Moral Contagion
Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America

Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.

Michael A. Schoeppner (Author)

9781108455121, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 July 2020

266 pages
15 x 23 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'… the book is a rigorous study of law, citizenship, and diplomacy and makes a welcome addition to the literature of southern history, Atlantic history, and antebellum political and legal history.' Ikuko Asaka, Journal of Southern History

Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national citizenship - one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation - they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national citizenship as a legal category. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of citizenship championed by Antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with 'moral contagion'.

Introduction
1. The Atlantic's dangerous undercurrents
2. Containing a moral contagion, 1822–9
3. The contagion spreads, 1829–33
4. Confronting a pandemic, 1834–42
5. 'Foreign' emissaries and rights discourse, 1842–7
6. Sacrificing black citizenship, 1848–59
7. From the decks to the jails to assembly halls: black sailors, their communities, and the fight for black citizenship
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]