James Somerset was born around 1741 in West Africa and was captured at about eight years old, transported by slave ship to the British colony of Virginia, where Scottish merchant Charles Stewart purchased him in 1749.
Somerset accompanied Stewart to Boston and then, in November 1769, to England, where he continued serving as Stewart's valet and was baptised at St Andrew's, Holborn, in February 1771.
In October 1771 Somerset left Stewart's service and refused to return; Stewart had him seized in November and imprisoned aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, intending to sell him into plantation slavery.
Somerset's godparents secured a writ of habeas corpus and enlisted abolitionist Granville Sharp, bringing the case of Somerset v Stewart before the Court of King's Bench, presided over by Lord Mansfield.
On 22 June 1772 Mansfield ruled that Stewart could not forcibly remove Somerset from England, a narrow legal decision that was widely and popularly understood to mean slavery had no basis in English law, making Somerset's case a landmark moment in the abolitionist movement.
- Central figure in Somerset v Stewart, 1772, a landmark case in English legal history
- His case was popularly understood to have ended slavery's legal enforceability in England
- Inspired enslaved people across the Atlantic world to view England as free soil
- His case remains a foundational precedent studied in legal and abolitionist history today
- A single act of refusal can reshape a nation's law. Somerset's decision to leave Stewart's service, and to fight his recapture, set in motion one of English law's most cited rulings.
- Legal victories can be understood more broadly than they were intended. Mansfield's narrow ruling was popularly read as ending slavery in England entirely, amplifying its real-world impact.