Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The Man Who Sank the Atlantic Slave Trade: Granville Sharp
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been following this series, you know the slave trade was a vast machine — ships, forts, kings, insurers, all grinding along for centuries. But every machine has a weak point. For the British Atlantic slave trade, that weak point was a mild-mannered London clerk named Granville Sharp. Luna: Wait — a clerk? Not a politician or a judge? Lucas: Exactly. Granville Sharp worked as a clerk in the Ordnance Office — basically a paper-pusher. He had no legal training, no fortune, no seat in Parliament. But he had two things: a furious conviction that slavery was a sin, and a patience for legal arcana that bordered on obsessive. And in the 1760s, he stumbled into a case that would change everything. Lucas: Honestly, episodes like this one — where we talk about the real people who pushed against this system — they're why we make this show ad-free. If today's conversation felt worth a coffee to you, there's a link at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Small thing, big difference. Luna: Yeah, it lets us keep digging into these stories without any commercial breaks. So — how did a clerk end up taking on the slave trade? Lucas: It started by accident. In 1765, Sharp's brother William, a surgeon, treated a young enslaved man named Jonathan Strong who had been beaten nearly to death by his master, a lawyer named David Lisle. William and Granville nursed Strong back to health. Two years later, Lisle spotted Strong on the street, had him kidnapped, and sold him to a Jamaican planter. Strong managed to get a message to Sharp, who went to court and won Strong's freedom on a technicality — assault, not slavery. But that got Sharp thinking: if English law didn't explicitly permit slavery, why was it happening? Luna: So he started researching. Lucas: For years. Sharp pored over old legal texts, medieval charters, common law precedents. He wrote a pamphlet called 'A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery' — not exactly beach reading — and sent copies to every judge in England. And then, in 1771, a new case landed on his desk: James Somerset. Luna: Somerset — that's the famous one, right? The case that ended slavery in England? Lucas: Sort of. James Somerset was an enslaved African who had been brought to England by his master, Charles Stuart, a Boston customs official. Somerset escaped, was recaptured, and was about to be shipped to Jamaica to be sold. Sharp's lawyers got a writ of habeas corpus, and the case went before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, the highest judge in the land. Lucas: Mansfield was a conservative and didn't want to make a sweeping ruling. He tried to get the parties to settle. But Sharp pushed. And on June 22, 1772, Mansfield ruled that slavery was 'so odious' that it could not exist without positive law — and since England had no law establishing slavery, Somerset could not be forcibly removed from the country. In practice, this meant that any enslaved person who set foot on English soil was free. Luna: That's huge. No wonder it's called the Somerset ruling. Lucas: It was a legal earthquake. Planters were furious. Some claimed it would ruin the colonies. But Sharp wasn't done. A few years later, he got wind of a horrific story: the slave ship Zong. Luna: The Zong massacre — 1781, right? Lucas: Yes. The Zong was carrying 442 enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast to Jamaica. The captain, Luke Collingwood, made a navigational error that extended the voyage, and fresh water ran low. Collingwood decided to throw 133 enslaved people overboard, claiming it was 'necessary' to save the rest. The ship's owners then filed an insurance claim for the 'lost cargo'. Luna: They tried to claim insurance money for murder? Lucas: Exactly. The insurers refused to pay, so the owners sued them. The case was about insurance, not murder — but Sharp saw the moral opportunity. He attended the trial, took notes, and then launched a campaign to prosecute the crew for murder. He failed — the Admiralty ruled there was no crime at sea — but he made sure the details of the Zong became public. The story of mass drowning splashed across newspapers. It turned the stomach of the British public. Luna: And that's when the abolition movement really started gaining traction. Lucas: It was a turning point. Sharp teamed up with a new generation of activists — Thomas Clarkson, who gathered evidence on the horrors of the Middle Passage, and Olaudah Equiano, the former slave whose autobiography became a bestseller. In 1787, they formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Sharp was elected its first chairman. Luna: But he didn't stop at legal campaigns, did he? Lucas: No. Sharp had a grand vision: a colony in Africa for freed slaves. In 1787, the British government backed his plan to settle the 'Black Poor' — freed slaves and loyalist refugees from America — in Sierra Leone. Sharp bought land from local Temne chiefs and founded the Province of Freedom, later Freetown. It was a disaster at first — disease, attacks, internal conflicts — but it laid the groundwork for the later abolitionist colony of Sierra Leone. Luna: So he was trying to build an alternative system, not just tear down the old one. Lucas: Exactly. Sharp believed in what he called 'the inherent rights of mankind' — a phrase he used decades before it was common. He wasn't just a campaigner; he was a constitutional radical. He also wrote about the right to bear arms, the right to resist tyranny, even the right to emigrate. Some of his ideas ended up in the American Declaration of Independence. Luna: And yet most people have never heard of him. Lucas: He's overshadowed by Wilberforce, who was the great parliamentary orator. But Sharp was the engine room. He worked until his death in 1813, just a few years after the British slave trade was finally abolished in 1807. He never saw emancipation — that came in 1833 — but he cracked the legal foundation that made it possible. Luna: One clerk, a few cases, and an empire started to crumble. Lucas: That's the thing about moral courage. It often starts with someone who simply refuses to look away. Granville Sharp saw the injustice, studied it, and acted — and he changed the course of history.