y the arm as his
employer's property. A lawyer standing behind Mr Sharp, who seems to
have been puzzled how to proceed, whispered, 'Charge him.' Sharp
charged the captain with an assault, and as he would have been
immediately committed by the lord mayor if he persisted, he let go his
hold. The philanthropist was threatened with a prosecution for
abstraction of property, but it was abandoned.

This occurred in 1767. The next important case was that of a negro
named Lewis. He 'had formerly,' says Mr Sharp's biographer, 'been a
slave in possession of a Mr Stapylton, who now resided at Chelsea.
Stapylton, with the aid of two watermen, whom he had hired for that
purpose, in a dark night seized the person of Lewis, and, after a
struggle, dragged him on his back into the water, and thence into a
boat lying in the Thames, where, having first tied his legs, they
endeavoured to gag him by running a stick into his mouth; and then
rowing down to a ship bound for Jamaica, whose commander was
previously engaged in the wicked conspiracy, they put him on board, to
be sold as a slave on his arrival in the island.' The negro's cries,
however, were heard; the struggle was witnessed; and information given
in the quarter whence aid was most likely to come. Mr Sharp lost no
time in obtaining a writ of habeas corpus. The ship in the meantime
had sailed from Gravesend, but the officer with the writ was able to
board her in the Downs. There he saw the negro chained to the mast.
The captain was at first furious, and determined to resist; but he
knew the danger of deforcing an officer with, such a writ as a habeas
corpus, and found it necessary to yield. The writ came up before Lord
Mansfield. He did not go into the general question of slavery, for
there was an incidental point on which the case could be decided on
the side of humanity--the captain and the persons employing him could
not prove their property in the slave, supposing such property lawful.
He was not only liberated, but his captors were convicted of assault.

These cases, however, did not decide the wide question, whether it was
lawful to hold property in negroes in this country. It came at last to
be solemnly decided in 1771, on a habeas corpus in the King's Bench.
Affidavits having been made before Lord Mansfield, that a coloured
man, named Somerset, was confined in irons on board a vessel called
the _Ann and Mary_, bound for Jamaica, he granted a habeas corpus
against the capta