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The South Carolina Negro Seamen Acts and The NAVIGATING THE DANGEROUS ATLANTIC: RACIAL QUARANTINES, BLACK SAILORS AND UNITED STATES CONSTITUTIONALISM By MICHAEL ALAN SCHOEPPNER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Michael Alan Schoeppner 2 To MAS and RMM 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my supervisory committee, especially Elizabeth Dale and Jessica Harland-Jacobs, for their mentoring and criticism during the course of this project. I would also like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of History for their generous financial support. Librarians and archivists at the New Orleans Public Library, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the University of Florida were instrumental in the completion of this dissertation. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 PREFACE ............................................................................................................................8 2 THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE DANGEROUS ATLANTIC: THE TRIALS OF DENMARK VESEY AND THE FIRST SEAMEN ACT .................................................18 3 THE FIRST YEAR OF ENFORCEMENT: CALDER, ELKISON, AND THE SOUTH CAROLINA ASSOCIATION ...........................................................................................41 4 LEGITIMATING RACIAL QUARANTINES: THE JACKSONIAN MANIPULATION OF GIBBONS V. OGDEN ................................................................................................89 5 THE EXPANDING SEAMEN ACTS: DAVID WALKER, BRITISH POLITICS, AND THE JACKSON ADMINISTRATION ...........................................................................114 6 THE IMPLICATION OF LEGISLATIVE DISCRETION: BRITISH EMANCIPATION, AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS, AND THE ENSHRINEMENT OF POLICE POWER, 1832-1838 ........................................................................................................................157 7 EXPANDING SUBJECT AND CONSTRICTING CITIZEN: BRITISH ABOLITION, NICHOLAS TRIST, AND THE CUBAN SEAMEN ACT ............................................188 8 FROM CONGRESSIONAL CONTEMPLATION TO INTERSTATE DISASTER .....214 9 A SERIES OF ANTICLIMAXES: THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE SEAMEN LAWS, 1847-1859 .........................................................................................264 10 EPILOGUE: DRED SCOTT, REENACTMENT, AND SECESSION...........................298 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................303 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................319 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy NAVIGATING THE DANGEROUS ATLANTIC: RACIAL QUARANTINES, BLACK SAILORS, AND UNITED STATES CONSTITUTIONALISM By Michael Alan Schoeppner December 2010 Chair: Elizabeth Dale Major: History This project is a history of the Negro Seamen Acts, a series of laws prohibiting the ingress black sailors into particular jurisdictions during the antebellum period. Beginning in South Carolina in 1822, these laws implemented race as a mode of quarantine, hoping to prevent the “moral contagion of freedom” from infiltrating domestic slave populations. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas eventually passed similar laws, varying in severity. For a short time, Cuba and Puerto Rico also closed their ports to sojourning black sailors. For white lawmakers in slave societies during the Era of Emancipation, these laws were essential in preserving the racial status quo in their own jurisdictions from the nefarious effects of the Dangerous Atlantic. The enforcement of the Seamen Acts initiated fierce debates in a number of political and legal forums, and this dissertation attempts to reconstruct these debates. Pulling from international consular and diplomatic correspondence, state and federal legislative documents in the United States, court decisions, abolitionist publications, and popular periodicals, this dissertation argues that the commentary on the Negro Seamen Acts played a formative part in specific legal and political developments in the United States. In particular, this dissertation 6 argues the interstate and international conversations regarding the Seamen Acts shaped the contours of federal commercial regulatory authority, the limits of state policing powers, and, most importantly, conceptualization of U.S. citizenship. International politics are instrumental in the stories that follow. The uneven emancipations of the Atlantic World created a definitional incongruence of rights and citizenship among nations wrestling with the political and legal status of people with black skin. And the interconnected Atlantic World meant that a change in status in one jurisdiction opened the discursive floodgates across the littorals and had the potential to influence racial policies and conceptions of citizenship in other polities. Thus, when sailors of color entered jurisdictions with Seamen laws in place, their treatment forced commentators across the Atlantic to ruminate about the exact process by which people of color became formally integrated into the constitutional bodies politic of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. 7 CHAPTER 1 PREFACE The Atlantic Ocean of the early nineteenth century represented both an avenue of opportunity and a potential for catastrophe. For free African Americans, the sea afforded a respite from the brutality of segregation, disfranchisement, and economic marginality. The decent wages, the rugged equality of tar life, the ability to see worlds beyond – and better than – the ones they left behind motivated many African-American men to choose a life at sea. But the wider Atlantic World also contained places far worse than the ones the sailors called home. Mariners often visited the sugar islands, cotton plantations, and other slave-societies where the small modicum of liberty they enjoyed were completely absent for people of color. Worse yet, very little protected the colored deck hand from a life in chains. An unscrupulous, greedy captain and a local slave marketer, if they were not intimidated by laws outlawing the slave trade, could quite easily transform a free man into a slave. For black sailors, the line that separated freedom and slavery was magnificent, but it could be erased with ease while on the open sea. For white Southerners, the Atlantic was also a dangerous but lucrative entity. Distant markets, the lands where plantation staples metamorphosed into money and credit, could only be reached via the Atlantic. But that same boulevard to wealth could also bring havoc. The Age of Revolution unleashed powerful ideas of equality and liberty that undermined the racial and social orthodoxies of Southern plantation life. These ideas, if unleashed upon and adopted by otherwise ignorant slaves, could precipitate cataclysmic changes in Southern society. To protect the racial status quo, various slave jurisdictions adopted peculiar forms of quarantine hoping to sequester domestic slaves from Atlantic ideologies – or “infections” – of liberty and freedom. Believing black sailors to be natural conduits of dangerous ideologies, slave states outlawed their 8 entry on pain of imprisonment, or in some places, enslavement. Commonly referred to as the Seamen Acts, these laws against black sailors sought to continue the profitable aspects of Atlantic exchange while simultaneously averting racial insubordination. Perceptions of the Atlantic, both as benefactor and malefactor, lured free black sailors to slave jurisdictions and inspired laws restricting their movements once they arrived. When the first of these quarantines went into effect in South Carolina in 1822, it precipitated a host of vexing questions, the most pressing of which centered on the U.S. Constitution. What was the exact relationship between state and federal power in the United States? Was race akin to cholera or yellow fever in terms of its eligibility as a subject of quarantine? What rights did people of color carry with them from their home jurisdictions? These questions plagued jurists and politicians for nearly forty years. This project seeks to illuminate the various answers that emerged over the course of the Seamen Acts‟ history. It looks to the courts, legislatures, diplomats, and the sailors and their representatives. It hopes to show that the Seamen Acts played a critical role in the articulation of important constitutional ideas. Taken together, the chapters that follow have three primary objectives. First, they seek to situate the Seamen Acts into the larger narrative of antebellum United States history. This aim is mostly implicit, and with the exception of this paragraph, it will remain in the background of the pages that follow. Some historians who have looked at the Seamen Acts debates have considered them tempests in teapots, inconsequential laws reflecting over-reactive Southern slaveholders in near
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