James Stout

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.

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.