‘The matter left to the jury,’ recalled the judge, Lord Mansfield, ‘was, whether it was from necessity; for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.’ With evident distaste, he told the insurers to pay up, but just two months later cancelled the payment, after activist Granville Sharp proved in court that the ‘necessity’ was much less than had been claimed.
Nonetheless, no criminal prosecutions for murder were brought by the Government. So Sharp, who had hired a shorthand writer to record every word, went to the Press. When the public read the Solicitor-General saying that tossing slaves overboard was quite proper and that it was mad to call it murder, they rose up indignantly. Letters of protest poured in;* Navy men shared harrowing tales of the slave ships; poets, clergy and statesmen made the clamour impossible to ignore. As Sharp said, Providence decreed that the massacre would strike slavery a fatal blow.
William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788. Mansfield was a reformer but not an activist, and was at pains to stress that he scrupulously enforced Parliamentary law. Nonetheless, his judgments tended to embolden the abolition movement: see Somerset’s Case. Back in 1766, he had brought into his family a girl of mixed race, Elizabeth, the result of an affair between Mansfield’s nephew John Lindsay and an enslaved woman in the West Indies.
Sir James Mansfield (1734-1821), no relation to the judge. He appeared for Gregson’s, but as Solicitor-General he was also a Government lawyer.
As well as Bishops and MPs in England, Sharp’s correspondents included Benjamin Franklin, a former US Minister to France who was elected President of Pennsylvania in 1785; John Adams, US Minister to the United Kingdom and from 1797 President of the United States of America; and John Jay, Governor of New York, Acting US Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and founder of the New York Manumission Society. Several American academic institutions elected Sharp as a Doctor of Law.