Somerset Case Research Articles

Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson

Reviewed by: Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson Cara Rogers Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. By Thomas Jefferson. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Robert Pierce Forbes. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. lx, 348. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-300-22687-4.) Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia will never attract as much attention as the Declaration of Independence, but it is nonetheless a monumental work for scholars of American political thought, science, literature, race, slavery, and more. This new edition of Notes, edited by Robert Pierce Forbes, is an important accomplishment because it is the first to thoroughly incorporate footnotes referencing Jefferson’s original manuscript, allowing readers to trace changes from that initial draft to the first printed edition of 1785. Notes had a complicated journey to publication, and Forbes’s introduction will aid readers in moving beyond Jefferson’s overly simplistic descriptions of his work to better understand its true complexity. Forbes’s work also sharply differs from previous scholarly editions of Notes by arguing that Jefferson deliberately “used Notes to revise the Declaration’s great truth that ‘all men are created equal,’” prompting a new and lasting wave of racism and strengthening the institution of slavery (p. lx). In a somewhat confusing account of Jefferson’s changing position on equality, Forbes claims that young Jefferson held antislavery views, but that he later “felt he had no other choice” but to “decouple” the “stirring pronouncements of the Declaration . . . from Virginia’s enslaved African Americans” (pp. xlv, xliv). According to Forbes, Jefferson made this choice partly to save himself from potential charges of hypocrisy, and partly because of the 1772 Somerset decision, in which an English judge ruled that “slavery was incompatible with natural law” (p. xlv). Although the Somerset case ultimately had no legal effect on slavery in the independent American republic, Forbes implies that [End Page 343] Jefferson needed to bolster his right to own human beings because of rising antislavery sentiment in Europe. Therefore, in the “Laws” chapter of the Notes, Jefferson rhetorically reduced Black Americans to the position of animals in order to subtly justify their continued enslavement. Moreover, Forbes asserts that Notes presented the “earliest plan for the removal and colonization of Black Americans” (p. xix). There are three problems with Forbes’s claims. First, earlier colonization plans included a 1773 proposal by four enslaved men in Massachusetts and another by the Rhode Island antislavery minister Samuel Hopkins (see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation [New York, 2016]). Second, there is evidence that Jefferson continued to oppose slavery during and after the publication of Notes—such as his authorship of an antislavery constitution for Virginia in 1783 and his ambitious (but never fully implemented) attempt to utilize tenant farming as a way to transition enslaved people to freedom in the late 1780s (see Cara Rogers, “The French Experiment: Thomas Jefferson and William Short Debate Slavery, 1785–1826,” American Political Thought 10 [Summer 2021]: 327–62). Finally, a careful comparison of the different versions of Notes suggests that Jefferson revised his remarks on race and slavery after receiving a prescient critique from fellow naturalist Charles Thomson, who commented that Notes “‘might seem to justify slavery’” (p. 298). Thomson suggested that Jefferson delete every remark on racial inferiority; Jefferson instead softened his conclusions, moving from statements of fact to speculation and adding several harsh condemnations of Virginians who owned enslaved people. Rather than using his Notes to alter the antislavery implications of the Declaration of Independence, then, Jefferson used the work to appeal to the sensibilities of racist Virginians, offering them the option of colonization while insisting that slavery was incompatible with republican government. After all, he asked, “can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” (p. 250). Scholars should continue to investigate the various iterations of Notes in order to provide further insight into Jefferson’s views; Forbes’s edition will aid in the...

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

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.

Changes of Air: The Somerset Case and Mansfield Park's Imperial Plots

Changes of Air: The Somerset Case and Mansfield Park's Imperial Plots

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason by Norman S. Poser (review)

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason. By Norman S. Poser.

