4 The Crime of Color in the Negro Seamen Acts

If any of you wish to know how free you are, let one of you start and go through the southern and western States of this country, and unless you travel as a slave to a white man (a servant is a slave to the man whom he serves) or have your free papers, (which if you are not careful they will get from you) if they do not take you up and put you in jail, and if you cannot give good evidence of your freedom, sell you into eternal slavery.

—David Walker, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 1829

Radical black abolitionist David Walker proposes this counterfactual journey into the slave states early on in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.¹Close In an Atlantic world where freedom had become increasingly territorialized, Walker seizes on travel as an ironic test of the individual freedoms purportedly secured in the federal compact. His series of conditional “ifs” reveal personal liberty to be both racially particularized and geographically bounded. Free blacks—citizens of northern states—either traveled as slaves or risked becoming enslaved upon entry into a slave state. Black movement was permissible only when it was subordinated to white authority. The misnaming of traveling slaves as “servants” or contractual agents with the freedom of choice was a fiction particular to the legal culture of travel and exemplified in the freedom suit. Punitive statutes directed specifically toward curtailing black mobility were common among the states south and west of Mason-Dixon, and they belie the discourse and reality of free travel and free will in a partially free Atlantic world. Free black mariners, whose lives perhaps best typified the cosmopolitanism of Walker’s “coloured citizens of the world,” discovered the dreadful accuracy of his words as they sailed into southern ports. Fearing slave insurrection from within and national interference with slavery from without, South Carolina was the first of the coastal slave states to enact a police law “for the better regulation of Free Negroes and persons of color,” a law that targeted free blacks engaged in the seafaring trade; North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas soon followed.²Close Officials and harbormasters in these states began seizing and imprisoning, under threat of enslavement, all black sailors once their vessels docked in southern ports.

The Negro Seamen Act (1822) was among a number of “quarantine laws” that guarded the waterways and thoroughfares into South Carolina, as lawmakers sought to delimit the power and potential of black revolutionary consciousness after the unsettling discovery of the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot in Charleston.³Close Vesey, who had supposedly “slaved in St. Domingo, studied with the Moravians, and learned several languages” before his master, a sea captain, resettled him in Charleston, embodied the radical promise of the Black Atlantic.⁴Close An early instance of what Robert Westley describes as “Black exceptionalism within the law,” the Negro Seamen Act was twice amended by South Carolina to increase its severity.⁵Close The 1835 amendment subjected black mariners who “ever again enter into the limits of the State” to sale at public auction “as a slave,” with the proceeds divided between the state and informer.⁶Close Southern states such as South Carolina seized on their sovereign power to decide on the value and nonvalue of life as they effectively deemed certain individuals outside the political community and, therefore, alienable as property.⁷Close Only two legal identities existed for black sailors under the specific provisions of such police laws: they were either prisoners or slaves. And the prisoner quickly became a slave if jail fees went unpaid. These Negro Seamen Acts made black citizens and foreign nationals, according to Connecticut’s New Englander, “guilty of [the crime of] being free” in southern states.⁸Close Stripped of any legal means for redress or amelioration, these “mariners, renegades and castaways” of the black Atlantic became slaves of the state in an uncanny continuum between what Orlando Patterson theorizes as the slave’s social death and what Joan Dayan reelaborates as civil death or “dead in law”; these men may possess natural life, but they had lost all civil rights.⁹Close

Black Atlantic scholarship has often looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to limn the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. Black sailors, according to Jeffrey Bolster, “established a visible presence in every North Atlantic seaport and plantation roadstead between 1740 and 1865” (see figure 4.1).¹⁰Close Indeed, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker regard black maritime circulation as one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled political sovereignty along these North Atlantic currents.¹¹Close The “Atlanticist radicalism” of black seafaring life threatened slaveholding localisms in a world where freedom seemed to inch westward, and southern U.S. lawmakers used these fears to further expand state power in relation to the federal government.¹²Close

This chapter examines the appeals to law made on behalf of black Atlantic mariners caught up in the workings of these antiblack statutes in coastal slave states. Outraged transatlantic reformers such as F.C. Adams drew public attention to the work of “the State [in] trying to reduce human beings from a state of freedom into that of slavery.”¹³Close British and American sailors, with the support of their national or state governments, instigated a number of legal actions to challenge the law’s constitutionality and secure its repeal. As the Liberator reported, any of these lawsuits would have tested “before the Supreme Court of the United States the legality of imprisoning such, when color and not crime was the only indictment to be found,” but South Carolina officials blocked all these cases from going before the federal high court.¹⁴Close Antislavery activists and opponents of this police regulation increasingly turned to the “bar of public opinion” once they realized that a federal hearing would not be forthcoming and that Congress, controlled by “slavocratic power,” would not act on the issue. Black and white abolitionists and merchants, southern reformers, and free blacks within the Atlantic world forged unexpected alliances as they endeavored to push this issue to the top of the political agenda. In the failure of law, they turned to newsprint, pamphleteering, and literature as they sought to enlist the “public mind” to do the work that legislators and jurists refused to do. These writers and orators, such as Walker, drew forth a revolutionary black consciousness from the law’s negativity and limits, creating an oppositional agenda over these many decades of intermittent transatlantic protest.

The controversial Vesey conspiracy unleashed a public discourse of black revolutionary agency that South Carolina officials and proslavery advocates sought to control for their own political ends, as they drew distinctions between their domestic and foreign black populations.¹⁵Close The specter of incendiary blacks foreign to local slaveholding customs justified, in various ways, the necessity of this controversial regulation, as southern ideologues insisted on the “paternal benevolence” of slavery as an institution. Throughout the many decades of public contestation, South Carolina lawmakers periodically reinvigorated this amorphous threat of black foreignness to resolve this rather conspicuous contradiction within slaveholding society: purportedly docile slaves capable of violent insurrection. Officials sought to relocate the threatening revolutionary potential of “domestic” slave populations onto the phantasm of free “foreign negroes.”¹⁶Close This racialized regulation of transborder movement also indicates the degree to which U.S. borders were far from open; it offers an early history of the racial exclusions that continued to characterize U.S. geopolitics and the right to free travel well into the twentieth century.¹⁷Close Not only did local law thus define the borders of state and nation, but it also, according to Mary Dudziak and Leti Volpp, “delineate[d] the consequence of borders for the peoples within them.”¹⁸Close

South Carolina officials sought to transform state aggression against its free black populace into a narrative of white victimization, as the police law activated a powerful sectional doctrine of self-preservation against a “racial” threat constructed as “foreign” to local customs. Public safety, insisted southern lawmakers, necessitated this statute, since “free negroes and persons of color, coming from the North … [had] attempted to corrupt our colored population by instilling into their minds false ideas of their duties and their station, till, by their insidious and exaggerated statements, they succeeded in exciting in the midst of this community a formidable insurrection.”¹⁹Close South Carolina advocates insisted on this higher “law of self-preservation” as they marshaled out the language of public health to represent free black sailors as an “infectious disease” capable of overwhelming their domestic slave populations.²⁰Close This history offers one of the starker illustrations of the racial moorings of police power, as lawmakers redefined these free blacks, regardless of national allegiances, into “foreigners” subject to punishment. They became stateless persons as officials stripped them of their legal personhood as either free citizens of northern states or subjects of Western nations. This geopolitical discourse of “foreignness” levied against free black American sailors, in particular, involved a troubling discourse of ontological dislocation and political alienation that was congruent with the slave’s social death.²¹Close The sailors’ claims on inalienable “native rights” went unheeded.²²Close How was black life to be inscribed in the social order given that life or birth in the nation did not necessarily establish black persons as citizens or sovereign subjects? These conflicts over the extension of rights and entitlements to the free black citizens of “sister states,” let alone the subjects of sovereign nations such as Britain or France, further pry apart the modern fiction of the equivalence of nativity and nationality.²³Close

Black northerners, concerned about the ongoing violation of their constitutional rights, organized to take action against the Negro Seamen Acts. In 1842, notable black activists including William C. Nell, Benjamin Weeden, and Charles A. Battiste (who also financed a boarding home for black sailors) called a public hearing in Boston to “consider the imprisonment of colored seamen in foreign ports, and to take measures for petitioning Congress and the State Legislature on their behalf.”²⁴Close Such petitions sought to circumvent the Gag Rule that officially suppressed discussion of slavery in Congress from 1836 to 1844. “Several colored seamen,” the Liberator reported of one well-attended meeting, “came forward to testify to the sufferings and cruelties they had experienced in southern prisons.”²⁵Close John Hatfield, a Pennsylvania native and barber aboard a “steamboat plying from New Orleans to Cincinnati,” reported, “[I was] arrested, ironed in the street to degrade me, and put in the jail.”²⁶Close There he found “men from Boston, New York, Baltimore, and other places” who had also been jailed under the Negro Seamen Act, even though they, like Hatfield, “had committed no crime.”²⁷Close Black reformers periodically organized meetings to give “public expression … especially from those the most likely to become victims to the slave code,” and boarding homes for black seamen, such as the one run by black abolitionist William P. Powell, founder of the Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society, became sites for antislavery organizing.²⁸Close

