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Somerset was born in West Africa around 1741. [1] He was captured when he was about 8 years old and sold to European slave traders. On 10 March 1749 he was transported by British slave ship to the American Colony of Virginia, where Scottish merchant Charles Stewart bought Somerset on 1 August 1749.
Of course, a number of these aspects were not unique to Pennsylvania, but, rather, represent features characterizing the institution generally. Yet, the following information will also show that Pennsylvanian society and government, like that of other colonies, had their own particular ways of appropriating the institution of indentured servitude.
Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of a slave on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale.
1796 Runaway advertisement for Oney Judge, a slave from George Washington's presidential household in Philadelphia. When the Dutch and Swedes established colonies in the Delaware Valley of what is now Pennsylvania, in North America, they quickly imported enslaved Africans for labor; the Dutch also transported them south from their colony of New Netherland.
Somerset's cause was taken up by Granville Sharp, a leading abolitionist. [3] Mansfield tried to persuade Stewart to free Somerset, as had happened in several similar recent incidents, thereby avoiding a potentially controversial legal case that might challenge the entire legality of slavery.
An Amendment, created to explain and to close loopholes in the 1780 Act, was passed in the Pennsylvania legislature on March 29, 1788. The Amendment prohibited Pennsylvanians from transporting pregnant enslaved women out-of-state so that their children would be born enslaved, and also prohibited Pennsylvanians from separating enslaved husbands from wives and enslaved children from parents.
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The book starts out with an overview of slavery and the slave trade in 18th-century Britain. Hochschild then details the start of the antislavery campaign in England, from Granville Sharp's advocacy of African slave James Somerset in Somerset v Stewart in 1772 to the establishment of Granville Town, Province of Freedom in 1787. [4]