The Somerset ruling galvanized both proslavery and abolitionist mobilization across the Atlantic

Evidence

Britain’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, went further than the Duke of Montagu and Selina Hastings and freed a Virginia runaway, James Somerset, overshadowing Gronniosaw’s pioneering slave narrative and Wheatley’s tribunal in Boston in 1772. No one could be enslaved in England, Mansfield ruled, raising antislavery English law over proslavery colonial law. Fearing Mansfield’s ruling could one day extend to the British colonies, the Somerset case prodded proslavery theorists out into the open and roused the transatlantic abolitionist movement. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 252

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing how law (Mansfield’s ruling) functioned as ‘policy first’ here — does a judicial decision predating public sentiment fit or complicate Kendi’s causal inversion?