Moral Contagions and “Foreign Emissaries”: Negotiating Race, Status, and Rights beyond the Antebellum Courtroom

During the antebellum period, lawmakers in eight Southern states enacted “quarantine” measures that barred the ingress of all free black sailors – regardless of nationality and upon pain of imprisonment – because of their suspected “moral contagions” of abolitionism and autonomy. This paper focuses on two specific protests against these so-called Negro Seamen Acts that occurred almost simultaneously in 1840s Charleston. Both were initiated by “foreign emissaries,” who argued that the individual rights of sailors limited the regulatory authority of South Carolina. Their arguments foreshadowed future developments in domestic citizenship law after the Civil War, but they also suggest that historians have much to gain by looking beyond the antebellum court systems as they explore the practical force of individual rights for free people of color. The negotiation of rights and legal status occurred in a number of non-judicial venues, and these negotiations are as much a part of our legal history as the development of judicial doctrine.

While historians of the United States have been quite conscious of the constitutional problems attending to the movement of slaves across jurisdictional boundaries, they have largely ignored the migration – both interstate and international – of free people of color. However, their movements provoked legal and political questions that were no less problematic or pervasive. In fact, while legal questions regarding slave movement were largely confined within the boundaries of the United States, questions concerning the regulation of free people of color transcended national borders. By following free people of color into slave jurisdictions, we see that the piecemeal demise of slavery across the 19^th-century Atlantic world precipitated intense debates about race and rights both within nations and between them. Diplomacy and constitutionalism were linked in complex and provocative ways in the port cities of the antebellum South.