The counter-revolution of 1776: slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America

Preface Introduction 1 Rebellious Africans: How Caribbean Slavery Came to the Mainland 2 Free Trade in Africans? Did the Glorious Revolution Unleash the Slave Trade? 3 Revolt! Africans Conspire with the French and Spanish 4 Building a White Pro-Slavery Wall: The Construction of Georgia 5 The Stono Uprising: Will the Africans Become Masters and the Europeans Slaves? 6 Arson, Murders, Poisonings, Shipboard Insurrections: The Fruits of the Accelerating Slave Trade 7 The Biggest Losers: Africans and the Seven Years' War 8 From Havana to Newport, Slavery Transformed: Settlers Rebel against London 9 Abolition in London: Somerset's Case and the North American Aftermath 10 The Counter-Revolution of 1776 Notes Index About the Author

Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire

Most scholars who have written about the law of slavery in England have focused on Somerset’s case of 1772, which had an intellectual impact and that challenged slavery not only in England itself but across the British Empire. While we recognize that Somerset represented some change in practice, historians have searched for consistency in earlier rulings, following a general tendency to see the Common Law as unchanging and the winning argument in the Somerset case itself. As a consequence, the current consensus is that the Common Law was somewhat confused, but that some coerced servitude was legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach. England was committed to a free society, but slavery was an anomaly that was tolerated because it was far away and across the ocean. Occasionally the historiography goes back as far as the seventeenth or even sixteenth century, to cite obscure cases, or even to the medieval period, when a kind of slavery was clearly legal. Seeing the slave law for the British Empire from the perspective of the famous Somerset case of 1772 has obscured the vibrant debate within the English judicial system over the legality of slavery in England and its empire over more than a century. Not only was the Common Law on slavery changing profoundly during the seventeenth century; it was an instrument of policy. When Charles II failed to pass an imperial slave code via Parliament, he turned to the courts. His judges—really his in that they held their seats “during his pleasure”--presided over a series of rulings that made slavery legal in England itself, as well as its empire.

The White Female as Effigy and the Black Female as Surrogate in Janet Schaw ’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debates over the propriety of the institution of slavery in the Empire were at the forefront of Great Britain's politics. Numerous cases had been heard in the high courts addressing the status of black individuals--whether free or enslaved--upon soil. As Deirdre Coleman notes, the British public's fascination with complexion can be seen as symptomatic of the period's fascination with new identity and status for Afro-Britons following Lord Mansfield's decision in the Somerset case (1772) (169). Despite the fact that the institution of slavery and its by-products of material wealth and goods pervaded virtually all social strata in some form or fashion, abolitionist efforts, especially among women, were on the rise. White females throughout the empire were becoming ever more aware of their complicity in the perpetuation of this inhumane system. As means of elucidating the way the reality of Caribbean slavery permeated all areas of society, it proves useful to look at the ways Janet Schaw and Jane Austen, two white female authors of the period, represented--or failed to overtly represent--within their writing the institution of slavery and particularly its psychological and physical effects on white females. From 1774-1776, Schaw, wealthy, middle-aged, white, Scottish woman, sailed from Scotland to the West Indies and North Carolina to visit her brothers and their families who had relocated to the New World. During her travels, she penned letters to female friend of like social standing in which she described her journey. These letters were published posthumously as Journal of A Lady of Quality from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774-1776. (1) Four decades after Schaw privately described her adventure, Austen published Mansfield Park, the plot of which centers around an English baronet, who owns property in Antigua, and his family in England. Employing Joseph Roach's concept of the human as presented in Echoes in the Bone, the second chapter of his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, where he posits that an economy of slave-produced abundance, expensive young women may come to signify the importance of excess itself, the symbolic crossing point of material production/consumption and reproductive fecundity, I argue, as evidenced in the aforementioned works by Schaw and Austen, that white women ultimately became the living effigies to the black female surrogate victims within the system of slavery (42). To provide further evidence to this attestation, I turn to Joyce Green MacDonald's article Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko After Behn, in which she notes that as means of justifying their dalliances with their female slaves, at least few white male authors penned accounts in which they attempted to persuade white women of their superiority over black women because of their distance from sullying sexuality, creating a new social and economic status for planters' wives and daughters in the colonies (75). In examining Schaw's A Journal of Lady of Quality and Austen's Mansfield Park through the lens afforded by Roach and MacDonald, one becomes aware of the representation of the white female and black female surrogate. Thus the very concept of woman within the system becomes the monstrous double (Girard 272). In Schaw's words and Austen's deafening silences, the effects of the system of slavery--both psychologically and physically--on white women of the Empire corroborates the concept of their status as effigies. Roach presents multilayered argument for the role of both performance and memory in rituals which accompany dying, death, and the (relocation of the dead among members of the Black Atlantic. (2) The employment of an effigy is vital in the establishment of creative memory. Roach points out, [an effigy] fills by means of surrogation vacancy created by the absence of an original (36). …

