Conclusion

The early abolitionists’ use of the habeas corpus process to undermine slavery should be regarded as a targeted effort focused on the English courts that can be distinguished from, and that functioned as a precursor to, the broader pub­lic appeals characteristic of the later political movement organized in the 1780s to gain a legislative abolition of the slave trade, initially, with the eventual goal of abolishing slavery in the British dominions.

As an underlying principle of the common law and legal maxims, a more tenuous modern legal concept of �rights of humanity’ also emerges in the abo­litionists’ legal writings and public advocacy focused on the human body as a bearer of rights, based in the combination of natural law foundations of rights that Sharp had asserted and the court’s attention to the systemic violence and physical abuse of enslavement, a practice which Mansfield reportedly consid­ered �so odious’ that it could only endure with the support of �positive law’. Habeas corpus, after 1679, also provided a kind of positive law to counteract slaveholders’ property claims in human chattel, with implications that seemed to advocates of slavery such as Long and Estwick to threaten the legality of such property in British colonies as well. Yet the habeas corpus process was always contingent upon its own vicissitudes of timeliness and the efficacy of actions by legal counsel, both of which were absent from Equiano’s suit and Thompson’s multiple petitions. Collective �rights of humanity’ based in the natural rights of the individual could only come into question indirectly in the legal arena, therefore, when the habeas corpus procedure itself was function­ing correctly, with all its actors performing their roles promptly and diligently in an English court exercising a powerful common law jurisdiction, and when the detained bodies in question were not already excluded by statute. Under such specific circumstances, the �singular subject status’ across imperial juris­dictions attributed by Halliday to the habeas corpusjurisprudence of King’s Bench could also become a collective and representative one that revealed the capacity of the common law to recognize the humanity and fundamental rights of all persons, including the enslaved.^{[1027] [1028]}

Ex parte Somerset can therefore be seen both as a culmination, if only par­tially successful, of the abolitionists’ concerted legal efforts in their recourse to habeas corpus to overturn slavery, and as a fortuitous case in which all the pieces fell into place: the remedy for one man’s detention arrived well on time, even if, afterwards, the collective â€?human rights’ that were claimable by formerly enslaved Africans would have to be delayed for some time, and would finally only be upheld as the result of political struggle, including by the enslaved, and parliamentary action.^ω5 In retrospect, then, the proceduralism of the common law was far more important, in the development of abolitionist legalism, than intellectual recourse to the principles of natural law and appeals to humane moral sentiments.