where Somerset continued to move about alone on Stewart’s behalf, learning his way around town and making his own acquaintances with Blacks and Whites. This bit of autonomy did not constitute freedom in Somerset’s mind, although Stewart furnished his chattel with fine garments of silk and sometimes money. Few records of Somerset’s procedures are recorded, but read in the context of runaway performances of Blackness, we can assume that by the time Somerset absconded on October 1, he may have been somewhat literate, but most assuredly he was decently dressed, familiar with his surroundings, and able to rely on friends to assist in his escape. Although slave catchers recaptured Somerset on November 26, 1771, he still made an astute decision to escape in England. In the United States, Stewart enlisted the public to capture Black fugitives, taking out at least one advertisement for another man who ran away, promising a “Pistole reward” to “whoever will apprehend and bring him to me.”75 These same networks of White surveillance were a little less effective for Stewart in England, however. Before Stewart could send the recaptured Somerset to Jamaica to suffer the brutal enslavement of plantation bondage, White abolitionists filed suit, arguing that Stewart could not detain Somerset; Judge Lord Mansfield determined that English law did not make clear provisions for chattel slavery to exist within England proper and freed Somerset. Stewart misread as fidelity Somerset’s daily life as an unfree person, his leaving “home” on errands and returning in the evening. Somerset’s escape reveals Black visuality as embroiled in the balance between illegibility and homelessness that is the fugitive condition.
Read in the context of innumerable runaways, Somerset is one of an unknown number of brilliant bondspersons who freed themselves in an environment built entirely upon Black captivity. Somerset’s escape was comparable to that of many other fugitives documented in runaway notices. A number of enslaved persons gained their master’s trust, acquired fine garments, made acquaintances, appeared content in their servitude, and then fled at a calculated moment. Although many times the fugitive just randomly took off, a greater number of runaways stole themselves at very important times, “when their absence was inconvenient and disruptive.”76 Like many others, Somerset’s assertion of fugitive freedom revealed a schism between a Black bondsperson’s outward appearances and self-perceptions, between visibility and vision.
The unique significance of this escape, however, is that it called upon the space of the transatlantic world for freedom, rather than bondage. Somerset’s decision to run away suggested the willful deployment of fugitivity, both its illegibility and its punitive homelessness. Somerset engaged the issue of transatlantic belonging through the fugitive’s opacity. News of Somerset’s escape joined a transatlantic circuit already reporting insurrection among enslaved Africans in Surinam, St. Vincent, and Jamaica.77 Somerset’s well-timed escape may have drawn on a transatlantic consciousness of running away or, quite simply, on the existence of a supportive web of friends located outside the colonial U.S. territories. Regardless, Somerset’s bid for freedom reveals his mastery of the Atlantic world as a domestic interior wherein his fugitivity—his illegibility and his displacement—entailed productive possibilities when used to exploit the visual assumptions of slavery.
The Somerset case became significant for what it meant about the amorphous space of the transatlantic. Newspapers on both sides of the ocean bandied about the horrors of slavery, the reach of U.S. property rights, and the meaning of Mansfield’s decision as one that unabashedly condemned slavery on British soil.78 Many proponents and detractors of the Somerset verdict understood the case as meaningful for the British Empire, with people of African descent benefiting in a corollary manner. The English lawyer Francis Hargrave published his argument on the trial, explaining that “questions arising on this case do not merely concern the unfortunate person who is the subject of it” because “they are highly interesting to the whole community.” Hargrave recognized “the right claimed by Mr. Steuart to the detention of the negro is founded on the condition of slavery,” a condition of the men’s relationship before their Atlantic voyage. However, Hargrave contended, “if that right is here recognized, domestick slavery, with it’s [sic] horrid train of evils, may be lawfully imported into this country, at the discretion of every individual foreign and native.”79 Essentially, lawyers on behalf of Somerset and his White abolitionist supporters argued, in part, that allowing Stewart to reclaim Somerset was to risk England’s position in the transatlantic interior. Somerset’s freedom was not simply about his own autonomy or the inhumanity of slavery toward people of African descent, but also about the danger of slavery to spatial boundaries of the British Empire and the relevant national identities of the English. Of course, these same concerns were important elements in arguments against Somerset’s manumission as well. One anonymous tract argued that abolishing slavery in one territory “would not put an end to it; and if it is annihilated in the British dominions only, it can answer no other purpose, but to ruin a great many unoffending families, and to encrease the sugar colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, &c. upon the downfall of ours.” Arguing that British slavery was less harsh than was the Portuguese, this writer contended the British “slave trade is not of that magnitude that is suggested by its opposers.”80 The Somerset decision threatened the innocent—namely, British benefactors of slavery. A unified transatlantic parlor connected through slavery meant a shared regard for the meanings associated with emancipation, including its moral and economic consequences.
Sense making about Somerset reverberated the power relationships between empires. Many eighteenth-century interpretations of Somerset’s freedom wrongfully imagined that Mansfield’s decree abolished slavery, even as this ambivalent decision simply assured that a master could not forcibly remove a bondsperson from England and that the bonded individual could “secure a writ of habeas corpus to prevent that removal.”81 Nonetheless, misinterpretations of Somerset’s trial superseded the issue of accuracy and configured both Mansfield’s decision and the British Crown as more sympathetic to slavery as problematic. Thus, Somerset fueled England’s still-paternalistic position toward its colonies and compelled U.S. antislavery thinkers to consider the transatlantic perception of early America.82 Although in truth Somerset ended de jure, not de facto, slavery in England, suppressing the legal basis for slavery in England, it ultimately became the crux for many early U.S. courts that “erroneously relied upon Somerset to help abolish slavery in the north,” based on the British example.83 This misperception about British benevolence proliferated even as many Black Loyalists found themselves marginalized in England and living in poverty after the Revolutionary War.84
Fugitives reveal the tactical management of racial visibility, showing African descendants subverting the hypervisible constructions of Black raciality circulating in advertisements, and cultivating critical spectator practices. Somerset’s escape suggested that enslaved Blacks did not just run away, but that they might even be shrewd in selecting critical moments in which to flee. Runaways like Somerset intimated a keen awareness of presumptions about complacency, shyness, and impudence in the performance of Blackness. Somerset’s well-timed escape suggested that Whites might never know the interior lives and ulterior motives of their bondspersons; thus, free performances of Blackness forced Whites to contend with the inherent failures of slavery’s visual logic. While slavery presumed, even required, that Black people evade the visual, fugitives used these same assumptions to their advantage.
Previewing Freedom
The act of picturing freedom mediated the relationship between the parlor’s demands for display and freedom’s fugitive obscurity. On and off the page, it intervened in the transatlantic penchant for exhibiting the Black body and the free person’s need for illegibility. Picturing freedom invited visual examination of Black bodies and welcomed viewers to scrutinize Black autonomy. The opaqueness of spectacular demonstrations of freedom remained fleeting and illegible unless transcribed to paper. Thus, to picture freedom in print, to attach the quotidian performance of Black freedom to the permanence of the page, made these demonstrations fit for the parlor. Print culture functioned as an essential element for fitting the free Black body into the domestic space of the transatlantic parlor, managing the simultaneous requirements of demonstration and disguise. Pictures of freedom were both things for display in the home and incomplete records for interpretation.