After Somerset: The Scottish Experience

The Scottish evidence examined here demonstrates the power of the popular understanding that, in Somerset's Case (1772), Lord Mansfield had freed the slaves, and shows how the rapid spread of this view through newspapers, magazines, and more personal communications, encouraged those held as slaves in Scotland to believe that Lord Mansfield had freed them – at least if they reached England.

Negro comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British empire fight the U.S. before emancipation

Preface Introduction 1 Rebellious Africans: How Caribbean Slavery Came to the Mainland 2 Free Trade in Africans? Did the Glorious Revolution Unleash the Slave Trade? 3 Revolt! Africans Conspire with the French and Spanish 4 Building a White Pro-Slavery Wall: The Construction of Georgia 5 The Stono Uprising: Will the Africans Become Masters and the Europeans Slaves? 6 Arson, Murders, Poisonings, Shipboard Insurrections: The Fruits of the Accelerating Slave Trade 7 The Biggest Losers: Africans and the Seven Years' War 8 From Havana to Newport, Slavery Transformed: Settlers Rebel against London 9 Abolition in London: Somerset's Case and the North American Aftermath 10 The Counter-Revolution of 1776 Notes IndexAbout the Author

Meditations on Aliens and Slaves

I'd like to connect the early slave cases I've found from the English high court in the late seventeenth century to arguments about blacks as aliens in the New Republic. These late seventeenth century cases created the basis for an imperial slave code via the courts (a common law of slavery, if you will). They justified slavery on the basis that those who were not subjects--especially those who were the subjects of heathen princes-- were aliens, and thus outside the protection of the law; therefore they could be considered property. These cases have been basically ignored in the modern historiography. However they were cases that lawyers in the New Republic still knew well--Jefferson has elaborate comments on them in his legal commonplace book, for example. Recovering that legal conversation and those precedents from the seventeenth century, which persisted in the common law for Antebellum America despite the Somerset case and Revolution-- sheds insight into the debates over the status of slaves in the early republic, both in discourse and law. For it was the argument that they were aliens which underpinned the legal logic & the common law precedent that they could be held as simple property or The process by which masters established ownership ultimately rested on this logic. Understanding these legal precedents help to explain Taney's opinion in Dred Scot in 1857: he attempted to provide a final solution to the slavery problem by defining all blacks as non-citizens, without claims to rights. He thereby reverted back to earlier legal precedents that held that aliens could be stripped of all human claims, could be treated as animals or goods. The crucial original case appeared in 1677 and was called Butts vs. Penny.

'Twelve Judges in Scarlet' The Seventeenth-Century Contest over a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire

