In 1733, Georgia was settled under the patronage of General Oglethorpe, of the British Army, and it was intended as a humanitarian scheme for furnishing refuge to impoverished meritorious persons, and persecuted Continental Protestants. The territory, together with the power to legislate for twenty-one years, was granted to trustees resident in England. The trustees at first prohibited the introduction of slaves, but under the humanitarian ideas with which the colony was begun, it languished and proved a miserable failure until the year 1749. The trustees were then induced to permit the introduction of slaves, at the instance, among others, of the celebrated preacher, Whitfield, and his follower, Habersham, who earnestly interceded for the permission—Habersham stating as a reason for the introduction of slavery that "Many of the poor slaves in America have already been made freemen of the Heavenly Jerusalem."
Slavery was thus introduced into Georgia, and the Colony began at once to prosper and advanced with rapid strides.
The institution of slavery, it will thus be perceived, existed at the time of the Revolution, not only in all of the revolting colonies, acknowledged by law and sustained by public sentiment at home and in the mother country, but it existed in all of the territories, which afterwards became a part of the United States, and was sanctioned by the sentiment of all of the Christian world.
But before this review of the slave trade and of slavery in the British colonies in North America, is closed, it is proper that England should receive credit for one incident in her judicial history in regard to the subject. In the year 1763, the celebrated case of Somerset, a slave who had been carried to England by his master from one of the British West India Islands, came up before Lord Mansfield in Westminster Hall on a writ of habeas corpus, and that distinguished Chief Justice of the King's Bench, in delivering his opinion discharging the petition, said: "The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man who breathes it is free."
This declaration is the source of much pride to Englishmen and Lord Campbell in his "Lives of the Chief Justices" goes into ecstasies over it. It is regarded as the enunciation of the great principle that the common law of England establishes universal freedom, and that wherever it prevails it knocks the shackles from the slave and turns him loose, a free man. Yet it was most probable that Somerset himself, and it was certain that his ancestor, if not himself, had been carried from Africa, in a ship that had been fitted out under the protection of that very common law by men breathing that same pure air, and sold into slavery in a colony to which the same law under which he was released, had followed the colonists. Was ever so absurd a farce enacted as that which was enacted by the Chief Justice of England, when he announced in Westminster Hall before the assembled bar of London, that the air breathed by a nation of slave-traders was too pure for the slave himself. None but an Englishman would have failed to discover its absurdity. Where then, was that "genius of universal emancipation" referred to at a later period at the Irish Bar by Curran, in such eloquent language, that it did not waft these words on the wings of that pure air across the channel to the Emerald Isle, to the coasts of Africa, to the plantations of America and the West Indies, or to the banks of the Ganges? Could not a breath of that pure air be afforded at least for the ships of the British Navy, then so sedulously guarding English slave ships through the horrors of the "Middle Passage" from French cruisers? No! that pure air was "fixed air" which could not extend beyond the shores of England, and the wings of the "genius of universal emancipation" were so clipped that it was a more clumsy domestic bird than the barnyard fowl.
At the same time that these celebrated words were uttered in Westminster Hall, the ministers of State, and king, lords and commons in Parliament, were cherishing with a fostering hand that very trade which had consigned Somerset to slavery, and was then consigning thousands upon thousands of his native countrymen to the same fate while the boasted navy of the "Mistress of the Seas" was escorting the human cargoes in safety and triumph to their destination, and in the colonies writs and executions were being issued, according to forms framed in Westminster Hall, to enforce from the sale of the bodies of human beings, the collection of debts, due to men who breathed the "pure air of England," and prided themselves on the liberties of the common law.
This decision of Lord Mansfield was one of those acts of judicial legislation for which he was so famous, and it was not the law. Quite as able judges as himself had previously decided the validity and legality of slavery even in England, and Lord Stowell, as able a judge and purer man than he was, subsequently ruled very differently from the decision in the Somerset case. England had no use for slaves at home, as her toiling millions supplied every demand for labor or service. Had it been to her interest to have had African slaves within her own limits, her pure air would have accommodated itself to their constitution. She never sacrificed her material interests to her philanthropy. Notwithstanding the decision of Lord Mansfield, it was twenty-five years before the prime minister of England (the younger Pitt) ventured to go even so far, as to bring in a bill to mitigate the horrors "of the Middle Passage," by limiting the number of slaves to be taken on board a ship—it was forty-five years before another prime minister ventured to advocate the abolition of the slave trade, and seventy-one years before slavery was abolished in the limited slave colonies left to England after the American Revolution, and that was not done until this small interest was so far overshadowed by other interests as to make it of no importance to her.