American slaves took interest when sporadic cases by individual African Americans questioned the rights of white ownership in court and won their freedom. They took heart after the Somerset ruling in which England’s Chief Justice William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield stated that the air of England was too free for a slave to breathe and on June 22, 1772, ordered that “the black man must be discharged.” With the rise of patriotic fervor in America, black hopes soared. Colonists demanded a government in which the yoke of slavery be torn from their limbs so all may live in a land that embraced individual liberties. And while white men dressed as Indians dumped tea into Boston’s and New York City’s harbors in protest of denied freedoms, groups of African American slaves petitioned the courts, boldly questioning the legality of slavery. At a time when the birth of a nation was being founded on the principal of self evident truths – that all men are created equal, the courts would veil themselves in hypocritical legalese.
Prior to Chief Justice Mansfield’s explosive decision, freeing blacks in the British Isles, some African Americans had responded to the temper of the times, most particularly in the northern colonies. In the decade before Lexington and Concord sparked the American Revolution, several African Americans had sought their individual freedom in court and won. They charged their masters with ‘restraining them of their liberties.’ A mulatto woman sued for her freedom in November, 1766, in which John Adams noted that he had not witnessed such a case up to that time and wrote, “Though I have heard that there had been many.” Late in 1769, a slave named Boston was successful in his suit against his owner John Swain, the Nantucket Court granting the whaleman his freedom. In the fall of 1773, Caesar Hendrick charged Richard Greenleaf of Newburyport with “detaining him in slavery.” The jury freed Caesar, awarding him damages and court costs. A year later, an African American belonging to Caleb Dodge of Beverly, Massachusetts was similarly successful in a court action.[1]
Though freedom suits were invariably won, they were not very common. Court and lawyer fees were expensive and the procedure was slow. In some instances, blacks pooled their meager funds to help an individual as well as passionate abolitionist lawyers reduced their fees to help right an injustice. However, all these cases were individual. They did nothing to address universal freedom like the Mansfield case in England for they did not extend beyond the parties involved. After the Mansfield case became known in America, “suits for service” gradually gave way to petitions.
Word of Mansfield’s decision made the press in America. Just prior to the decision that freed blacks living in England, a London correspondent for the Virginia Gazette wrote, “Since the commencement of the suit now pending in the Court of the King’s Bench relative to the freedom of a Negro servant, the spirit of Liberty had diffused itself so far amongst that species of people…”[2] Three days after the decision, the same correspondent wrote that two hundred blacks “with their ladies,” held a public entertainment in Westminster “to celebrate the triumph of their Brother Somerset… Lord Mansfield’s health was echoed round the room.” He added that the evening festivities ended with a ball.[3]
However there were to be no celebrated balls within the thirteen colonies. Neither governors, legislatures, nor the courts took notice of the Mansfield decision, though a thread of hope wove amongst those expressing abolitionist views. The decision stimulated requests for legislative action, focusing not on individual cases, but broadening suits to attack the legality of slavery as a whole. If the institution of slavery could be cast down in England, surely it would be the same in America, an enlightened land that claimed freedoms for all. This renewed surge that challenged the foundations of slavery, though it first fell upon deaf ears, would ultimately prove to hasten slavery’s downfall in New England.
By early 1773, African Americans in and around regions of abolitionist sentiments, such as Massachusetts and Philadelphia, formed groups of many slaves, similar to present day class action suits. They filed petitions, asking the General Court to grant them relief from slavery’s inhumanities. “We have no property! We have no wives! We have no children! No city! No country!” On June 25, 1773, the Massachusetts legislature appointed a “Committee on the Petition of Felix Holbrook and others who sought to be liberated from the ‘State of Slavery.’[4] Three days later the committee recommended that the petition be tabled until the next session. When several of the complainants visited Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson to enlist his support, he told them that his instructions made it impossible to assist them.
In May of 1774, the slaves sent another petition to Governor Hutchinson and the Massachusetts legislature. They described themselves as, “a Grate Number of Blacks…who…are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian country.” They said that they were a free born people who had never forfeited that blessing by any compact agreement. Some of them “were stolen from the bosoms of our tender parents and from a populous, pleasant and plentiful country and brought hither to be made slaves for life in a Christian land.” Six weeks later they requested a supplement to their suit in the form of a land grant that “some part of the unimproved land, belonging to the province, for a settlement…” In response to this petition, the legislature debated “the state and circumstances of the Negro slave in this province.” Even in Massachusetts, where patriot sentiment clambered the loudest for the natural God given rights of personal freedom and liberties, the vote was taken and simply stipulated that “the matter now subside.”
The winds of change that blew across America in 1774 carried with it a freshness that gave birth to an infant nation, an experiment in life, liberty, and a strong judicial system. Yet at the dawn of this new age of enlightenment, the air of America, unlike that of Mother England, would only allow white lungs to draw the sweet breath of freedom. For the black man and woman, their suffering would carry on far beyond the Declaration of Independence’s hypocrisy, beyond the violence of a Civil War, beyond lynchings and segregation to the Civil Rights Movement nearly two hundred years later, and even then, to the here and now, as evidenced by the vocal bigotry of White Supremacists, the indifference of the political party presently in power, and the repeated cries of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. American courts, from its infancy, have proven over the decades that justice, true justice is fragile. The rights of personal freedoms never assured, spinning in a constant flux of influence, greed, and power, ultimately shrouded in many shades of liberty.
For Further Reading on the Mansfield Decision, Slavery in Colonial American, and African Americans Who Fought in the American Revolutionary War, check out these Free Previews on Amazon
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Cato’s Road House. Colonial African American Tavern Owner who Originated the term Cocktail
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Self-evident? A Story of African American Soldiers in Washington’s Army
African American History – Over 50 Great Books to Chose From on Amazon
100 Great Children’s and Young Adult Books on African American History
RESOURCES
Finkleman, Paul. Slavery Race and the American Legal System 1700-1872. 2007: The Lawbook Exchange, Clark, NJ.
Johnson, Charles & Smith, Patricia. Africans in America, Americans Journey Through Slavery. 1998: Harcourt Inc., New York, NY.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. 1961: The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Making of America. 1996: Simon and Schuster, New York, NY.
Virginia Gazette, May 7 & Sept. 3, 1772.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Quarles, pp. 38 & 39.
[2] Virginia Gazette, May 7, 1772.
[3] Virginia Gazette, Sept. 3, 1772, Quarles, pg. 38.
[4] Quarles, pg. 39.