Warned of the dangers of sailing into southern ports, some sailors took matters into their own hands and resisted through desertion or mutiny. Northern senators, for example, reported that “voyages had sometimes been broken up or delayed and embarrassed in consequence of the desertion of colored seamen who had left their vessels on discovering that they were to visit southern ports.”²⁹Close Eighteen black crewmen mutinied aboard the S.L. Bogart in 1857 when they discovered that their vessel was bound for Mobile, Alabama, rather than New York as they had been led to believe. “The alleged cause of the mutiny,” noted the Zion’s Herald, was “the unwillingness of the colored seamen to go where they feared to be reduced to slavery.”³⁰Close Some white captains also joined the fray to defend the rights of their black shipmen. Charles McLean, the British sailing master of the St. Lucia merchant vessel Susan King protested “the cruelty and injustice of such an act” and forcefully repelled the Wilmington harbor officials intent on arresting his black crewmen in 1845.³¹Close

Stories of free black seamen thus imprisoned and sold into slavery through the cupidity of unscrupulous captains and southern police officers became a common feature of the antislavery platform and print culture.³²Close In 1834, the Committee on the Domestic Slave Trade of the United States emphatically reported, “There is a continual stream of free colored persons from Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, and other seaports of the United States, passing through the calaboose into slavery in the country.”³³Close This report described in detail a number of cases of kidnapping, in which avaricious captains took advantage of the Negro Seamen Acts to profit from the enslavement of their free black crewmen. The experience of Boston seaman Robert Roberts—who was “kidnapped at New Orleans, and committed to the calaboose, preparatory to being sold and sent into the interior”—illustrates the utter precariousness of black freedom across the border separating free from slave state.³⁴Close Roberts suspected “that his captain, a Scotchman named Bulkley, was privy to the outrage,” and he narrowly escaped enslavement, in a telling instance of the cosmopolitanism of black seafaring life, for if he had not “been able to speak French” to the “creole French soldier who was on guard”—whom he convinced to deliver a message “to two friends in the city, who obtained his release”—he would have been sold.³⁵Close Roberts shared his New Orleans prison quarters with “nine colored men, whom he knew to be free, having known several of them as stewards on board northern vessels. Two of them belonged to Boston, one to Portland, and three to New-York. After twenty days, they were to be sold.”³⁶Close Other shipmasters exploited their crewmembers’ fears of enslavement to coerce them into signing disadvantageous contracts, until sailors successfully challenged this practice before Massachusetts court in Stratton et al. v. Babbage (1855).³⁷Close

Few statistics exist for the number of sailors incarcerated and sold as slaves in southern states, yet a keeper of a “Seaman’s Home” in New York estimated that twelve hundred black sailors were seized annually in New Orleans, five hundred in Charleston and three hundred in Savannah.³⁸Close London’s Anti-Slavery Reporter likewise reported, “upon the very best authority, that in 1851, thirty-seven British subjects were seized and incarcerated, and forty-two in the course of last year; and that there is no doubt of many free coloured British subjects having been sold into slavery under the operation of this law, all traces of whom have been lost.”³⁹Close When the South Carolina Assembly finally deliberated the modification of its law in 1856, “[i]t was shewn,” according to the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “that no less than seven hundred and thirty coloured seamen, for no crime whatever, were incarcerated in the Charleston prison during the short span of ten months.”⁴⁰Close

American abolitionists opposed to the South Carolina law stressed unrestricted interstate travel as an essential right of citizenship to counter these proliferating regulations against black American seamen in southern ports. Indeed, Congress had long recognized the exceptional status of mariners in 1796 when it passed “An Act for the relief and protection of American Seamen” authorizing seamen protection certificates to black and white merchant seamen certifying their status as national citizens to protect them from impressment.⁴¹Close The popular conception of the constitutional right to “free travel” (discussed further in the conclusion) forced the government to reckon with the place of free blacks within the nation. What did legal freedom mean if police laws such as South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act disregarded the rights accorded to the free? Both American and British antislavery activists pondered this question. The various accounts of “kidnapped” free black sailors offered a powerful cautionary tale of postemancipation freedom. Memorials, lectures, novels, and pamphlets protesting these police laws repeatedly stressed the Atlantic contours of an antislavery campaign that transcended both national identifications and geopolitical boundaries. The uneasy and shifting alliances of abolitionists, sailors, reformers, and commercially affected merchants brought international attention to bear on the far-reaching effects of slavery in the United States. The British government insisted that the South Carolina statute violated the 1815 treaty providing for the “reciprocal liberty of commerce” between the two nations, and concerned Americans protested it for violating citizenship rights and interstate comity. Critics couched their protests within the legal paradigm most legible to the federal government: the constitutional privileges and immunities pledged to citizens as “agents of contractual liberty.”⁴²Close These overlapping protests challenged the United States to define itself as either a nation among a community of nations or a confederation of sovereign states.⁴³Close

Outcries against the Negro Seamen Act ignited congressional debates over whether the individual states or the federal government possessed the authority to regulate travel or “free ingress and regress” across state lines. Massachusetts senator Robert Charles Winthrop, who also led the northern opposition to the proposed Fugitive Slave Bill, cited the Negro Seamen Acts as instances of southern noncompliance with interstate comity and the privileges and immunities of state citizenship secured in the Constitution.⁴⁴Close Well in advance of the denationalization of black citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sandford, South Carolina’s “extraordinary law” deemed free blacks not citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution, instituting racial classifications instead as the basis for political entitlement.⁴⁵Close Antislavery newspapers noted the complex political relays between the plight of fugitive slaves in the North and black sailors in the South, caustically attacking lawmakers “in favor of aiding in the capture of Fugitive Slaves” but “dumb in regard to the arrest and imprisonment of free colored seamen at the South.”⁴⁶Close A public discourse defining this constitutional right to free interstate travel emerged out of these protests against the Negro Seamen Act. The “right of free entrance into any of the states of the Union,” urged northern advocates, “is the very first among the privileges of citizens.”⁴⁷Close Connecticut’s New Englander, for example, insisted over three lengthy treatises in 1845 and 1846 that these black citizens of northern states simply exercised their right to “free ingress and regress,” concluding that South Carolina’s regulation violated this constitutional guarantee of reciprocal travel privileges.⁴⁸Close

As sectional passions intensified, the South Carolina Assembly enacted additional measures that suspended habeas corpus, generally acknowledged as fundamental to citizenship, for all free blacks entering the state. The amended Negro Seamen Act of 1844 stipulated that “no negro or free person of color, who shall enter this State on board any vessel … and who shall be apprehended and confined by any sheriff in pursuance of the provisions of said act shall be entitled to the writ of habeas corpus.”⁴⁹Close This measure was significant given the longstanding role of habeas corpus in Anglo-American jurisprudence and political philosophy as “an instrument of individual freedom against arbitrary imprisonment” by the state and especially given the writ’s centrality to the history of Anglo-American antislavery activism since Somerset.⁵⁰Close “The doors of the courts of justice,” observed a Massachusetts statesman, “are effectually closed, and apparently closed forever” to such sailors.⁵¹Close Black sailors were thus made “dead in law,” possessing natural life but stripped of civil rights.⁵²Close These legislative enactments appalled Douglass’s North Star, which deemed them a “revolting injustice” in a “country and under a Government boasting of its Freedom, its Civilization and its Justice!”⁵³Close

An individual who invoked habeas corpus asserted the right to be subject to the law rather than to arbitrary power; the revised Negro Seamen Act specifically prevented incarcerated black sailors from seeking reprieve through legal channels.⁵⁴Close The “law is his enemy,” announced the New Englander, “[i]f crossing the line of his native state, he is detained, by whatever necessity, beyond the short period of absence which the law may allow.”⁵⁵Close These excessive measures outraged newspapers such as the New York Daily-Times, which condemned the power invested in local sheriffs “to seize the unfortunate black freeman, convey him as a felon through the public streets, incarcerate him in the common jail, and release him only at the period, no matter how remote, of the sailing of the vessel to which he had been attached.”⁵⁶Close Few full accounts of the seizure, imprisonment, and auction of free black seamen exist within the historical record, precisely because these seamen were barred from appealing to courts for arbitration. The following sections critically reconstruct a number of these cases to read them alongside material from the Anti-Slavery Recorder, John Brown’s slave narrative, David Walker’s antislavery jeremiad, Samuel Ringgold Ward’s British oratories, and the largely unexamined antislavery writings of F.C. Adams, specifically the novel Manuel Pereira. As these cases starkly exposed the limits of the law in a partially free Atlantic world, black and white abolitionists turned to literary and rhetorical appeals in their decades-long transatlantic struggle to reshape South Carolina’s racial jurisprudence.

