Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery.

• Author: Gwynn, Ellen B.
• Position: Book Review

Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery by Steven M. Wise

What required four years of bloodshed that nearly destroyed the United States, England had accomplished by a civil lawsuit a century before. In 1769, an American slave, James Somerset, accompanied his owner, Charles Steuart, on a vacation to London, where he ran away. After slavecatchers found him, Steuart punished him by shipping him out to the slave markets of Jamaica. Before the ship set sail, however, a writ of habeas corpus issued, commencing the case of Somerset v. Steuart.

Lawyer and law professor Steven M. Wise centers his book, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery around the case, which seemed to call for the simple determination that Steuart had lawfully purchased Somerset in Virginia, and thus had the clear right to sell him. But Somerset had obtained the assistance of Granville Sharp, an ordnance clerk who had been devoting his small resources and tenacious determination to a series of lawsuits designed to secure the abolition of slavery. Sharp studied lawbooks in his spare time and had discovered a long tradition of antipathy to involuntary servitude among English courts and lawyers. He condemned contemporary lawyers who tarnished this illustrious heritage by tolerating and defending slavery.

In three suits that preceded Somerset v. Steuart, Sharp and his attorneys succeeded in winning the freedom of a slave who had been beaten and abandoned, then seized and sold by his master when his health was restored; damages for a free black man whose wife was kidnapped and shipped to the West Indies; and a criminal conviction for false imprisonment of a slaveowner who attempted to sell his former slave. In spite of his successes, Sharp was continually frustrated by judges who stopped short of considering the legality of slavery itself. Until Somerset v. Steuart.

In fact, the Right Honorable William, Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, the most powerful judge in England, urged Steuart to free Somerset or to voluntarily dismiss the case, which would foreclose the court's need to decide an issue that might result in freeing the 14,000 to 15,000 slaves in England. If the parties insisted on a decision, however, Lord Mansfield promised it would be founded neither on compassion for James Somerset nor fear of the consequences, but on the law; "fiat justitia, ruat...