In England the new era was formally signalized by an epoch-making decision.  In November, 1769, Charles Stewart, once a merchant in Norfolk and later receiver general of the customs of North America, took to England his Negro slave, James Somerset, who, being sick, was turned adrift by his master.  Later Somerset recovered and Stewart seized him, intending to have him borne out of the country and sold in Jamaica.  Somerset objected to this and in so doing raised the important legal question, Did a slave by being brought to England become free?  The case received an extraordinary amount of attention, for everybody realized that the decision would be far-reaching in its consequences.  After it was argued at three different sittings, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England, in 1772 handed down from the Court of King’s Bench the judgment that as soon as ever any slave set his foot upon the soil of England he became free.

This decision may be taken as fairly representative of the general advance that the cause of the Negro was making in England at the time.  Early in the century sentiment against the slave-trade had begun to develop, many pamphlets on the evils of slavery were circulated, and as early as 1776 a motion for the abolition of the trade was made in the House of Commons.  John Wesley preached against the system, Adam Smith showed its ultimate expensiveness, and Burke declared that the slavery endured by the Negroes in the English settlements was worse than that ever suffered by any other people.  Foremost in the work of protest were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, the one being the leader in investigation and in the organization of the movement against slavery while the other was the parliamentary champion of the cause.  For years, assisted by such debaters as Burke, Fox, and the younger Pitt, Wilberforce worked until on March 25, 1807, the bill for the abolition of the slave-trade received the royal assent, and still later until slavery itself was abolished in the English dominions (1833).

This high thought in England necessarily found some reflection in America, where the logic of the position of the patriots frequently forced them to take up the cause of the slave.  As early as 1751 Benjamin Franklin, in his Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, pointed out the evil effects of slavery upon population and the production of wealth; and in 1761 James Otis, in his argument against the Writs of Assistance, spoke so vigorously of the rights of black men as to leave no doubt as to his own position.  To Patrick Henry slavery was a practice “totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong,” and in 1777 he was interested in a plan for gradual emancipation received from his friend, Robert Pleasants.  Washington desired nothing more than “to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law”; while Joel Barlow in his Columbiad gave significant warning to Columbia of the ills that she was heaping up for herself.