The Negro finds himself an unprotected foreigner in his own home.

—Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, 1899

Conspiracies such as Denmark Vesey’s Charleston plot were undoubtedly flashpoints in the complex history of black resistance to slavery and its racial ideologies, yet the slave state also enlisted the potential of black revolt in the centralization of its power.⁵⁷Close The trope of black revolt, notes Maggie Sale, was often “a site of contestation among unequally empowered groups.”⁵⁸Close Southern lawmakers marshaled the threat of black revolt as the groundwork for the exercise of police power.⁵⁹Close The imagined dangers of “free foreign negroes” thus became the basis of a powerful racial jurisprudence that restricted individual rights in the name of “self-preservation.” Indeed, Kent’s Commentaries on American Law observed that the “great principle of self-preservation doubtless demands, on the part of the white population dwelling in the midst of such combustible materials, unceasing vigilance and firmness.”⁶⁰Close These ubiquitous Negro Seamen Acts sought, in Eric Sundquist’s terms, the “countersubversive containment of revolutionary energy,” yet southern lawmakers found themselves reinvigorating the revolutionary potential forestalled in Vesey’s conspiracy in order to secure popular consensus for periodic expansions to the law.⁶¹Close South Carolina statesman and jurist Benjamin Faneuil Hunt, for example, defended the South Carolina act in Ex parte Henry Elkison v. Francis G. Deliesseline (1823), one of the earliest cases to challenge the police regulation, with an alarmist vision of the state convulsed in the throes of a mass slave uprising: “If South-Carolina has to dread the moral pestilence which a free intercourse with foreign negroes will produce, she has, by the primary law of nature, a right within her own limits to use every means to interdict it—she is not bound to wait until her citizens behold their habitations in flames.”⁶²Close Lawmakers uncoupled black revolt from actual historical events and transformed it into a free-floating phantasm to authorize the continual expansion of police power against their black and white populations.

Black mariners sailing under the protection of Western nations such as Great Britain and France were also subject to this police law as coastal slave states acknowledged, in a negative fashion, the revolutionary possibilities of a black Atlantic reshaped by the Haitian Revolution and West Indian Emancipation. The Richmond Enquirer, for example, angrily justified South Carolina lawmakers: “Are they bound to receive aliens, who may carry the very seeds of insurrection into their bosom? Suppose our slaves returning from Hayti,—suppose suspected tools from that island should arrive in Charleston in a British vessel,—is there no right to guard against the danger?”⁶³Close Proslavery lawmakers often invoked the specter of San Domingo’s successful slave revolt to defend regulations against black sailors as necessary policing measures. In the beleaguered 1845 congressional debate over the admission of Iowa and Florida, Mississippi senator Robert Walker defended a similar prohibition in the Florida constitution as the only guarantee against the entry of “[f]ree colored seamen [who] were dangerous to a slaveholding community,” including “runaway slaves from St. Domingo, who had been concerned in all the atrocities perpetrated there, and whose hands had been imbrued in the blood of their masters.”⁶⁴Close This slave revolution found localized intensifications in Nat Turner’s uprising and the averted conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey. Indeed, these compounded memories of black revolution persisted with vivid and unabated force within the political discourses of southern jurisprudence at midcentury. These historic slave conspiracies undoubtedly contributed to the fear of revolt, but southern lawmakers also actively reshaped the public memory of these events to serve their political interests.

South Carolina governor William Aiken, Jr., for example, offered a revisionist legislative history that cast the state’s domestic tranquility as dangerously undermined by the combined corrosive forces of “foreign free persons of color” and abolitionist “fanaticism.” South Carolina’s native slave population, Aiken suggested, was vulnerable to the “seduction” of “foreign free persons of color”; the Negro Seamen Act was a “humane” measure to “protect” both the “slave and master.” The historic events of Vesey’s plot had become, in Aiken’s words, “the most irrefragable evidence” for the continued necessity of South Carolina’s policy against these dangerous foreigners:

In 1822, a most dangerous and extensive conspiracy of the black population in and about Charleston, was discovered. It had been chiefly planned and devised by foreign free persons of color, who had seduced and corrupted the native free blacks and slaves…. The trial of the culprits elicited the most irrefragable evidence of their active agency, and of the dangers arising from the intermingling of foreign blacks with our slaves, and humanity demanded, both for the slave and the master, that they should be protected from these seductions.⁶⁵Close

In studied contrast to the apocryphal warning that Charleston Times editor Edwin Holland sounded in the wake of the Vesey conspiracy—“Let it never be forgotten that, the ‘our negroes are truly the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy”—Aiken’s revisionist history transferred this danger posed by “our slaves” to the spectral figures of “foreign free persons of color.”⁶⁶Close Foreignness defined the racial boundaries of a kind of liminal inclusion for those “native free blacks and slaves” who existed within the imagined social order of the slave state. Aiken’s “appeal to history,” as the New Englander observed, sought, among other things, to locate insurrectionary desire for freedom in an external “foreign” population, even though the trial testimony of suspects named in the Vesey conspiracy tended to “prove that this, like all other attempts of this kind, sprung from internal causes.”⁶⁷Close Rather than acknowledge the “domestic” origins of slave unrest, southern legislators and officials had begun to represent “the rank and file of the conspiracy as the victims of foreign seduction” in the concerted effort to redirect the source of revolutionary black agency elsewhere beyond the boundaries of the state. This discourse of seduction paralleled the fantasies of individual slaveholders such as Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who remained convinced that John S. Jacobs would return to him, reimagining the escape of their slaves as the work of meddlesome white abolitionists who had “decoyed” them away. “Southern imagination, unrestrained by the literal record,” proclaimed the New Englander, had become the unlikely rationale for the enactment of those “obnoxious laws” under which free black northern citizens suffered without access to any legal means of redress.⁶⁸Close

The South Carolina law quickly became, in the words of the Southern Quarterly Review, the gravest question to agitate the Union “since the formation of the government,” hastening sectional divisions and plunging the nation into international conflicts with Great Britain and France.⁶⁹Close Police officials began to seize and incarcerate all free black seamen found aboard vessels arriving into Charleston Harbor once the law went into effect in 1823. Not a single crewmember was left aboard a British vessel in one “remarkable” case.⁷⁰Close These actions immediately ignited protests from affected French, British, and American sailors and shipmasters, who appealed to their national and state governments for relief. France first petitioned the U.S. government in 1837, and the minister of marine on numerous occasions issued circulars to French shipmasters warning them of these Negro Seamen Acts.⁷¹Close

The case of Jamaica-born free black Henry Elkison was the first of many unsuccessful British lawsuits to test the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act. Stratford Canning, the British minister in Washington, secured an early pledge from Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that British seamen would not be seized in Charleston Harbor. The British consul brought charges against the Charleston sheriff, Francis Deliesseline, and petitioned U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, a Charleston native, for a writ of habeas corpus to release Elkison after authorities, at the urging of the South Carolina Association—an extralegal organization of private citizens (many of whom were Charleston public officials)—arrested him off the Liverpool merchant vessel Homer.⁷²Close Johnson heard Ex parte Henry Elkison v. Francis G. Deliesseline (1823) while riding circuit, and his ruling, which dismissed the habeas request on procedural grounds, proffered perhaps one of the more controversial instances of judicial dictum until Taney’s Dred Scott opinion.⁷³Close

