Legal Translation and the Specter of Race: The Worldly Context of Somerset v. Stewart

Abstract

The 1772 British court case Somerset v. Stewart is considered the beginning of the British movement for the abolition of slavery, a point of national pride, and justification for the empire's expansion. Using comparative literary methodologies, this paper reads the case with and through French legal precedent cited in Somerset, examining the effects and implications of legal translation.

Keywords:

• world literature
• comparative law
• British abolition
• postcolonial studies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper has taken its time coming into the world, and I am grateful to Christopher Taylor for his continued encouragement and careful notes on the many drafts that preceded its publication. Thanks also to the 18th and 19th Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago for a clarifying discussion on the piece; to Sarah Wenzel for her invaluable help procuring a copy of the Memoire of Francisque's trial; and to Shouvik Bhattacharya for helpful sources and an insider's perspective on legal scholarship.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. T. B. Howell, “The Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, on a Habeas Corpus, AD 1771–1772,” in A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and Other Illustrations, Vol. 20 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1816), 82.

2. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Marco Wan, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2017).

3. Wan, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction, 4.

4. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 8.

5. Haun Saussy, “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 24.

6. Sue Peabody, There are no Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

7. George van Cleve gives a full and succinct report on the trials beginning in 1559 that addressed the status of slaves in England; George van Cleve, “‘Somerset's Case’ and its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective,” Law and History Review 3, no. 24 (2006): 614–22.

8. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 35.

9. Ibid., 48.

10. Ibid., 37.

11. Ibid., 38.

12. Mansfield's contemporary and colleague, William Blakstone, mentions the free soil principle in his widely read and influential Commentary on the Laws of England. Originally published by Clarendon Press at Oxford between 1765 and 1769 (for a modern edition, see William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016]). These citations of the principle were thus current in English legal discourse and cannot be attributed exclusively to the liberal abolitionist ideologies of Sharp and his legal team; William R. Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England,” History 79, no. 255 (1994): 43.

13. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 51.

14. Ibid., 79.

15. Vicki C. Jackson, Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era (New York: Oxford University Press), 24–25.

16. Ibid., 24.

17. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 64.

18. Ibid., 62.

19. Ibid.

20. Peabody, There are no Slaves in France, 6.

21. Jourdan, Décrusy, and Isambert, “Edit concernant les esclaves nègres des colonies,” in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l'an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution, Tome 21 (Paris: Imprimerie de H. Fournier, 1830), 124: “Les esclaves nègres, de l'un et l'autre sexe, qui seront conduits en France par leurs maîtres, ou qui y seront envoyés par eux, ne pourront prétendre avoir acquis leur liberté sous prétexte de leur arrivé dans le royaume […] mais faute par les maîtres d'observer les formalités prescrites par les précédents articles, les nègres seront libres, et ne pourront être réclamés.” All translations from the French are the author's own.

22. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 63.

23. Jourdan, Décrusy, and Isambert, “Déclaration concernant les nègres esclaves des colonies,” in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l'an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution, Tome 22 (Paris: Imprimerie de H. Fournier, 1830), 113: “lesdits esclaves seront confisqués à notre profit, pour être renvoyer dans nos colonies, et y être employé aux travaux par nos ordonnés.”

24. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 110.

25. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 63.

26. Jean Omer Joly de Fleury, Memoire signifié pour le nommé Francisque, Indien de nation, néophyte de l’église Romaine, intimé contre le Sieur Allain-François-Ignace Brignon, se disant Ecuyer, Appellant (Paris: P. G. Simon, Imprimeur du Parlement, 1759), 29: “Il n'est rien de plus injuste que l'application qu'on voudroit faire aux Indiens des Lois qui ont autorisé pour l’Amérique l'asservissement des Nègres Affriquains, principalement si on considère que jamais l’Indien, dont il s'agit dans la cause, n'a pu être destiné au service des Colonies occidentales, que c'est de l’Affrique que les Colons d’Amérique font venir les esclaves dont ils ont besoin.”

27. Ibid., 25–26: “Si, par la couleur de leur peau, les individus qui naissent sur les bords de l’Indus et des rivières qu'il reçoit dans sa course, ont quelque ressemblance avec les Nègres d’Affrique, au moins diffèrent-ils de ces derniers, en ce qu'ils n'ont point le nez si écrasé, si applati, les lèvres si épaisses, si saillantes, en ce que, au lieu de ce duvet cotonneux et crêpé qui couvre la tête des Affriquains, ils portent de longues et belles chevelures, semblables à celles dont les têtes des Européens sont décorées. Tel est Francisque […] abstraction faite de sa couleur, il ressemble plus aux Européens, que beaucoup d’Européens même auquels il ne manque que d’être noirs pour paroître Affriquains.”

