BBC Two celebrates the diversity of history this autumn

Dear Martin,



a quick question for you and maybe Mr Hislop? Why on earth did you choose Wilberforce, and not the much more deserving Granville Sharp? Every time I read Granville's story I end up also in tears of a mixture of admiration and pride somehow. Wilberforce did a good job, partly in order to "make his mark", but it was Granville Sharp whose story also inspires the most.

I'm starting to wonder if anyone has even heard of Granville. So, with many thanks to the ever useful Wikipedia, here's a brief history.



Sharp's first involvement: Jonathan Strong



Sharp's brother William held a regular surgery for the local poor at his surgery at Mincing Lane, and one day in 1765 when Sharp was visiting, he met Jonathan Strong. Strong was a young black slave from Barbados who had been so badly beaten by his master, David Lisle, a lawyer, that he had been cast out into the street as useless. Sharp and his brother tended to his injuries and had him admitted to Barts Hospital, where his injuries were so bad they necessitated a four-month stay. The Sharps paid for his treatment and, when he was fit enough, found him employment with a Quaker apothecary friend of theirs. In 1767, Lisle saw Strong in the street and had him kidnapped and sold to a planter called James Kerr for £30. Strong was able to get word to Sharp, and in a court attended by the Lord Mayor and the Coroner of London, Lisle and Kerr were denied possession of Strong. They instituted a court action against Sharp claiming £200 damages for taking their property, and Lisle challenged Sharp to a duel - Sharp told Lisle that he could expect satisfaction from the law.



Sharp consulted lawyers and found that as the law stood it favoured the master's rights to his slaves as property: that a slave remained in law the chattel of his master even on English soil. Sharp said "he could not believe the law of England was really so injurious to natural rights." He spent the next two years in study of English law, especially where it applied to the liberty of the individual.



Lisle disappeared from the records early, but Kerr persisted with his suit through eight legal terms before it was dismissed, and Kerr was ordered to pay substantial damages for wasting the court's time. Jonathan Strong was free, if the law had not been changed, but he only lived for five years as a free man, dying at 25.





William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield.



The Strong case made a name for Sharp as the Defender of the Negro and he was approached by two more slaves, although in both cases (Hylas v Newton and R v Stapylton) the results were unsatisfactory, and it became plain that the judiciary - and Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench (the leading judge of the day) in particular - was trying very hard not to decide the issue. By this time, Great Britain was by far the largest trafficker in slaves, transporting more Africans across the Atlantic than all other nations put together, and the slave trade and slave labour were important to the British economy.



In 1769 Sharp published A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery ..., the first tract in England attacking slavery.



On 13 January 1772, Sharp was visited and asked for help by James Somersett, a slave from Virginia in America, who had come to England with his master Charles Stuart in 1769 and had run away in October 1771. After evading slave hunters employed by Stuart for 56 days, Somersett had been caught and put in the slave ship Ann and Mary, to be taken to Jamaica and sold. Three Londoners had applied to Lord Mansfield for a writ of habeas corpus, which had been granted, with Somersett having to appear at a hearing on 24 January 1772.



Members of the public responded to Somersett's plight by sending money to pay for his lawyers (who in the event all gave their services pro bono), while Stuart's costs were met by the West Indian planters and merchants.

Calling on his now-formidable knowledge of the law regarding individual liberty, Sharp briefed Somersett's lawyers. Mansfield's prevarications stretched Somersett's Case over six hearings from January to May, and he finally delivered his judgment on 22 June 1772.



It was a clear victory for Somersett, Sharp and the lawyers who acted for Somersett: Mansfield had acknowledge that English law did not allow slavery, and only a new Act of Parliament ("positive law") could bring it into legality. However, the verdict in the case is often misunderstood to mean the end of slavery in England. It was no such thing: it only dealt with the question of the forcible sending of someone overseas into bondage, that a slave becomes free the moment he sets foot on English territory. It was one of the most significant milestones in the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world, more for its effect than for its actual legal weight.



The murder of slaves on the ship Zong in 1781.



In 1781 the captain of a slave ship, the Zong decided to throw 122 sick slaves over board, with another ten throwing themselves over board in despair. He reasoned that as the slaves were cargo, the ship's owners would be entitled to the £30 a head compensation for their loss at sea: were he to land and the slaves to die there, no compensation would be forthcoming.



The ship's owners filed their insurance claim, but the insurers disputed it. In this first case the court found for the captain and the owners. The insurers appealed. It is at this point that Sharp enters the story. He was visited on 19 March 1783 by Olaudah Equiano, a famous freed slave and later to be the author of a successful autobiography, and told of the horrific events aboard the Zong. Sharp immediately became involved in the court case, facing his old adversary over slave trade matters, Lord Mansfield.



Mansfield notoriously declared that "the case was the same as if asses had been thrown overboard" but ruled that the ship-owners could not claim insurance on the slaves because the lack of sufficient water demonstrated that the cargo had been badly managed.



No officers or crew were charged or prosecuted for the deliberate killing of 132 slaves. Indeed, the Solicitor General for England and Wales, Mr. John Lee, declared that a master could drown slaves without "a surmise of impropriety". Sharp's attempts to mount a prosecution for murder never got off the ground.



The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade



Sharp was not completely alone at the beginning of the struggle: the Quakers, especially in America, were committed abolitionists. Sharp had a long and fruitful correspondence with Anthony Benezet, a Quaker abolitionist in Pennsylvania.



However, the Quakers were a marginal group in England, and were debarred from standing for Parliament, and they had no doubt as to who should be the chairman of the new society they were founding, The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.



On 22 May 1787, at the inaugural meeting of the Committee - nine Quakers and three Anglicans (who strengthened the committee's likelihood of influencing Parliament) - Sharp's position was unanimously agreed.



In the 20 years of the society's existence, during which Sharp was ever-present at Committee meetings, such was Sharp's modesty that he would never take the chair, always contriving to arrive just after the meeting had started to avoid any chance of having to take the meeting. While the committee felt it sensible to concentrate on the slave trade, Sharp felt strongly that the target should be slavery itself. On this he was out-voted, but he worked tirelessly for the Society nevertheless.



Abolition



When Sharp heard that the Act of Abolition had at last been passed by both Houses of Parliament and given Royal Assent on 25 March 1807, he fell to his knees and offered a prayer of thanksgiving. He was now 71, and had outlived almost all of the allies and opponents of his early campaigns. He was regarded as the grand old man of the abolition struggle, and although a driving force in its early days, his place had later been taken by others such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. Sharp however did not see the final abolition as he died 6th July, 1813.

Martin

I have an issue about history programmes and historical dramas today in that they never seem to cover some of the most dramatic periods of our history. What about commissioning something about 1066, the wars between England and Scotland the war of the roses, the civil war and the Jacobite rebellion etc.



To be sure there is enough adventure,romance, charecters and blood n guts in these historical events to create some really dramatic TV.