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Readers who enjoy a good courtroom drama will want to read Wise's summary of the arguments and tactics used by both sides. Ultimately, Lord Mansfield undercut the pro-slavery arguments by expressing serious doubt about the infamous Joint Opinion. Steuart's barrister was left nearly speechless. In Wise's words, "The West Indies representatives who were paying [the barrister's] substantial fees … must have choked on their sugar cane."

Lord Mansfield had been hoping for another narrow decision, but both parties had intended to make this a test case, and so he declared that, absent a positive law that established slavery (as it did in the colonies), "black chattel slavery was 'of such a nature … so odious' that English common law would never accept it."

Mansfield later tried to play down the significance of his decision, but it could not be contained. It reverberated throughout England and the colonies. And in the course of time, its principles undercut the slave trade as well.

Sickened by the violence of the American revolution, Sharp resigned from his job in the Ordnance office and pursued antislavery, prison, and hospital reform movements while living off the generosity of his brothers. He joined with Wilberforce and others to form the Society for the abolition of the Slave Trade. And before he died, he was awarded honorary doctorates by Brown, Harvard, and William and Mary.

Despite Sharp's great achievement, Steven Wise seems put off by the original abolitionist, calling him "harsh, absolute, moralistic, and unforgiving." "Sharp's personality had an ugly, intolerant side," Wise writes, and labels Sharp "a religious bigot."

Granville Sharp's bigotry (anti-Catholicism, anti-Quakerism) is unremarkable for his time. And his belief that blacks were intellectually and morally inferior to whites was conventional wisdom shared by other great minds of the time: Voltaire and Jefferson among them.

Granville Sharp was both a man of his times and a man ahead of his times. But perhaps religious fervor is the best fuel for the reform of social evils.

David Neff is editor of Christianity Today.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4