Most scholars who have written about the law of slavery in England have focused on Somerset’s case of 1772, which had an intellectual impact not only in England itself but across the British Empire. While we recognize that Somerset represented some change in practice, historians have searched for consistency in earlier rulings, following a general tendency to see the Common Law as unchanging and the winning argument in the Somerset case itself. As a consequence, the current consensus is that the Common Law was somewhat confused, but that a kind of slavery was basically legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach. England was committed to a free society, but slavery was an anomaly that was tolerated because it was far away and across the ocean. Occasionally the historiography goes back as far as the seventeenth or even sixteenth century, to cite obscure cases, or even to the medieval period, when a kind of slavery was clearly legal. Seeing the slave law for the British empire from the perspective of the famous Somerset case of 1772 has obscured the vibrant debate within the English judicial system over the legality of slavery in England and its empire over more than a century. Not only was the Common Law on slavery changing profoundly during the seventeenth century; it was an instrument of policy. When Charles II failed to pass an imperial slave code via Parliament, he turned to the courts. His judges—really his in that they held their seats “during his pleasure”--presided over a series of rulings that made slavery legal in England itself --as well as its empire. These judges held that people could be property and that their status was hereditary, whether as chattels or villeins. These rulings brought the phalanx of English property law to bear upon slavery. Otherwise slavery law would followed feudal law, which had restrictions on ownership, master/servant law, which had a variety of protections for servants, or been nothing more than piracy, a situation enforced by the sword and brute force, but not law. These cases provided the structure of regulation of markets that made slavery--as it existed in eighteenth and nineteenth century America–possible.

'In a Country of Liberty?': Slavery, Villeinage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772)

'In a Country of Liberty?': Slavery, Villeinage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772)

“Too Pure an Air:” Somerset’s Legacy From Anti-slavery to Colorblindness

Canonical cases like Somerset v. Stewart resonate beyond their particular historical context because they change or crystallize critical legal and political debates. Analyzing the legacy of such cases is a complex task, fraught not only with the difficulties attendant to knowing history, but also with the conundrum of reading the past through the present. Somerset's Case has left particularly complicated legacies, partly because of its influence on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, English law has always shaped American legal doctrine. But because the question at the heart of the case entailed the status of a slave-James Somerset-whose master had brought him to England from the Americas, the transatlantic character and significance of the decision was embedded within the facts of the case itself. Adjudicating the controversy in Somerset required negotiating slavery as a transnational enterprise immersed in multiple bodies of law. Part of the challenge in assessing Somerset then is, that from its inception, it was a case that had multiple audiences and legal trajectories-speaking both directly and implicitly to the issue of slavery and freedom, in England and in the colonies. Given this complex history, it is fair to say that there never was a singular legacy of the case, and certainly not one that can be articulated now. Rather, there are multiple and conflicting trajectories which culminate in the case, becoming one of the most significant in both American and English law.

Transatlantic Negotiations: Lord Mansfield, Liberty and Somerset

While strictly speaking, English soil did not automatically confer or restore a slave's freedom, the characterization of England's soil by Englishmen themselves as "free" meant that the presence of a person who challenged his/her continued state of bondage stood in tension with that description-a characterization that was an integral part of common law. That tension could have been ameliorated had there been a statute declaring all bound diasporic Africans unquestionably free. Instead, legal personnel invoked common law traditions, and Mansfield frequently ruled in favor of individual liberty on a case by case basis. Mansfield himself did not focus on the question of slavery (which was, at the end of the day, far too volatile given Britain's preeminence in the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century). Rather, he focused on the question of liberty-a question that potentially privileged free English soil. In the context of the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield proceeded as was his wont, particularly as, having risen through the ranks from Solicitor General to Attorney General and finally to Lord Chief Justice of the court of King's Bench (a series of promotions that could not have been easily achieved by a Scot in England had Mansfield not been circumspect about both about his reputed Jacobite past, and about the company he kept), he was no political innocent.

Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade Seymour Drescher (bio) Before the end of the war of American Independence the possibility of abolishing Britain's Atlantic slave trade had never been raised in parliament. No pressure group from without had urged its consideration. No member had moved its investigation. By the end of the French wars three decades later, parliament had shut down Britain's trade. Its government had begun a process of internationalizing abolition. For fully half a century after Waterloo every major initiative would be advertized to the world as the desire of both the government and the nation. This dramatic change was embedded in far larger transformations in British political culture and practice. The evolving dialogue between people and legislators was increasingly nationalized by the thickening network of provincial newspapers. Parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial readers. Letters, advertisements for public gatherings, political pamphlets and news items about activities of political leaders in London provided fare for ongoing public conversations which linked provincial readers, not only with the centre in London, but with interested actors from all parts of the island. When parliamentary debates extended over weeks and months, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature.1 Within this broader process abolition came to occupy a distinctively innovative position. As we shall see, it combined new techniques of propaganda, petitioning and association with the organizational networking techniques of mercantile and manufacturing lobbyists. Between its emergence as a national political movement in 1787 and the internationalization of slave trade abolition at the end of the Napoleonic wars, political abolition became a pioneering organization in mobilizing hitherto untapped groups as actors for philanthropic and social reform. The movement's fortunes in parliament during those three decades were also emblematic of the difficulties entailed in converting public pressure into law and policy.2 [End Page 42] 1. Antislavery Sentiment before Mobilization One of the distinctive qualities of British political abolitionism was its emergence in conjunction with a massive wave of popular support in 1787-8. Christopher Brown has meticulously traced the long history of abolition's protohistory down to the eve of popular mobilization. Two themes stand out in this story. The first is the steady stream of articulated distaste and revulsion that the overseas slave system continually evoked in eighteenth-century writings. Few travel accounts, imperial histories or geographical compendia failed to mention its striking brutality and its deviance from metropolitan behavioural, legal and religious norms. Some commented upon the ease with which most participants accepted the indifference to human suffering entailed in its perpetuation. Eighteenth-century culture was therefore saturated with casual references to the violence done to social norms by the slave trade. By the mid-1780s apologists for the trade would have found most lines of defensive rationalization closed except those grounded on the sanctity of private property, the economic value of slave labour and the national interest in sustaining valuable Atlantic trades and products.3 The bad news for pioneer abolitionists was that these reasons, all linked to the need of African labour for staple agriculture in the tropics, were precisely those that had easily sustained the system against sporadic hostility for nearly a century. Arguments for the maintenance of the British transatlantic system were always fundamentally grounded in the necessity of the slave trade to sustain the wealth and power of the empire in a highly competitive world. From the early eighteenth century, writers also occasionally deplored the unexplored opportunities for greater development in Africa hindered by the slave trade. They almost invariably returned, however, to the premise that one had to develop trades based upon the world 'as it stands'.4 Throughout the century it was apparent that the British legislature held the key to restricting or prohibiting the slave trade. Britain's first abolitionist, Granville Sharp, exemplified the pervasive sense of helplessness when imagining attempts to influence parliament toward that end. In 1772, flush from his own judicial victory in the Somerset case, Sharp was delighted by Anthony Benezet's assurance from Philadelphia that 20,000 to 30...

MARK S. WEINER. Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. Pp. xvii, 421. $26.95

In this very impressive and important work, Mark S. Weiner uses “legal cases” from America's colonial period up until modern times to “depict the changing status of black Americans within the American national identity” (p. xi). For Weiner, these legal conflicts—the “black trials” of the book's title—also reveal important truths about America's “national identity itself.” We are the things we struggle over, and the civic status and social position of black people have been the subject and object of unremitting struggle throughout American history. Weiner sees these struggles as having taken place within the framework of “three visions of law and civic life” in America: “liberal individualism,” “racial caste,” and “Christianity” (pp. 17–20). Weiner's project is to show, through his analysis of fourteen legal cases, how these three, often contradictory, visions have helped shape black Americans' quest for “civic belonging” (pp. 5–9). The book unfolds chronologically in five parts whose titles convey the author's view of the “rituals of citizenship” that have marked blacks' progress across the four centuries surveyed. “Colonial Visions, 1619–1773” presents the “birth of black trials” (p. 27) as blacks and whites on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with contradictory religious impulses, the values of the Enlightenment, and white supremacy in legal proceedings well known and almost unknown. One of the book's many strengths is that Weiner, in this section and others, employs the obscure—the case of Joseph Hanno, accused of killing his wife—along with the very famous—Somerset's Case—to illustrate the problematic nature of blacks' civic status.