Before a crowded summer courtroom, Justice Johnson ceded authority to the slave state in the case, even though he admitted, in what was tantamount to a declaration of the law’s inherent lawlessness, that Elkison’s “right to his liberty” without “remedy to obtain it” was an “obvious mockery” of law.⁷⁴Close Habeas corpus jurisdiction only extended to persons held under U.S. authority, and Elkison, as Johnson acknowledged, was confined “arbitrarily and without authority by a state officer, a case to which our power to issue this writ does not extend.”⁷⁵Close Indeed, these sailors, in F.C. Adams’s evocative imagery, were thus “held by the thumb-screws of law.”⁷⁶Close Johnson denounced the Seamen Act as a violation of both the enumerated congressional power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and the 1815 treaty with Great Britain establishing “reciprocal liberty of commerce” and the “right of navigating their ships in their own way.”⁷⁷Close Even though such criticisms were mere dicta without binding legal power once Johnson professed his lack of jurisdiction, some antislavery newspapers misreported them as cause for celebration.⁷⁸Close In response, the Charleston Mercury rather smugly announced “that the act of the South Carolina Legislature, so far from being suspended, since the trial of Elkison, proceeds in operation more rigorously, perhaps, than before.”⁷⁹Close Regional papers ranging from the Baltimore Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser to Maine’s Eastern Argus likewise noted “that, from the continued arrivals of free persons of color at that port, the people of the north have been led into an error by the publication of Judge Johnson’s opinion.”⁸⁰Close Indeed, Johnson gave federal sanction (albeit grudgingly) to the legality of the South Carolina act: like later U.S. officials beleaguered by similar petitions, he possessed, in his words, “no power to issue the writ of Habeas Corpus” and referred Elkison’s consul to the South Carolina government.⁸¹Close

Elkison’s case, as reported in Britain, brought pressure to bear on the uncertain status of blacks in a nation still internally divided over the question of immediate or gradual abolition in the West Indies. The British Christian Register, for example, remarked on the striking “resemblance of the American slave logic to the similar argumentation of our West Indian Man-owners.”⁸²Close Indeed, the southern “tirade” in Elkison, this British periodical continued, “resembles many of the West Indian flights on the same subject,” including declarations of “the rights of property, separation from Great Britain.”⁸³Close Reportage of Elkison’s case in the United States also deepened the rift between the free and slave states. Johnson’s pronouncements in Elkison, needless to say, were highly unpopular in the South, and many southerners eagerly echoed South Carolina Association solicitor Isaac E. Holmes’s strident letter to the Charleston Mercury: “if South Carolina was deprived of the right of regulating her colored population—it required not the spirit of prophesy to foretell the result, and that, rather than submit to the destruction of the state, I would prefer the dissolution of the union.”⁸⁴Close Holmes’s antiunionist words anticipated the tenor of the “nullification crises” that pitted South Carolina against President Andrew Jackson over the federal tariff acts of 1828 and 1832.⁸⁵Close Charleston newspapers, fearing riots, deemed it “inexpedient to publish … Judge Johnson’s Opinion,” but Niles’ Weekly Register published the complete transcript of Johnson’s opinion in September, and editorialized versions of the case soon began appearing in northern newspapers.⁸⁶Close Johnson’s opinion and the arguments of Benjamin Faneuil Hunt, whom the South Carolina Assembly had engaged to defend Sheriff Deliesseline, were published later that year in Charleston as the pamphlet The Argument of Benj. Faneuil Hunt, in the Case of the Arrest of the Person Claiming to Be a British Seaman.⁸⁷Close

Hunt, an ardent unionist, voiced many of the key arguments that the state used to defend its police laws against “foreign negroes,” affirming the state’s right to use a range of force that at first restricted and then revoked the personal liberties of black citizens and foreign nationals alike. Classic theories of state formation hold that “modernity begins when government claims a monopoly on legitimate violence within its territory,” and, as John Torpey contends, modern states seized, in a parallel action, the authority to regulate movement and to identify “unambiguously who belongs and who does not—in order to ‘embrace’ their members more effectively and to exclude unwanted intruders.”⁸⁸Close In this vein, Hunt drew largely from Swiss legal philosopher Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nations (1758) to argue that South Carolina merely exercised its right as a sovereign state to “interdict altogether the entry of foreigners into his dominions.”⁸⁹Close This right to control entry was an essential feature of state sovereignty, which Hunt likened to the patriarchal imperium:

the civilized man can secure his family against the contagion of the dissolute or depraved, by closing his doors, or selecting his visitors;—So, every sovereign state, has the perfect right of interdicting all intercourse with strangers, or of selecting those whose influence or example she may fear, and confining the exclusion to them. A master of a family receives or excludes his visitors, according to the peculiar situation and feelings of his own household. A State must be the sole judge to decide what strangers may or may not enter. The power to exclude or to admit strangers, implies the right to direct the terms upon which those who are admitted shall remain. As an individual may direct what apartment his guest shall occupy, a state may confine strangers to such limits, as its own policy may dictate.⁹⁰Close

Hunt implicitly evokes a Federalist understanding of imperium in imperio, or “sovereignty within sovereignty” (the division of power within one jurisdiction), to argue that the state, when acting in the service of protecting its populace from harm (like the patriarch over his household), should not be subject to constitutional scrutiny.⁹¹Close

The regime of police laws that Hunt defends and likens to the patriarchal imperium increasingly restricted what constituted acceptable forms of social relations. The “preservation” and “defense” of such slaveholding customs required the continual reinforcement of police power against free blacks.⁹²Close The regulation of free “foreign negroes” was vital to the so-called moral health of the slave population. “This State,” as Hunt explains, “having a large slave population, conceives it prudent to guard against the moral contagion which the intercourse with foreign negroes produces, and therefore she prohibits them from remaining in any other part of the State.”⁹³Close Free blacks, by definition, were threats to a slaveholding society founded on violently enforced racial dichotomies between slave and citizen, foreigner and native, black and white. In thus “monopolizing the legitimate means of movement,” to borrow Torpey’s words, the slave state further established its identity in the process of excluding and thereby distinguishing foreigners and aliens from its native populace.⁹⁴Close Hunt’s strategic and repeated use of the term “foreign negroes” constructs black Americans who were citizens of sister states as outsiders to their own nation. What did it mean to be a citizen in a northern state but not have the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship once in a southern jurisdiction? Whereas antislavery periodicals like the Liberator distinguished “foreign seamen” from “native American seamen,” advocates of the South Carolina regulation effectively redefined all black sailors as “foreigners.”

This doctrine of self-preservation and states’ rights was the cornerstone of the southern defense of its increasingly punitive Negro Seamen Acts. When the British consul in Charleston again protested the imprisonment of free black seamen, the Charleston Mercury argued that this law “has its foundation in the right of every organized society to protect itself,—a right which no Government can be expected to surrender.”⁹⁵Close The state’s sovereign right to self-protection cannot be compromised for the sake of respecting the civil liberties of a few foreign nationals: “The safety of a whole State must be consulted, although it results in temporary inconvenience and annoyance to a coloured or even a white British seaman.”⁹⁶Close Governor John Means, facing one of the more concerted diplomatic assaults on the law in 1852, stressed with hyperbolic certainty, as did nearly every other South Carolinian before him, that “the right of self-preservation … [is] a right which is above all constitutions, and above all laws, and one which never was, nor never will be, abandoned by a people who are worthy to be free” (MP, 356; emphasis added). In defending the necessity of the Seamen Act, Means invokes a natural right (of self-preservation) that exists outside or “above” the existing legal order. This law is paradoxically enacted precisely to deal with this “extralegal” situation. Such contradictions within South Carolina’s governmentality illustrate powerfully what Giorgio Agamben describes as the “state of exception”: no system of law is fully complete unto itself but relies upon an “exception”—a suspension of the norm—that exists both within and outside the juridical order that it helps constitute.⁹⁷Close The South Carolinian defense of the Negro Seamen Act, its law that becomes a “right which is … above all laws,” thus reveals the necessary incoherence of the slave state in relation to the law.

Throughout the antebellum period, Great Britain continued to demand “redress and reparation” for the arrest and confinement of its black mariners in the United States, and it lodged eight more petitions with the U.S. government for such “violent and unjustifiable act[s]” and “outrage[s].”⁹⁸Close Within a year of Elkison, the British minister Henry Addington brought the Marmion case before President James Monroe, seeking the repeal of South Carolina’s “very grievous law.”⁹⁹Close The Marmion, according to its captain, Peter Petrie, “was not well moored at the wharf, before the officers, who were appointed to put this law into execution, came on board, and forcibly carried one of the four of these men to jail, where he remained during my stay in Charleston.” Three other black crewmen whom Petrie had safely transferred onto a New York bound packet were, according to his testimony, “apprehended by men who seemed anxious only to get their fees, and thrown into prison, depriving them of the opportunity to comply with the law, which they would have done in a few hours.”¹⁰⁰Close Charleston police, however, continued to enforce its law against black British mariners despite the inquiries of successive U.S. secretaries of state, especially after the discovery of David Walker’s incendiary Appeal circulating among Charleston slaves in early 1830.

