possession of him again. To this end he had the slave kidnapped, and then sold him to one John Kerr for £30.
Although held in prison, Strong found means to send for friends, and Granville Sharp went to the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Kite, "and entreated him to send for Strong, and to hear his case."
Accordingly the case was heard, and Strong was discharged from custody on the ground that he had been kidnapped — that is, really, on a technical plea. Sharp freed Strong, but this case established no principle worth mention, and the story is told chiefly because the work of Sharp in the case was his first effort in behalf of the negro race, and great things were to follow through his later efforts.
Straightway Sharp found his hands full of the work of liberating slaves. So let us look his work in the face. It was nothing more nor less than an attack on property legally obtained and legally held. It was a work that would not "square with the business sense" of anybody. It is, therefore, but justice to the man to let him say here what the faith was that moved him to this extraordinary career. In a letter to Lord Carysport he said:
"This is the compendium or sum total of all my politics, so that I include them in a very small compass. I am thoroughly convinced that Right ought to be adopted and maintained, on all occasions, without regard to consequences either probable or possible."
This was the first statement made by an abolitionist of what the abolitionists called "the higher law."
In November, 1769, Charles Stewart, a Virginia planter, brought a slave named James Somerset to
