In 1772, a crowd gathered outside court to hear the decision on a case that had captured the public imagination. It was the case of James Somerset, an enslaved man who had escaped from his ‘master’, Charles Stewart, in England in 1771. Stewart had Somerset arrested and placed aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, then a British slave colony. Somerset was able to contact Granville Sharp, a humanitarian lawyer and abolitionist, who brought the case to court. The presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, reluctantly agreed that Stewart must be discharged.
