North American Calm, West Indian storm: the politics of the Somerset decision in the British Atlantic

Abstract

ABSTRACT A significant historiographical literature posits that Lord Mansfield’s famous decision in the 1772 Somerset case deeply threatened slaveholders throughout the British Empire. Colonial slaveholders had good reason to believe that this ruling threatened their power over their slaves, and West Indian planters and their representatives publicly expressed fear and outrage about Mansfield’s ruling and what it represented. But the bulk of North American slaveholders did not either in public or in private. This article attributes that relative silence largely to the links between the politics of slavery and those of the imperial crisis of the 1770s. It was British emancipatory policies during the American Revolutionary War, rather than this decision, that panicked North American slaveholders and ultimately taught them their need to control the state.