South Carolina reacted violently to the discovery of Walker’s Appeal and rejected these diplomatic appeals to suspend the operation of its police law against black British subjects. British Foreign Minister to the U.S. Charles Vaughan called on Secretary of State Martin Van Buren to intervene on behalf of yet another black Briton, a cook named Daniel Fraser, who was seized from his Liverpool merchant vessel, the Atlantic.¹⁰¹Close Vaughan’s formal remonstrance sought to impress on Van Buren “how hopeless it is to expect that the magistrates of Charleston will set at liberty Daniel Fraser, or to look forward with any confidence to the repeal of the obnoxious act by the legislature of the State.”¹⁰²Close Indeed, the circulation of Walker’s pamphlet coincided with a marked change in national policy toward these state police laws. In 1831, after recent protests against the Negro Seamen Acts, Attorney General John Berrien overruled former Attorney General William Wirt to declare, according to Fehrenbacher, that “state police powers protected in the Tenth Amendment took precedence over federal power to regulate commerce.”¹⁰³Close

British diplomatic protests against South Carolina again erupted in 1843 over the seizure and incarceration of a black steward from the British vessel Higginson. Police officers physically assaulted and committed the steward to solitary confinement after he refused to labor for them. Coerced labor was not uncommon among imprisoned sailors. “The law,” as the Charleston Courier observed, “does not define the power of jailors over the persons confined under its provisions, and had provided no efficient means of securing to them comfortable quarters and protection from tyranny and cruelty.”¹⁰⁴Close George Tolliver, a free black American sailor who had been incarcerated on seven different occasions reported that “when thus imprisoned, he was denied a sufficiency of food, and compelled to perform various menial and disgusting offices in the prison; though … the captain was obliged to pay a full, if not an exorbitant price for his board.”¹⁰⁵Close Undermining the distinction between the free and enslaved, the unwaged labor coerced from these incarcerated sailors anticipated the one exception to the legislated abolition of slavery reinstated in the Thirteenth Amendment, which permitted “involuntary servitude for those convicted of crimes.”

The British were not alone in their demands for the repeal of “the obnoxious law.” Massachusetts Whig Journal editor David Child’s address before the New England Anti-Slavery Society noted, “Forty respectable master[s] of American vessels lying in the port of Charleston, whose men had been seized and were then in prison, petitioned Congress for redress in 1823.”¹⁰⁶Close Led by Captain Jared Bunce of the Georgia, a regular trader between Philadelphia and Charleston, the petitioners urged the federal government to “adopt such energetic measures as will relieve … their free colored mariners … [from] an unlawful imprisonment, and their vessels … [from] an enormous and unnecessary expense and detention.” Bunce had appealed “to a court of the state of South Carolina for a habeas corpus, to inquire into the cause of the arrest and detention of Andrew Fletcher, (steward), and David Ayres, (cook), both free colored persons, and native citizens of the United States.”¹⁰⁷Close The case eventually came before the South Carolina Supreme Court, where “the case was suspended, and the prisoners were deprived of the relief for which they moved; and do still remain in confinement.”¹⁰⁸Close Indeed, the South Carolina Supreme Court employed this tactic with similar results in the case of Portuguese sailor Manuel Pereira, examined at length later in this chapter. Bunce’s congressional petition, like his stalled court case, “appear[s] to have been disposed of among a mass of matters,” even though “[c]itizens of free states, Maine, New-Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island, Connecticut, New-York, and Pennsylvania” continue to be “seized and sold into bondage.”¹⁰⁹Close

In Massachusetts, a state historically identified with both maritime commerce and abolitionism, mercantile interests and antislavery “radicals” found a peculiar and uneasy alliance in their united protests against the Negro Seamen Acts. Petitions protesting the seizure and imprisonment of black mariners were repeatedly brought before the state legislature. Massachusetts lawmakers were sympathetic to the plight of shipmasters and crewmen, yet they carefully couched their protests in terms of commerce and constitutional right while avoiding arguments that might be misconstrued as endorsing abolitionism. The Massachusetts legislature revisited the issue in 1839, when it appointed a Special Joint Committee “to inquiry into the expediency of providing for the deliverance of citizens of this Commonwealth, who may be imprisoned and liable to be sold as slaves.”¹¹⁰Close The committee’s minority report catalogued the recent outrages against free black northern citizens with a number of affidavits from “colored citizens of New Bedford … who have suffered under the laws in question.”¹¹¹Close John Cory, “a free born citizen of Massachusetts, a native of the town of Westport,” reported that “a couple of persons, calling themselves officers, came on board” and seized him off the trading sloop Rodman in 1824. “[S]even others, colored like myself, were in prison,” according to Cory, even though “[n]o offence was charged upon any of us.” The Charleston police dealt similarly with Richard Johnson, the wealthy black merchant who underwrote the Rodman’s commercial voyage south. The report concluded “that facts of this kind may be obtained from the captain of every northern vessel, that has visited Charleston with colored persons on board.”¹¹²Close

In the 1840s, public protest over the imprisonment of northern seamen in Charleston crystallized into a specifically regionalized dispute between Massachusetts and South Carolina that further aggravated sectional feelings throughout the nation. South Carolina’s stubborn refusal to modify its law may be explained, as Guyora Binder argues, “as a dialectical moment in its controversy with the North over slavery itself,” which simultaneously forced free states such as Massachusetts to solidify their liberal ideologies.¹¹³CloseMassachusetts and South Carolina each responded to the issue of slavery through the extreme territorializing of its state power. South Carolina admitted the right of Massachusetts “to elevate the descendants of the African race to the rank or status of free white persons … within her own limits” but vigorously denied “that she has any right to require us to extend to such of them as may enter our limits.”¹¹⁴Close Advocates of South Carolina argued that southerners often had “on board their own vessels, colored seamen who were slaves. If one of these vessels went into a port of the state of Massachusetts all those slaves were instantly emancipated.”¹¹⁵Close Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court had indeed begun in 1844 to free slaves brought into the state on board ships, in Commonwealth v. Potterfield and Commonwealth v. Fitzgerald. Coastal slave states persisted in arresting black sailors who arrived on their shores, just as free states led by Massachusetts began to free, by writ of habeas corpus, those slaves who were brought within their bounds by traveling slaveholders.

These Negro Seamen Acts made it impossible for abolitionists to address the problem of slavery without attending to the condition of free blacks within the American polity. Abolitionists insisted that these “severe penal restrictions” were an outgrowth of “that cursed system of murder, robbery, adultery, and every other sin under heaven, called American slavery,” even as merchants, British diplomats, and state legislators continued to couch their protests in far less politicized terms.¹¹⁶Close The Massachusetts legislature, for example, authorized the governor to appoint agents in Charleston and New Orleans “for the purpose of collecting and transmitting accurate information respecting the number and the names of citizens of Massachusetts, who have heretofore been or may be … imprisoned without the allegation of any crime.”¹¹⁷Close The Charleston appointment was initially extended to Benjamin F. Hunt, the same man who passionately defended South Carolina law in Elkison, in the effort to distance this resolution from the divisive “question of abolition.”¹¹⁸Close This desire to dissociate protest against South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act from abolitionist politics was not unusual. The American Colonization Society’s African Repository, for example, protested in sympathy with “respectable” ship owners who were forced to suffer economic hardships, but it remained firmly set against “the question of abolition.”¹¹⁹Close

Sectional feelings reached a tipping point when, in 1844, the newly elected Massachusetts governor, George N. Briggs, commissioned Samuel Hoar as his representative to Charleston and Henry Hubbard to New Orleans, directing the two to prosecute lawsuits on behalf of Massachusetts citizens at the expense of the public treasury. A lawyer specializing in maritime law, Hoar would have brought a civil suit before the U.S. Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of the Negro Seamen Act.¹²⁰Close However, the South Carolina legislature, once notified of Hoar’s appointment, condemned his mission and issued a nearly unanimous series of resolutions authorizing Governor William Aiken, Jr., to expel him as an “emissary of a Foreign Government, hostile to our Democratic Institutions, and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police.”¹²¹Close It furthermore declared that “free negroes and persons of color are not citizens of the United States, within the meaning of the Constitution, which confers upon the citizens of one state the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States.”¹²²Close This denationalization of black citizenship closely echoed the statements of former Attorney General Roger B. Taney, as he tried to forestall British diplomatic efforts to redeem sailors seized under North Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act, statements that Taney later developed in his Dred Scott opinion: “The African race in the United States even when free, are everywhere a degraded class, and exercises no political influence.”¹²³Close The South Carolina attorney general, fearing the national condemnation that would be levied on the state if Hoar should be lynched, charged the Charleston sheriff to escort him from the city.¹²⁴Close

