Publishing freedom, winning arguments: Somerset, natural rights and Massachusetts freedom cases, 1772--1836

"Publishing Freedom, Winning Arguments: Somerset, Natural Rights and Massachusetts Freedom Cases 1772--1836" explores the way in which the key late-18th century English court case Knowles v. Somerset was appropriated by African-Americans and abolitionists (white and black) and cited in America in freedom causes---assisted to that end by contemporary newspaper reports of the decision. At the heart of the continued claims upon the narrowly defined Somerset decision is this: the willful and canny misunderstanding of the Chief Justice's rendering, the refusal to be limited by the letter of the law and the insistence upon the liberal application of the spirit of the law where freedom is at stake.; The dissertation is inspired in large part by the increasing efforts to place colonial American history in a broader Atlantic context underscoring that the ties between Britain and her American colonies do not simply disintegrate with the Declaration of Independence. It argues that the Somerset case was a key ideological turning point in English legal decisions concerning slavery whose effect was not limited to the center of English law and society: it was an important foundation upon which colonial and later, Early Republic, African-Americans built their own court cases in an effort to obtain freedom, exerting as it did an acute influence on American slave law. The dissertation investigates the reception, adaptation and efficacy of the Somerset decision specifically in Massachusetts where a complex legal history of slavery and the passionate articulation of freedom prevailed. By examining several Massachusetts freedom suits brought into the courts by enslaved African-Americans or by anti-slavery personnel, Somerset's continued significance becomes apparent---being ideologically attractive to all who pressed for freedom. The case is at once the springboard for, and the center of the dissertation. From it, a number of American legal actions that referred specifically to the arguments employed in the London case were launched. And at the core of other American legal actions, Somerset and the natural rights ideology that informed it, beat like a pulse giving life to the vision of unhampered universal freedom for enslaved African-Americans.