Nothing But Liberty: Somerset's Case and the British Empire

George Van Cleve places Somerset's Case squarely in the middle of Britain's imperial history. It belongs there. After clarifying the “narrow” holding in the case—that Charles Stewart could not forcibly remove James Somerset from England—Van Cleve argues that Chief Justice Mansfield and his Court of King's Bench “creat[ed] a new legal framework for slavery” and “did so quite knowingly at the price of undercutting the legal, economic and moral basis of slavery as an institution throughout the Atlantic Empire.” This argument that Somerset's Case transformed slavery law throughout the British Empire rests on three claims. First, Van Cleve views Somerset's Case as an imperial conflict of laws case because it involved a conflict between the laws of two royal territories, England and Virginia. Second, Van Cleve contends that Mansfield intended the decision and his remarks accompanying it about the positive law foundation of slavery to have abolitionist effects. Finally, these two points are related: Mansfield drew a distinction “between English and colonial law on slavery” in order to undermine slavery across the empire.

Mansfield's Decision: Toward Human Freedom

As Daniel Hulsebosch and Ruth Paley show in their perceptive and helpful comments, Somerset's Case raises questions about several dimensions of the nature of British imperial slavery. As to those dimensions, we share considerable common ground. I agree with Paley that racism was an important element in the treatment of black slaves in England and in its colonies. Hulsebosch is correct that in the late eighteenth century protecting liberty in England by keeping England free from slavery could co-exist with the willingness or desire to maintain colonial slavery. However, as discussed below, the significance of the Somerset decision goes beyond racism and metropolitan protection.

The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England

omerset v. Stewart, decided by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield four years before the American Declaration of Independence, was long S interpreted as outlawing slavery in England.’ Not only did Somerset have a profound impact in Britain where, many believe, it led to the subsequent abolition of the slave trade (1807) and the eventual emancipation of all slaves in the British colonies (1834), but it also ‘became part of a newly developing American common law [and] . . . was widely discussed in America both before and after the revolution’.2 The American courts, following the revolution, adopted the great bulk of English common law and most interpreted Somerset to stand for the proposition that, in the absence of specific legislation or constitutional provisions authorizing it, slavery was contrary to natural law, ‘odious’ and thus prohibited under common law tradition. Consequently, northern courts, particularly, interpreted the 1772 English decision as outlawing slavery in the absence of any specific legislative mandate to the contrary. If, as some now suggest, Somerset did not abolish slavery, then American courts erroneously incorporated it into common law following the revolution. If the common law at the time of the American revolution sanctioned slavery, then the courts in Massachusetts and other northern states should have held that slavery was permitted in their states unless specifically outlawed by state

"That Sole and Despotic Dominion": Slaves, Wives, and Game in Blackstone's Commentaries

IN THE LANDMARK SOMERSET CASE OF 1772, an archaic notion of inalienable property helped produce a popular rhetoric of inalienable liberty. While Lord Chief Justice Mansfield was popularly understood to have freed all the slaves in England through his ruling in this case, he himself repeatedly insisted that he had merely prohibited sending slaves abroad for sale. Behind this confusion lies the fact that to Mansfield and his court, James Somerset was neither an autonomous individual nor a piece of merchandise. Although these two alternatives may adequately describe the world of commercial relations, the common law traditionally offered a third option in a collection of persons who were also property, the objects of a personal dominion that did not involve commercial exchange. Mansfield drew on this tradition in trying to determine how far slavery was sanctioned by positive law in England. While Mansfield is famous for adapting common-law principles to accommodate newer commercial practices, his inability to control the meaning of his ruling in the Somerset case reflects some of the tensions implicit in England's transformation to a commercial society. By examining the encounter between the common law and West Indian slavery in Mansfield's court and in William Blackstone's influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), we will explore the continuing and paradoxical importance of inalienable property, an idea of property defined by its very incompatibility with the marketplace, to an increasingly commercial society.