Garrison’s Liberator seized on Hoar’s banishment as an opportunity to consolidate public opinion against “slaveholding power,” condemning it as tantamount to South Carolina’s extraordinary rejection of a white citizen’s constitutional right to unmolested free travel.¹²⁵Close The excessive measures taken against Hoar offered the antislavery weekly a “fresh confirmation of the hideous fact, that no man who is suspected of being an abolitionist can travel in any slaveholding state, without endangering his property, his liberty, or his life!”¹²⁶Close Stunned by South Carolina’s excessive measures, many newspapers saw Hoar’s expulsion as a “gross insult” to a sister state in defense of an “outrageous law.”¹²⁷Close Hoar’s expulsion as an “enemy” of the state did seem to be a grave misstep in South Carolinian statecraft, diplomacy, and public relations, and a number of concerned commentators saw the escalating conflicts between the two states as further “weaken[ing] the bonds which unite the different sections of the confederacy.”¹²⁸Close To some northerners, these actions were all the more galling because they had been taken against a “free white citizen of Massachusetts,” and the Liberator cautioned against this slippery slope of restrictions on interstate travel: “The insatiable appetite of the slave power is no longer satisfied with black victims,” and “the jails of the South are fast filling up with victims from the ranks of the whites—the educated and refined—the old colony stock of ancient Puritan blood!”¹²⁹Close Many northerners were apoplectic over this refusal to grant the venerable statesman his “privilege of locomotion, under the American Constitution!”¹³⁰Close “The sovereignty and dignity of the State of Massachusetts,” as other partisan papers reported, “were represented by Mr. Hoar…. Massachusetts herself appeared in his person … and it is Massachusetts, in the person of Mr. Hoar, that is expelled from South Carolina.”¹³¹Close

The uncivil treatment of black and white northern citizens angered many people, who argued that South Carolina did not offer the “same degree of protection” to American citizens as it did to “those of foreign powers” such as Britain and France.¹³²Close Sectional rhetoric often accompanied such critiques of this preferential treatment of black Britons. Such references to the “foreign” gave a nationalistic edge to the discourse of U.S. sectionalism, especially given the fact that these claims were patently untrue. Charleston officials continued to seize and imprison black Britons, even though American antislavery activists often claimed otherwise. American antislavery print culture thus appropriated the proslavery discourse of “foreign negroes”: “foreigners” became opposed to American “countrymen” in editorials deriding southern discrimination against “citizens of the free States of the Union.”¹³³Close Abolitionist campaigns for the repeal of these Negro Seamen Acts were thereby articulated with U.S. nation-building projects that sought to secure the boundaries of national identity. John Palfrey’s Papers on the Slave Power (1846), for example, hyperbolically reported that “the British Lion … gave a growl and snap, and the Carolina people presently found out that it was perfectly safe to let British blacks come and go without hindrance or harm, even though they should be lately emancipated slaves from Barbadoes or Jamaica; while they cannot see to this day that it is at all safe to take the same course with blacks from Massachusetts.”¹³⁴Close Such references to the South’s preferential treatment of British over American seamen sought to enlist nationalist loyalties and identifications in the antislavery campaign to repeal the Negro Seamen Acts, even as these activists eagerly sought to rally transatlantic support for their efforts. As U.S. sectional tensions flared in the 1850s, British abolitionists, in an analogous gesture, denounced American aggression against British civil liberties in their efforts to rouse public opinion against slavery and to further identify freedom with British law and cultural heritage.

The people of Charleston might now inquire why they have so much law and so little justice?

—F. C. Adams, Manuel Pereira; or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina, 1853

A new spate of transatlantic disputes over the incarceration of black British seamen erupted in the early 1850s, as Great Britain, pressed by an outraged public, increased its diplomatic efforts to secure the repeal of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act. This section charts this final decade of popular mobilizations to repeal the regulation, as three cases in quick succession captivated the British public. Abolitionists challenged Britain’s commitment to protecting the rights of its newly emancipated black subjects. A number of editorials surfaced in the London Times expressing the public condemnation of what was viewed as an arbitrary law of racial exclusion that was a violation of British rights and an affront to the nation. One letter, addressed to Lord Palmerston, offered an eyewitness account of the routine workings of “white law” in Charleston: “I was in America in 1839 and 1840, and remember very clearly that the entire black crew of a ship from St. Domingo, captain, able hands, and all, were packed into prison during the whole time the vessel remained in the same port of Charleston, South Carolina.”¹³⁵Close The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society regularly devoted columns of its monthly publication, the Anti-Slavery Reporter, to the “Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen” as it informed the British public of the depredations perpetrated on its free black subjects. It offered ample coverage of the Parliamentary deliberations over the case of sailor Manuel Pereira, who had become something of a cause célèbre, alongside moving narrative accounts of British seamen seized and sold into slavery. Anglo-American abolitionists sought less to address the abstract points of law than to guide public sympathy toward the harrowing plight of black mariners in southern ports.

The Anti-Slavery Reporter was one of the earliest newspapers to report on the seizures of Isaac Bowers and Rueben Roberts, calling on “the British press and public to demand from Government immediate measures to prevent future outrages of this kind” and insisting that it “must receive a definitive answer, whether the colored population belonging to this country and its various dependencies are to be treated as felons and slaves in any ports of the United States.”¹³⁶Close Great Britain’s concerted efforts in the 1850s to dispute South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act brought international scrutiny to bear on the questions both of federal powers and of institutional slavery in the United States. Britain’s refusal to indemnify U.S. slaveholders for slaves set free from distressed or wrecked American vessels in the British West Indies did not contribute to amicable foreign relations. In 1841, Secretary of State Daniel Webster petitioned in vain for the extradition of the slaves who mutinied aboard the Creole and had become free, according to British officials, by virtue of landing in Nassau in the British Bahamas.¹³⁷Close West Indian Emancipation had radically reshaped the boundaries of freedom and slavery throughout the Atlantic world. Indeed, in 1851, the French National Assembly declared slavery and the imprisonment of black sailors to be “barbarous,” as Great Britain continued its fruitless negotiations with the intractable South Carolina Assembly. “Neither France nor England,” France’s General Lahitte reportedly declared, “have been able to persuade the government of the United States to enter into the ways of civilization and humanity, which we will persevere to march in.”¹³⁸Close Lahitte’s disdainful words chart the Enlightenment’s unfinished journey from Europe to the so-called New World as France and Great Britain began to reshape themselves as free nations in the wake of abolition and emancipation.¹³⁹Close

Fresh from governorship of the Bahamas, George Buckley-Mathew, the British consul-general of the Carolinas, initiated diplomatic negotiations with South Carolina’s Governor Means in “hopes that the law by which any of H.B.M.’s subjects are taken from the protection of the British flag and imprisoned, should not be extended to foreigners.”¹⁴⁰Close Charleston police officers had seized Isaac Bowers, “a coloured man, a native of Antigua, and, of course, a British subject,” and incarcerated him for two months while his vessel Mary Ann was refitted for its transatlantic journey.¹⁴¹Close Bowers was the first of three highly publicized cases of British seamen who were incarcerated and, in one instance, sold into slavery by the Charleston police. Over the next few years of heightened protest, transatlantic antislavery print culture freely disseminated these stories as powerful symbols of slavery’s inexorable workings, leading to the law’s modification in December 1856.¹⁴²Close The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society addressed a memorial to Palmerston, the British secretary of foreign affairs, urging the government to take more active measures to prevent the ongoing violation of “the just liberties of a large body of mariners,” after it determined that Bowers was “not likely to obtain any redress for the indignity and injury he … suffered at the hands of the American authorities.”¹⁴³Close Public interest was further aroused when, after returning to Britain, Bowers brought suit against his former captain for withholding wages “on the ground that he had paid for the steward’s support while in gaol.”¹⁴⁴Close The prosecuting attorney condemned Capt. William Waddington for his passive acquiescence to “the unjustifiable imprisonment of Bowers,” since he had “made no representation to the British Minister at Washington City, or even sought the protection of the British Consul.”¹⁴⁵Close The combined efforts of mariners such as Bowers and Anglo-American abolitionists intensified public protests, forcing Parliament to take more-active measures to secure the repeal of those “obnoxious laws.”¹⁴⁶Close “[P]ublic indignation in [Great Britain] had been greatly excited by the statements in the newspapers,” and Palmerston was asked to satisfy the “people … that the Government … [would] take any practicable steps towards remonstrating against and putting an end to the practice in question.”¹⁴⁷Close