28. De Fleury, Memoire signifié pour le nommé Francisque, 25: “Les Indiens sont un peuple libre: le joug de l'esclavage ne leur a point été imposé […] Instruits dans divers cultes à la vérité idolâtres, régis par des Loix, soumis à des Monarques, riches par la fertilité de leurs Terres, perpétués dans une ancienne filiation, les Indiens n'ont point eu besoin que les nations Européennes vinssent défricher le sol qu'ils habitent, et discipliner leurs Villes.”

29. Ibid., 28: “Jamais il n'est entré dans l'idée d'aucun peuple d’établir dans les Indes les Colonies; toutes les Nations de l'Europe y participent cependant au négoce; mais comment? c'est par l’établissement de Compagnies.”

30. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 63–64.

31. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 80.

32. Howell, “Case of James Sommersett,” 24.

33. For example, Robert Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 1988).

34. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5.

35. Ibid., 6.

36. Cotter, “Somerset Case,” 36–37.

37. Ibid., 35, 48–50, 52–56.

38. F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press), 142–43.

39. For a detailed report of public response to Somerset v. Stewart in England, see Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain, ch. 9.

40. Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “Nothing but Liberty: ‘Somerset's Case’ and the British Empire,” Law and History Review 24, no. 3 (2006): 652.

41. Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “Somerset's Case at the Bar: Securing the ‘Pure Air’ of English Jurisdiction within the British Empire,” Texas Wesleyan Law Review 699 (2006–07): 700.

42. For example, Cotter, “Somerset Case”; Hulsebosch, “Nothing but Liberty”; Hulsebosch, “Somerset's Case at the Bar”; James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” Journal of British Studies 27, no. 1 (1988): 45–68; Ruth Paley, “Imperial Politics and English Law: The Many Context of ‘Somerset,’” Law and History Review 24, no. 3 (2006): 659–64; William M. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World,” University of Chicago Law Review 42, no. 1 (1974): 86–146.

43. For example, Patricia Hagler Minter, “‘The State of Slavery’: Somerset, The Slave Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 36, no. 4 (2015): 603–17; Katherine Paugh, “The Curious Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves, and the Limits of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 4 (2014): 629–41; Dana Rabin, “‘In a Country of Liberty’?: Slavery, Villeinage, and the Making of Whiteness,” History Workshop Journal 72 (2011): 5–29; van Cleve, “‘Somerset's Case’ and its Antecedents.”

44. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery,” 109.

45. For a thorough argument and report on the multifarious interpretations of Somerset, see Derek A. Webb, “The Somerset Effect: Parsing Lord Mansfield's Words on Slavery in Nineteenth Century America,” Law and History Review 32, no. 3 (2014): 455–90.

46. Granville Sharp, Essay on Slavery (Burlington: Isaac Collins, 1773).

47. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery,” 117.

48. Rabin's “‘In a Country of Liberty?’” is a rare exception. Rabin demonstrates that arguments presented in the Somerset case represent English law as a tradition tied to whiteness and white bodies through the lawyers’ description of the British system of villeinage discussed above. By Rabin's account, by describing villeinage as a tradition cast off by British legal practice, freedom and English law are styled as local and racial phenomena, leaving Somerset's black slavery both within and without English law. Rabin is one of the few scholars who dedicates the bulk of her analysis to the counsels’ arguments; indeed, perhaps the scholarly focus on the effects of Mansfield's decision have largely eclipsed this kind of attention to the argumentation and ideology that surrounded the case.

49. Richard Hyland, “Comparative Law,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, ed. Dennis Patterson (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 185–87.

50. Ibid., 187–90.

51. Ibid., 190–92.

52. Ibid., 192.

53. Ibid., 193–97.

54. See Pierre Legrand, “The Impossiblity of ‘Legal Transplants,’” Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 4, no. 2 (1997): 111–24.

55. Robert Leckey, “Review of Comparative Law,” Social and Legal Studies 26, no. 1 (2017): 5.

56. Pheng Cheah, What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 6.

57. Quotation in Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature, trans C. A. M. Sym (London: Routledge, 1939), 13–14.

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Mollie McFee

Mollie McFee received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in June 2017.