60 Notes for the Month. [JAN. 



England, by sailing to the West Indies forfeits his liberty. It is not the 

 act of performing the voyage ; because fifty other persons perform that 

 along with him ; and no one's free agency, at the end of the journey, has 

 disappeared but his own. The loss is not like the evaporation of honesty, 

 which has been sometimes believed to take place on a West India voyage; 

 because there the quality in question departs from the voyagers generally, 

 and not from any peculiar individual. And to get rid of any seeming 

 ridiculousness or improbability about the supposed case of a slave woman, 

 from Jamaica, becoming the wife (in England) of a British subject, we 

 may just notice the fact that it is not at all a necessary concomitant to a 

 female's being a slave in our colonies, that she should be a negress. 



A contrary judgment, however, to that delivered by Lord Stowell, 

 strips this case of very little of its difficulty : of so little indeed, that we 

 take the decision, one way or the other so that the law be declared 

 to be a matter of no very material consequence. Perhaps the conclusion 

 which his lordship has come to, is the best. If the effects of the one 

 decision, in a possible case, may press hardly upon the slave, there are 

 abundance of possible cases in which an opposite decision would fall very 

 heavily on the master. A planter, for instance, say in Jamaica, loses a 

 slave from his estate by desertion ; and sends into the " Bush" the com- 

 mon harbour of such runaways, to seek him. There can be no doubt, so 

 long as the law recognizes any property in the bodies of men, that the 

 slave deserting, is the property of his master at the time when he deserts ; 

 and that the master would have the right, wherever he found him, to 

 retake him. And yet, by a decision reversed to Lord Stowell' s, it would 

 be declared that this right of the master may become lost to him, with- 

 out any act, on his part, by which, legally or equitably, he would deserve 

 to forfeit it. The wonder of a man's losing his liberty by merely passing 

 from one portion of the globe to another, is considerable ; but not greater, 

 as far as we see, than that of his gaining his liberty by the same process. 

 By Lord Stow ell's recent judgment, it is decided, that the right of a free 

 negro to his liberty, may lapse in the course of a voyage from London ta 

 Jamaica to which voyage, however, the negro himself must be consent- 

 ing for he cannot be carried away against his will ; but, on the other 

 hand, Lord Mansfield's decision, it must be recollected, has long ago 

 invested the passage over the Atlantic ocean with a property no less inex- 

 plicable ; for by that judgment, the right of a planter to his slave lapses 

 in the course of a voyage from Jamaica to London whether, moreover, 

 to that voyage the planter be consenting or not ! 



A man loses a slave, undoubtedly his property, off his estate, in the 

 month of May, and advertises that slave and retakes him in the month of 

 August ; and yet the slave, having in the meantime made a trip to Eng- 

 land, says ". Your right, whatever it was, is at an end : I am here ; but 

 I am free." This would be the effect of the unrestrained operation of 

 the law of Lord Mansfield. Now it is at least as difficult to see by what 

 process, this planter without any act of his own has become defeased, 

 in the course of three months, of a property which he undoubtedly pos-. 

 sessed, as it can be to show how a free negro, by an act which is his 

 own to wit, by the voyage from England to Jamaica becomes in a few 

 months defeased of his liberty. 



And there are difficulties beyond this ; and considerable ones. If we 

 decide that a slave, known as a deserter, and never manumitted, and 

 found upon his master's estate, may be free, we soon get into troublesome 



