Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb

for the British Empire, with people of African descent benefiting in a corollary manner. The English lawyer Francis Hargrave published his argument on the trial, explaining that “questions arising on this case do not merely concern the unfortunate person who is the subject of it” because “they are highly interesting to the whole community.” Hargrave recognized “the right claimed by Mr. Steuart to the detention of the negro is founded on the condition of slavery,” a condition of the men’s relationship before their Atlantic voyage. However, Hargrave contended, “if that right is here recognized, domestick slavery, with it’s [sic] horrid train of evils, may be lawfully imported into this country, at the discretion of every individual foreign and native.”79 Essentially, lawyers on behalf of Somerset and his White abolitionist supporters argued, in part, that allowing Stewart to reclaim Somerset was to risk England’s position in the transatlantic interior. Somerset’s freedom was not simply about his own autonomy or the inhumanity of slavery toward people of African descent, but also about the danger of slavery to spatial boundaries of the British Empire and the relevant national identities of the English. Of course, these same concerns were important elements in arguments against Somerset’s manumission as well. One anonymous tract argued that abolishing slavery in one territory “would not put an end to it; and if it is annihilated in the British dominions only, it can answer no other purpose, but to ruin a great many unoffending families, and to encrease the sugar colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, &c. upon the downfall of ours.” Arguing that British slavery was less harsh than was the Portuguese, this writer contended the British “slave trade is not of that magnitude that is suggested by its opposers.”80 The Somerset decision threatened the innocent—namely, British benefactors of slavery. A unified transatlantic parlor connected through slavery meant a shared regard for the meanings associated with emancipation, including its moral and economic consequences.

      Sense making about Somerset reverberated the power relationships between empires. Many eighteenth-century interpretations of Somerset’s freedom wrongfully imagined that Mansfield’s decree abolished slavery, even as this ambivalent decision simply assured that a master could not forcibly remove a bondsperson from England and that the bonded individual could “secure a writ of habeas corpus to prevent that removal.”81 Nonetheless, misinterpretations of Somerset’s trial superseded the issue of accuracy and configured both Mansfield’s decision and the British Crown as more sympathetic to slavery as problematic. Thus, Somerset fueled England’s still-paternalistic position toward its colonies and compelled U.S. antislavery thinkers to consider the transatlantic perception of early America.82 Although in truth Somerset ended de jure, not de facto, slavery in England, suppressing the legal basis for slavery in England, it ultimately became the crux for many early U.S. courts that “erroneously relied upon Somerset to help abolish slavery in the north,” based on the British example.83 This misperception about British benevolence proliferated even as many Black Loyalists found themselves marginalized in England and living in poverty after the Revolutionary War.84

      Fugitives reveal the tactical management of racial visibility, showing African descendants subverting the hypervisible constructions of Black raciality circulating in advertisements, and cultivating critical spectator practices. Somerset’s escape suggested that enslaved Blacks did not just run away, but that they might even be shrewd in selecting critical moments in which to flee. Runaways like Somerset intimated a keen awareness of presumptions about complacency, shyness, and impudence in the performance of Blackness. Somerset’s well-timed escape suggested that Whites might never know the interior lives and ulterior motives of their bondspersons; thus, free performances of Blackness forced Whites to contend with the inherent failures of slavery’s visual logic. While slavery presumed, even required, that Black people evade the visual, fugitives used these same assumptions to their advantage.

      Previewing Freedom

      The act of picturing freedom mediated the relationship between the parlor’s demands for display and freedom’s fugitive obscurity. On and off the page, it intervened in the transatlantic penchant for exhibiting the Black body and the free person’s need for illegibility. Picturing freedom invited visual examination of Black bodies and welcomed viewers to scrutinize Black autonomy. The opaqueness of spectacular demonstrations of freedom remained fleeting and illegible unless transcribed to paper. Thus, to picture freedom in print, to attach the quotidian performance of Black freedom to the permanence of the page, made these demonstrations fit for the parlor. Print culture functioned as an essential element for fitting the free Black body into the domestic space of the transatlantic parlor, managing the simultaneous requirements of demonstration and disguise. Pictures of freedom were both things for display in the home and incomplete records for interpretation.

      African descendants who pictured freedom in slavery resisted dominant organizations of the visual. Fifty-three kidnapped Mende people of Sierra Leone ousted the crew of the Amistad, a Spanish slave ship, in 1839 as it sailed from Havana to Puerto Principe, Cuba. Portuguese merchants working for a Cuban trading company held the Mende confined in warehouses, selling them off into slavery under the cover of night. The abduction of the Mende people from Sierra Leone to Cuba was already illegal by this time since an Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 had established that Africans imported to Cuba after May 1820 were legally free.85 However, the Spanish government maintained a lax attitude toward the treaty, as well as to British and U.S. efforts to outlaw transatlantic trade of Africans, because slavery in Cuba was increasingly profitable after the Haitian revolution.86 Portuguese merchants illegally enslaved the Mende and were poised to profit off the sale once in Cuba, but when slavers made a second effort to transport the Mende from one locale to another, the captives revolted. They killed all but two of the ship’s crew, including the ship’s captain, sparing only those who could help them sail back to Africa. Although the two navigators purposefully misdirected the ship for several weeks, it was only during a stop for provisions in Long Island that the U.S. Navy illegally seized the Amistad and the captives, transporting them to New London and then New Haven, Connecticut, for trial on charges of piracy, mutiny, and murder.87 Through this long and winding journey through the Atlantic, the people onboard the Amistad faced the subjugating glares of slavery and the spatial demands for transparency.