The starchy, conservative lawyer who freed every slave in England

Americans make movies about slavery and its abolition. In the past two years we’ve seen the Oscar-winning Twelve Years a Slave, based on a 19th-century slave narrative, and Django Unchained, with Christoph Waltz as a bounty-hunter who, uniquely among bounty-hunters of the period, did not make his living from capturing fugitive slaves. Spielberg’s Lincoln was about the Great Emancipator himself, as was the less historically rigorous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

But the abolition of slavery in England has never received the same attention. Perhaps it is because abolition here came not through blood and glory, but through the common law; or perhaps because emancipation does not frame constitutional debates here in the same way it does in the States. (Both sides in the abortion wars think that they are the North in that analogy, whether it’s Justice Scalia comparing Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott, the case that found laws prohibiting slavery unconstitutional, or Steven Spielberg getting the judge who wrote Roe v. Wade to play the judge who freed some slaves in Amistad.)

But this week the film Belle opens, which focuses on the curious fact that the judge who effectively abolished slavery in England, Lord Mansfield, shared his house with Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race daughter of his nephew and a Spanish slave. The film probably overplays Dido’s part in his decisions: contemporary gossip among slaveholders was that Mansfield was biased against them because of her, but we have no evidence that the abolitionists even knew of her existence. It also conflates two cases which came before Mansfield as Lord Chief Justice, taking the facts from the Zong — a slave-ship which threw 133 slaves overboard to conserve supplies, then made a claim for their loss on their insurance — and the decision, almost word-for-word, from the case of the slave James Somersett.