James Stout

Not to give him much credit, because I don't think he's a very nice guy, but he's a really interesting judge to be trying in this case, right?

Now, and again, he is not considered a friendly judge.

Sharp considers him a deeply hostile judge, in fact.

And in the Zorg case, Mansfield has no trouble ruling that enslaved Africans are property.

Anyway, by the time we hit 1783, Sharp is well-established as the guy to talk to if you're trying to defend or create rights for enslaved people in England, right?

And so it's not hard to see why our friend Olada Equiano would like Granville Sharp, right?

Seems like a pretty natural friendship.

Yeah.

And so once Equiano reads that article about the Zorg case, he does the 1700s equivalent of pasting a link to a news article in the group chat, and he like sends a copy to his friend Granville Sharp.

Granville writes in his diary, Gustavus Vassa called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown alive into the sea from on board an English slave ship.

And this is the start of a process that is going to terminate in the creation of the first mass movement against slavery in British history, right?

This is the inciting instant.

Is Equiano sending this letter to Granville Sharp?

So Sharp hits the ground running.

He starts meeting with the lawyers who represented the insurers in that case and is like, hey, I think we can file an action against the Gregson syndicate and request a new trial.

And I think we can win that new trial because we didn't really have a full trial last time.

If we really make a thing of this, we can make them go through discovery and we can look at the log books and the other documentation kept by the crew of the Zorg, right?

And we can see, did they really need to kill those people?

You know?

Yeah.