) passed the bill triumphantly through the Commons, and Lord Grenville with difficulty carried it to a final issue on the 25th of March, 1807, a few minutes before the ministers resigned disgusted with the king's obstinacy concerning the Catholics. Next year the United States declared the slave trade to be piracy, herein going beyond England in severity.

The agitation against the slave trade, carried on in Parliament by the eloquence of Wilberforce, and aided by the learning and zeal of many eminent talents, was a great enlightenment to England; but it was not the first step towards emancipation. A first-rate judicial sentence had already pronounced against slavery: which was the more remarkable and the more important, since English judges in general, as other civil officials, had indirectly sanctioned the institution. Under the circumstances it was to be expected. In the colonies where slavery existed, every man of importance held slaves; the income of all the educated classes depended on slavery. The very men appointed as protectors of slaves were generally slaveholders, and the judges as well as the clergy were implicated in the same interest. When the colonial lawyers and judges recognized slaves as property, and their documents were produced in an English court, where no advocate stood up to protest in the interest of the blacks that men and women were not and could not be property, no one could expect an English judge to open this question of himself. As he could not effect the freedom of the human beings called "property," he would seem to himself to be injuring a white person with no benefit to the blacks. In the result the slave-owners were able to claim that their right of property in slaves had been again and again acknowledged by English judges. Yet, as hinted above, a critical case had already occurred, which deserves here spe cial detail.

A planter brought to London a slave called James Somerset, in 1772, and when he fell ill, inhumanly turned him out of doors. Mr. Granville Sharp, a philanthropic barrister, found him in the street, placed him in a hospital where he recovered his health, and then got him a situation as a servant. Two years after, his old master arrested and imprisoned him as a runaway slave. Mr. Sharp brought the case before the lord mayor, who ordered Somerset to be set at liberty. But the master seized him violently in presence of the lord mayor and Mr. Sharp; on which the latter brought an action against the master for assault. The question of law was finally referred to the twelve judges, in February and May of that year, who decided unanimously that no man can be accounted a slave on English territory. This decision is often quoted, as though the soil of Great Britain made a slave free; but that is a legal fiction. Evidently it is only when a slave (so-called) comes within the reach of an English court that his freedom is declared. At that time the American colonies were beginning their quarrel with Great Britain, but had not renounced allegiance. All the colonies were subject to the common law of England; and if in Virginia and Jamaica there had been a judge as upright and able as Lord Mansfield and a philanthropist as zealous as Granville Sharp, it would seem that slavery might have been dissolved by a few judicial trials.

This decision was of vast importance in opening the eyes of the British public to the essential illegality of a system morally so iniquitous. Honest, plain men were emboldened to look to the bottom of the case, when the shield and screen of law was removed. What if Parliament were to enact that in some county in England five persons out of six should become the property of the sixth, just as horses and cows are, and that the progeny forever of these thus enslaved should be slaves? Would it be within the competence of Parliament so to vote? Or if by mere violence a part of the community were enslaved to another party, and Parliament and the courts were infamously to connive at it, would custom ever make the iniquity equitable, and vest in the violent oppressors a right of compensation when no longer allowed to defraud men of their dearest natural rights? Every freeman who justified insurrection against royal tyranny was necessarily led to justify slave insurrection against their masters, however he might shudder at possible fierce retaliation for past injuries. Thus the mental revolution of England was begun, and in spite of the distraction of two dreadful wars — or we may say three — against the American colonists, against the French republic, and, after the short peace of Amiens, against Napoleon I., the movement was at