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In the aftermath, Mansfield tried to play down the significance of his decision, and yet it took on huge symbolic significance.

It really went out of his hands, and I'm sure he heard a lot about it. He traveled in very wealthy circles. Many of his friends were slaveholders. Many of them were deeply conservative people economically and would not have been happy with this decision, but even unhappier about what people did with the decision.

I don't think Mansfield was planning on being known as the father abolitionism. The way people spun the Somerset decision on both sides of the Atlantic, both inside and outside the courtroom, made him uncomfortable because they made it seem like it was an absolutely radical decision than the deeply conservative decision Mansfield wanted.

In America it took a bloody civil war to deal with the slavery issue and yet in England it was dealt with through the courts. Could America have avoided all the bloodshed?

Yes, we could have. But for immensely complex political reasons we did not. And that is something that Americans should continue to be ashamed of.

It's something that the English are delighted about. I opened the book with the bicentennial dinner given by the Corporation of London in 1972 in which the Lord Mayor of London notes that in order to abolish slavery in the U.S. they had to have a bloody civil war. But the English, the more civilized country, was able to abolish slavery through a judicial decision. And indeed, that is something to be proud of.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4