This case is not what it seems. Mansfield, as historians James Walvin and F. O. Shyllon explain, was intensely interested in upholding the property basis of British slavery, and he was not, by any means, proclaiming that all slaves were free in Britain.4 What Mansfield actually declared was this slippery justification for not deporting Somerset:
The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by courts of justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political; it must take its rise from positive law; the origin of it can in no country or age be traced back to any other source: immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority, and time of its introduction are lost; and, in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly.5
Still, the case was interpreted in the popular imagination to mean that slavery was abolished on British soil. It gained a huge following and took on a mythological status after it was settled. Long rambling opinion pieces, filled with an eighteenth-century spirit of debate, crowded out lesser news in the Morning Chronicle, London Chronicle, Gazetteer, and Gentleman’s Magazine in 1772. One man calling himself “A Friend of Mankind” wrote, “Every person in England, and every person in a civilized state, has a claim to the protection of its laws, as he is subject to them…. No degree of slavery can subsist in a free state; all mankind are created free agents, and it is only arbitrary force that perverts the gifts of God and nature.”6 Others proclaimed it a judgment in “universal liberty” and even the country’s fervent abolitionists, such as Granville Sharp, who was more closely connected with the case than most people, took Mansfield’s decision to mean “the exercise of the power of a Master over his Slave must be supported by the Law of the particular Countries; but no foreigner can in England claim a right over a Man: such a Claim is not known to the Laws of England.”7
Ten years after the Somerset case, which left the issue of slavery securely situated in the colonies, another case brought it uncomfortably close to home, the infamous case of the slave ship Zong. In 1781, the Zong sailed on a common trade route, from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa, and then with a cargo of 470 Africans bound for Jamaica. Disease and death tore through the ship, and in less than three months over sixty Africans and seven crew had died. Although this was one of the usual hazards of slave voyages, the reaction of Luke Collingwood, captain of the Zong, was shockingly unprecedented. When it became clear to Collingwood that loss through “natural causes” was inevitable, he proposed that the crew throw the remaining sick slaves overboard. He argued that this would only bring a slightly earlier death to people who would die anyway, which in turn would leave the dwindling water supplies for those who were well. It was twisted reasoning, but it seemed to be enough for the crew, who agreed to push fifty-four Africans into the sea on 29 November, forty-two the next day, and twenty-six the next. Ten of these, in an act of resistance against the mass murder, committed suicide by throwing themselves overboard in despair.8
As if the manner in which Collingwood treated these people was not shocking enough, the way the case was later handled in British courts indicated how callous the business of slavery and law had become. Although antislavery advocates were horrified, the case was subsumed under British insurance law, and the insurance company refused to pay slave owners anything. Apparently, death from “natural causes” was not covered. In a rebuttal, the slave owners insisted that the slaves were “goods” that had to be sacrificed in this case, and they demanded compensation. It therefore came down to a chilling distinction between slaves as property and as people. At one point in the trial, the solicitor representing the slave owners said,
What is all this vast declamation of human beings thrown overboard? The question after all is, Was it voluntary or an act of necessity? This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods; for to this purpose, and the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property: whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it. This property—the human creatures, if you will—have been thrown overboard: whether or not for the preservation of the rest, that is the real question.9
The Zong case was never settled. Initially, it was set for a further trial where, by coincidence, Judge Mansfield, who had presided over the Somerset case, was set to hear it. However, if there was a second trial, it was never recorded. But the event was one of the first highly publicized stories that would brand the brutalities of slavery on the British consciousness. As with the Somerset case, so it was with the Zong. Letters to the daily and weekly newspapers brought the case before the public. And just as the Somerset case had won national praise for British liberty, the Zong affair registered a profound sense of British tyranny. A letter writer in the Morning Chronicle of 18 March 1783 who attended the case wrote, “The narrative seemed to make every one present shudder.”10 It was this event, according to veteran historian James Walvin, that instigated the full unleashing of antislavery sentiment in Britain. Not only was it behind the abolitionist movement, it was a startling instance of the kind of integrated team work that would eventually bring slavery to an end. The day after the 18 March article, the Nigerian born Londoner Olaudah Equiano personally called on the white abolitionist Granville Sharp to discuss the incident.11
Ironically, the Somerset case, which took place in Britain, implied that slavery would be contained in the faraway colonies, while the Zong affair, which took place faraway in the middle passage, brought slavery terrifyingly close to home in the sense that it entered the British consciousness in a personal way. The truth was that slavery, by the 1780s, was bound to ideas of proximity and distance. Before this, Europeans had been able to look with cold remove on the slave trade because of its sheer physical distance from them. The trip from a British slave port such as Liverpool, Bristol, London, or Hull to a destination along the coast of East or West Africa ran anywhere from four thousand to six thousand miles and could take months.12 The middle passage from Africa to the West Indies was roughly the same distance, lasting anywhere from forty days at the least, to four months at the most. Sailors heading back to Britain from the West Indies would travel another five thousands miles, and depending on where they stopped with their trade goods, this journey too could last months.
But more important than physical distance was psychological distance. Slave owners, up until the late eighteenth century, seemed to have both in their favor. They frequently argued that because of the geographical remoteness of the colonies from Britain, they were absolved of any crime against Africans. The mass majority of people who were not slave owners felt even more psychologically remote. Even as people were beginning to acknowledge that physical distance made no difference in how intimately involved Britain was in the trade, they had been used to viewing slavery with the same indifference that Tommy faced in his complaint against his master. Therefore, it was psychological remove from the plight of slaves, not just geographical remoteness, that seemed an even more ironclad notion.
Early abolitionists emphasized exactly this point. One of the first, the American Quaker John Woolman, whose essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes appeared in 1746, traveled around America as an itinerant minister speaking against slaveholding. Along with those of the American abolitionist and fellow Quaker Anthony Benezet, Woolman’s writings were transported to Britain, serving as the initial inspiration behind Britain’s antislavery movement: British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gives Woolman credit for his own conversion to the antislavery cause. Very soon into Woolman’s travels around America, he discovered he was up against one grand objection. His parishes argued that because metropolitan centers were at a safe distance from plantations, they were not responsible for what took place there. So Woolman found himself writing things like, “Great distance makes nothing in our favour.