�Rights of Humanity’

Long contends further that the protections of the liberty of the subject in Magna Carta only pertained to barons and other freemen, and that while the common law writ of habeas corpus was available to villains, its process did not affect them â€?any further than in the enjoyment of the only right almost that they had by the [...] common law, that of not being detained in prison without some cause shewn’™ Long also reasserts the analogy of hereditary villeinage to slave status that Sharp and Hargrave had disputed, and Mansfield had ignored and set aside, by making it a disqualification for the full protections of habeas corpus.75 When such villains were brought before the court on a Habeas Cor­pus cum Causa, Long avers, â€?when the cause of the imprisonment appeared, on the return of the writ, to be a refusal to obey and do service to his master, he was remanded back to confinement; and this refusal to serve was held by the judg­es a legal cause of caption and detention; and that he had no further remedy, by law, against the claim of his master to his personal services’?⁶ The Habeas Corpus Act (1679), Long insists, was only meant to confirm previous statutes and rulings.

The abolitionists’ natural law arguments before the court and their subse­quent celebration of Mansfield’s decision as �a judgment in behalf of humani­ty’ vindicating the �injured human rights’ of the enslaved suggest, in this con­text, that they understood the remedial proceduralism of habeas corpus to penetrate through questions of differential status (slaves versus freemen) as asserted by Estwick and Long?^[1004] Anticipating the Somerset decision, in 1772 Sharp issued an Appendix to his earlier tract Representation in order to contest continued assertions by slaveowners that chattel slavery was allowed by com­mon law and statute, as well as colonial law. Sharp reportedly arranged for a copy of this pamphlet to be delivered personally to Mansfield by James Somer­set himself^{[1005] [1006] In this text, he begins by again ruling out the possibility that any person could by contract consign himself to the status of a chattel slave. Then, turning to principles in drawing upon an eclectic array of Latin and English legal maxims, Sharp renews his argument that natural rights to one’s own per­son are confirmed by and indeed fundamental to the common law, asserting that, while a chattel is �res estimabilis', sold for a price comparable to �that of a good Horse, [...] to the disgrace of human nature’,}

the Negro, (though considered as a Chattel with respect to the Master’s claim, yet being himself, also, a Man) has certainly a superior right and title to his own Person; a claim of natural property in himself, which is in­estimable; far above all pecuniary consideration; for, with respect to his side of the question, THE HUMAN BODY IS ABOVE ALL PRICE, 'Cor­pus humanum non recipit aestimationem'.

�Surely, his Liberty to him is inestimable’, Sharp concludes, then offering a ren­dition of this sentiment in Latin: �LIBERTAS EST RES INESTIMABILIS^,.81 Sharp’s confidence in the applicability of this principle to prove the illegality of colonial laws governing slavery is based in an assumption of its incontroverti- bility under English law.^{[1007] [1008] Even if the West Indian slaveowner suffers a loss, Sharp insists that the law would not commit a wrong �when it rejects the lesser claim of estimable property, in favour of that natural interest which is inestima­ble’, because �every claim of Property is unjust that �interferes, or is inconsistent with, that natural and equitable claim to personal security, which the law of this kingdom has always favoured33 Beneath legal status was the vulnerable, but in Sharp’s eyes, both natural and self-evidently factual human body of the en­slaved African, an indisputable ground of common belonging to the human species.}

By confronting Long’s and Estwick’s arguments with Sharp’s on the question of the slave’s right to personal property in his own human body, we can cast further light on Mansfield’s comments in his summation of counsels’ arguments on both sides in Somerset that, though �contract for the sale of a slave is good’ in England, as Stewart’s counsel had argued, it is �the person of the slave himself [who] is immediately the object of enquiry; which makes a very material dif­ference. The now question is, whether any dominion, authority, or coercion can be exercised in this country, on a slave according to the American laws?’.^[1010] The Chief Justice implies that the remedial process of habeas corpus, in bring­ing James Somerset in person before the court, effectively excluded any con­tractual claim of property in his body, the question that had lingered in Lewis’s case. The �odious’ coercion endemic to slavery in general, and not simply the personal assault inflicted on one fugitive slave, could therefore become legible and actionable before the court by means of the non-discriminatory habeas jurisdiction of King’s Bench, which overrode colonial slave laws and excluded them from England.

By arguing that one slave’s natural �human rights’ should be construed as pertaining to all slaves in England, and by implication, enslaved people more generally, the abolitionist lawyers also seem to have implied that African slaves as a group could be considered for the purposes of law as represented by the legal person of James Somerset in the habeas corpus action^[1011] As evidenced in the presence of London’s Anglo-Africans inside and outside the courtroom during the Somerset hearings, all slaves shared an interest in Somerset’s cause, but in this instance one that threatened to overturn the economic interests of the planter class, the slave merchants, and the colonial plantation system that supported the expansion of empire: a natural interest in freedom, as Sharp defined it, shared by all human beings and grounded in the �inestimable’ per­sonal value of the human body^[1012] It was arguably this more abstract and yet also more fundamental common bond and interest in personal liberty that Sharp and the other abolitionists asserted, following the teachings of Black­stone and other jurists along with the precedents of common law, as a consti­tutional right founded in the inherent natural �rights of humanity’ that in turn were protected by the writ of habeas corpus as a remedy available to all per­sons, regardless of status, thanks to statute.

Somerset’s multifaceted representative standing - on behalf of the enslaved, the rights and liberties of the King’s subjects, and slavery’s violation of the rights of humankind more generally - also meant that the habeas corpus re­medial process in Somerset produced effects that depended upon but also transcended the writ’s procedural scrutiny of the detention of an individual. It also reverberated by giving encouragement to other enslaved people in Eng­land and throughout the empire, as well as later in the independent United States, a slaveholding polity. As Douglas A. Lorimer has argued, the Somerset decision had a greater impact on �the slave’s life chances’ in England than has often been recognised, because �by declaring that blacks could not be com­pelled to leave the country... the law had confirmed their right to resist this most threatening and arbitrary aspect of their masters’ authority’.^[1013]

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