James Stout

But there are cases from the 1600s to the 1700s that back up this argument.

And one thing that was definitely true is that no law was ever passed in England to make it legal to own Africans.

That's never – there's never like a law that just says you can do this.

People just start doing it and they're like, well, I guess this is property.

Yeah.

It's happening now.

Yeah.

The best pro-slavery advocates could do is point out a 1729 legal opinion in which an attorney general had argued that the legal status of a slave didn't change just because they set foot in England, right?

Which is something, but it's not the same as like there being a law saying you could do this, right?

Yeah, right.

You can't point to it as a slavery act.

Yeah, exactly.

Even when we go back in American history, when we're looking for when chattel slavery begins, you can see cases where there are indentured servants, right?

And as a form of punishment, their terms of service are extended.

But then it appears that the black people's terms of service are not extended, presumably because they are assumed to be

in servitude for their entire life by nature of who they are right but like we can't point to a this is when they decided it was going to be like that and those were the rules

Right, right.

Yep.

So, Granville comes into the 1770s well-armed to argue that slavery is not really legal.

Next, per Mike Kay's piece for antislavery.org, in 1772, Sharp defended James Somerset, a slave who had escaped and been recaptured.