Under this public pressure, Palmerston issued yet another appeal to the U.S. government on behalf of the “plain rights of British subjects.”¹⁴⁸Close U.S. Secretary of State John Clayton, unwilling to interfere in a “local” concern, referred British Consul Mathew to Governor Means. Newspaper accounts of Mathew’s rather unprecedented private negotiations with Means out-lined the long unresolved conflict between South Carolina’s local laws and the federal treaties between Britain and the United States.¹⁴⁹Close The British press denounced the violation of Bowers’s rights as a free Englishman, even though it generally cautioned against extreme diplomatic measures, unlike the radical position of Littell’s Living Age, which condemned the “gratuitous imprisonment of a whole class of British subjects” as amounting “to a diplomatic grievance of the first magnitude.”¹⁵⁰Close The editor of Littell’s even demanded reparations for the imprisonment of all British crewmen whose “complexion falls below a recognized standard of olive” as “amends for the insult put upon our colored fellow-countrymen.”¹⁵¹Close The vexed status of black Britons that had been raised in Elkison reemerged in postemancipation Britain as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society urged the government to “do its duty” to protect the “personal freedom of all British subjects, without distinction of colour.”¹⁵²Close

The South Carolina legislature remained obstinate, even though Louisiana, pressured both by popular opinion and by its British consul later that year, “passed an act amending the colored law of the State, by abolishing the penalty of imprisonment, and permitting free persons of color to come on shore, with passports from the Mayor.”¹⁵³Close Failing in various appeals to the South Carolina legislature, Mathew, at the direction of the charge d’affaires in Washington, decided to challenge the “police law” through the courts. He began legal actions on behalf of two recently arrested black seamen, Manuel Pereira, a Portuguese sailor articled to service on the English brig Janson, and Rueben Roberts, a native of Nassau in the British West Indies and cook aboard the English schooner Clyde. It is likely that the two men shared the same Charleston jail cell. Although South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act, as a number of newspapers noted, was “to be tested in more forms than one,” the proximity of the two cases yielded reportage that confused the specifics of their separate proceedings.¹⁵⁴Close Pereira’s case was particularly effective at sensitizing British and American publics because his vessel had been “driven into the port of Charleston in distress,” and the wrecked condition of the Janson’s arrival in Charleston Harbor was key in Pereira’s case against the police law.¹⁵⁵Close Newspapers ranging from the London Times to the Liberator noted that Pereira’s incarceration was particularly repugnant because of “the involuntary character of his visit to the shores of Carolina.”¹⁵⁶Close Even the Charleston Mercury admitted, albeit with some ambivalence, that the police law “was passed to reach only those cases in which the party subject to it, voluntarily came within the jurisdiction in defiance of its provisions.”¹⁵⁷Close Consul Mathew engaged Charleston native and former Attorney General James L. Petigru, who appealed Pereira’s case to the state supreme court when the lower court refused to issue a writ of habeas corpus. The South Carolina Supreme Court postponed the hearing of the appeal to the following year, forcing Pereira to “lie in jail” for eight months.¹⁵⁸Close The South Carolina jurists, no doubt, calculated that the case would fail once Mathew obtained Pereira’s release. “If Pereira is now released by paying the charges,” speculated newspapers, “the case and the prospect of obtaining from the final authority a decision upon the question will fall to the ground. And it would be hard to keep the poor fellow immured long enough for the argument to be had at Charleston, and the decision rendered, so that an appeal may be taken to the Federal Judiciary.”¹⁵⁹Close

The local media and Charleston police officials disseminated distorted versions of Pereira’s arrest. These accounts neglected to note that the Janson had been wrecked; neither captain nor crew had a vessel to which they could return. Arrested on 24 March 1852, Pereira was thus left to face the prospect of an indefinite imprisonment and eventual enslavement. Given these unusual circumstances, Mathew, acting “under instruction from his Government, to test the Constitutionality of the act,” began the legal actions on Pereira’s behalf.¹⁶⁰Close Governor Means, by his own admission, had specifically directed the Charleston sheriff “not to give up the prisoner even if a writ of habeas corpus had been granted … while these proceeding were pending,” even though he later contradicted himself in claiming that Pereira “was at perfect liberty to depart at any moment that he could get a vessel to transport him beyond the limits of the State.” As the Anti-Slavery Reporter noted, Means left unanswered the key question of “[h]ow the unfortunate prisoner was to ‘get a vessel,’ under these circumstances.”¹⁶¹Close As Mathew took steps to appeal Pereira’s case before the state supreme court, the Charleston sheriff, hoping to prevent further legal action, “made an attempt to ship Pereira off,” since “his presence was essential to test his right to the habeas corpus” (MP, 355, 358).¹⁶²Close Mathew, “finding that his great object would thus be defeated, intercepted the sheriff, on his way to the vessel,” and paid Pereira’s passage to New York once they completed “the requisite arrangements for carrying on the suit in appeal.”¹⁶³Close Mathew was misadvised, however, and Pereira’s case was eventually struck from the docket of the state court in 1853 on the grounds that he was no longer in custody.¹⁶⁴Close

While awaiting Pereira’s delayed hearing, Mathew directed Petigru to charge Charleston sheriff Jeremiah D. Yates in the U.S. circuit court for the “assault and false imprisonment” of Rueben Roberts, asking for damages in the amount of four thousand dollars “for the indignity which he had suffered.”¹⁶⁵Close Sheriff Yates had seized Roberts from the Clyde upon its arrival from Cuba on 19 May 1852 and jailed him for one week until the vessel was ready for sea.¹⁶⁶Close The U.S. circuit court judge in Charleston declared the South Carolina law valid when Roberts v. Yates (1853) came to trial, and the case was ready for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court once the jury decided in the sheriff’s favor.¹⁶⁷Close The New-York Daily Times offered a biting commentary on South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act when Roberts’s case made international headlines: “Satire could hardly select a fairer mark for mirth than the spectacle of a sovereign State, represented by a Sheriff and his posse, bearing down upon every arriving merchantman, inspecting the crew, and claiming the custody of all persons, whose complexions justified a suspicion of African descent.”¹⁶⁸Close A number of newspapers saw these two cases as the culmination of decades of thwarted efforts to test the “validity of the law,” a pattern of obstruction intensified since Samuel Hoar’s expulsion from Charleston.¹⁶⁹Close Many people entertained hopes for the law’s imminent repeal once either of the two cases entered the U.S. Supreme Court docket; however, Roberts’s case, like Pereira’s, never came before that federal tribunal.

Fear of rupturing amicable trade relations with the United States prompted the British government to adopt a more judicious course to conciliate South Carolina.¹⁷⁰Close By June 1853, it had elected to drop both lawsuits and instructed Mathew to withdraw Roberts’s appeal, which was pending trial before the U.S. Supreme Court.¹⁷¹Close Commercial interests and the British government’s unwillingness to further aggravate U.S. sectional tensions, combined with a new and less interventionist-minded British Foreign Secretary, facilitated this diplomatic course.¹⁷²Close The National Era reported that the U.S. federal government had advised Britain that “to insist on the repeal of those laws under which the imprisonment of colored foreigners, entering South Carolina, would raise questions between the slave States and the Federal Government which would be exceeding inconvenient, if not destructive to the Union.”¹⁷³Close Unwilling to foment ill will with the United States, Britain announced “that the Law officers of the Crown were satisfied that Great Britain had no ground for complaining of any infraction of treaties.”¹⁷⁴Close In a November address before the state legislature, the South Carolina governor confirmed that “the cases of manuel pereira and reuben roberts, colored seamen, are settled.” South Carolina officials undoubtedly thought they had put to rest “the awkward case … that has been before the British and American public in more shapes than one.”¹⁷⁵Close They could not, however, expunge Pereira and Roberts from public memory, and, in the failure of law and diplomacy, a relatively unknown British writer, F.C. Adams, brought their cases before “the bar of public opinion” for proper adjudication.¹⁷⁶Close

Manuel Pereira; or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina was the first of a number of popular antislavery historical fictions written by the former Savannah Georgian newspaper editor F.C. (Francis Colburn) Adams.¹⁷⁷Close From the little that can be pieced together of his biography, Adams was “an Englishman … [who] resided many years in the Southern States” and had been, according to the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “[o]fficially connected with one of the principal local journals, but was finally turned against slavery by what he witnessed of its atrocities.”¹⁷⁸Close An unverified account in the Zion Herald claimed that Adams

resided in Charleston, where he was treated with much consideration until he took part with the British Consul Mathew in his opposition to the law imprisoning colored seamen. It was, we understand, for this offense that Mr. Adams was thrown into prison, on his release from which he went to London, in 1852, where the publication of “Our World,” a novel, and other works illustrative of southern life, have given him considerable reputation in the department of literature which has been illustrated by the genius of Mrs. Stowe.¹⁷⁹Close

Indeed, the New York publishers Miller, Orton & Mulligan advertised Our World as “A Great Anti-Slavery Romance” in the back pages of Kate Pickard’s The Kidnapped and the Ransomed (see figure 4.2). The particular regional cadences and sectional politics of the antebellum United States fascinated Adams even after his return to Britain, and he captured them in a number of short and full-length works.¹⁸⁰Close Advance praise from the New-York Daily Times for Adams’s third novel was particularly descriptive of his penchant for seizing on records and documents to craft compelling histories of the present, touting Justice in the By-Ways, another novel set in antebellum Charleston, as “emphatically a work of our age…. a history in the guise of fiction, history whose accuracy is attested by public records and State documents. Each character is a living reality.”¹⁸¹Close  Manuel Pereira, likewise, offered readers the merits of a legal treatise in the form of a “life-like” ethnographic fiction.

