James Stout

I feel like this makes me free, right?

Yeah.

So large numbers of enslaved people in England start fleeing their masters in an errant belief that slavery had ended on the island.

Many abolitionists who misunderstood the ruling celebrated it as a sign of the fundamental justice and equality of English law.

Judge Mansfield had to issue a note that the case was only really relevant to a specific niche situation, which caused Ben Franklin to joke that English abolitionists were celebrating the majesty of their legal system for its virtue in, quote, setting free a single Negro, right?

Where he's like, okay, guys, like, it's good, but, like, maybe calm down a little bit, you know?

Yeah, pipe down.

Yeah, this is one guy.

There's still a lot of guys.

Still a net negative.

Now, this judge, the Earl of Mansfield, is a really interesting guy because not only is he the judge in the Somerset case, he's going to be the judge in the Zorg case.

Now, this isn't weird because he's one of the most significant figures in the whole history of English law.

He's the judge for a lot of big cases at the time, right?

But he's a particularly interesting guy to rule on cases like this because he has no child of his own, but he's raising his illegitimate niece, Dito Bell, as his daughter, and she is a black woman of mixed race.

Right.

So he is simultaneously repeatedly being like enslaved people are property and my ruling should not be seen to free anyone.

And is also clearly capable of understanding that they're human beings because he is a black woman.

Right.

And there's there are a couple of moments where because he's never talks in a way that's very sympathetic to this.

But there's a couple of rulings where it's like, well, maybe this is where his sympathy moved him a little bit.