Buell & Blanchard of Washington, D.C., first published Manuel Pereira in the spring of 1852, as the international disputes over the South Carolina regulation became more heated, and the London publishing house of Clarke, Beeton, & Co. republished the novel the following year.¹⁸²Close Buell & Blanchard placed a number of advertisements for the novel in its abolitionist weekly National Era, which had just completed its serialization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.¹⁸³Close The National Era favorably commended the novel to its readers and described the work, then in press, as

founded upon that infamous statute of South Carolina, by which her citizens claim a right to imprison colored seamen, of all nations, and even those cast upon their shores in distress. We have perused the book in advance of its publication, and find that it gives a life-like picture of Pereira … the prison regimen, character of the Charleston police, and the mendacity of certain officials, who make the law a medium of peculation.¹⁸⁴Close

The novel’s topical subject matter, the reviewer insisted, “cannot fail to interest alike the general reader, commercial man, and philanthropist”—much like the unlikely and shifting coalitions forged among free blacks, abolitionists, diplomats, and merchants had in protest of the police law over the preceding decades. As a man “raised and educated in the spirit of her institutions,” Adams’s autobiographical introduction establishes his personal allegiance to the regional South only to make his subsequent critique of the Negro Seamen Act as an “effect of slavery and its wrongs” all the more damning (MP, vii). Manuel Pereira begins, deceptively, as a nineteenth-century ship narrative in the fashion of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, only to become a rather dark eyewitness exposé of the capricious workings of criminal justice in Charleston. Indeed, Manuel Pereira challenges the romantic radicalism of current Atlantic historiography with its perverse stress on the racialized forms of containment rather than the mobile freedoms generally associated with sailors and maritime life.

In a manner resembling the “authoritative” paratexts of fugitive slave narratives, Manuel Pereira includes an exhaustive appendix that reproduces Consul Mathew’s various petitions, his diplomatic correspondences with Governor Means, resolutions passed in the South Carolina Assembly, and local reportage from the Charleston Southern Standard and Charleston Mercury. These materials, found under the heading of “Correspondence, Etc.,” were reproduced and circulated as a free-standing pamphlet entitled “The Law of Colored Seamen.” Adams may very well have been the anonymous pamphleteer, given his outspoken campaign against the Negro Seamen Act. But legal documents such as these offered little insight into the subjective experiences of people whom the law afflicted. Adams’s novel, in what Ian Baucom describes as a “long, Atlantic genealogy of witness,” gave dramatic voice to the countless sailors who suffered silently under South Carolina’s punitive regulation.¹⁸⁵Close “[W]e speak,” in the words of the introduction, “for those … citizens to all intents (notwithstanding their dark skins) of the countries to which they severally belong—peaceable persons pursuing their avocations to provide a maintenance for their families, and entitled to the same protective rights claimed by more fortunate citizens of such countries” (MP, viii). The Canadian Provincial Freeman lauded the novel for enabling “any politician, philanthropist, human christian, (as we have the opposite,) and loyal man, to see things as they are and exist, appertaining to that vilest of all trafficks and abominations, namely, the buying, holding, and selling of human beings.” “In such books” as Manuel Pereira, it declared, “the armour of the anti-slavery advocate consists.”¹⁸⁶Close

Manuel Pereira was by no means a sentimental novel in the fashion of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though its publication, as the Anti-Slavery Reporter observed, “has created as great a sensation in Charleston as Uncle Tom has done all over the world.”¹⁸⁷Close The narrative steadfastly refuses the resolutions of sentimental fiction, even as it uses aspects of sentimentalism to “properly enlighten” the public mind (MP, 156). Adams was quite familiar with Stowe’s popular novel, as shown by his vigorous book-length commendation of it in Uncle Tom at Home, published in Philadelphia the following year.¹⁸⁸Close Unlike Stowe’s fiction, however, Manuel Pereira sought more specifically to “discuss the … question of law” by narrating “the sufferings of those who endure the wrong and injustice” of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act (MP, vii). And it was far less invested in sentimentalism’s injunction to personal moral reform as a means to political reform, seeking instead a more structural critique designed to effect, in the words of the Anti-Slavery Reporter’s review, “the bold exposure of the whole system” of law and culture that upheld the Negro Seamen Act.¹⁸⁹Close

Aboard the Janson, Pereira may have been a free subject under the protection of Great Britain, but once he touched the shores of Charleston local laws remade him into a “nigger” to be beaten, imprisoned, and starved. Like the slave, he was among those abandoned before the law.¹⁹⁰Close Little biographical information about Pereira can be gleaned from popular print culture other than a few brief and, not surprisingly, derisive remarks. The novel, therefore, offers one of the most sustained accounts of the free black seamen unwittingly caught up by the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act, as it asks its readers to consider the historical Pereira in the context of an ensemble of local and international social relations.¹⁹¹Close

Adams remakes the historical Pereira into a virtual Englishman to show that British freedom was woefully incomplete as long as slavery continued in the United States. “It mattered but very little” to the beloved Pereira, explains the narrator, “where he was born, for he … sailed so long under the protection of the union-jack of Old England that he had formed a stronger allegiance to that country than to any other” (MP, 11). Pereira’s allegiance, according to this narrative, was due in part to England’s cultural heritage of freedom, for “the flag was sure to protect his rights, and insure from the Government to which he sailed respect and hospitality” (MP, 11). Adams has the fictional Pereira repeatedly descant, in what passes for Portuguese-inflected English, some variation of his comment “I’m always sail in English ship, because I can get protection from flag and consul, where I go—any part of globe” (MP, 17). Once in Charleston, Pereira becomes an Englishman in elocution and manner if not by birth, as Adams imbues him with a rhetorical fluency that rivals that of Frederick Douglass’s Madison Washington in A Heroic Slave, replacing the Portuguese accent from the opening seafaring scenes with perfectly grammatical English once Pereira begins to defend himself against the depredations of the Charleston police. At the jail, the manacled Pereira protests, “It must be humanity that puts these symbols of ignominy upon my hands” and “confines me in a dungeon lest I should breathe a word of liberty to ears that know it only as a fable” (MP, 131–32). Indeed, Pereira’s figurative transformation serves to heighten his subsequent racialization as a “foreign negro” upon arrival in Charleston. The captain is a man who “never believed in making equals of negroes,” yet he too is suitably impressed by Pereira’s earnest “reverence for the old jack” (MP, 21). His informal pledge to protect Pereira is soon tested, as the Janson “floated a complete wreck” into Charleston Harbor, the nearest port, for repairs. The mate, an “experienced salt” from the “north-country” reminiscent of Melville’s Starbuck in his clarity of perception, offers the captain a sobering account of the reception Pereira was certain to receive in Charleston: “The Thebis got a coloured man; but the owners had to pay him an enormous advance, and this, too, with the knowledge of his being locked up the whole time he was in port” (MP, 22). The incredulous captain, representing the ethical man of commerce, soon finds himself, like the sailing master of the Thebis, caught in a crisis of law.¹⁹²Close

Once Manuel Pereira breaks from the maritime universe of the sea narrative, it quickly redefines itself as an exposé of police corruption in Charleston; it offers a scathing indictment of the unscrupulous abuse of power at the hands of men who are the professed guardians of the city. Indeed, the extreme confinement of the city jail provides the setting for the remainder of the novel. “[A]ny man connected with the city police,” according to the narrator, “would not, for conscience’ sake, scruple to hang a man for five dollars. We make no exception for colour or crime” (MP, 25–26). Adams’s indictment of police corruption in Charleston may seem at first tangential to Pereira’s story, yet the novel seeks precisely to show the reader “that the complex system of official spoliation, and the misrepresentation of the police in regard to the influence of such persons upon the slave population, is a principle feature” in the “imprisonment of free citizens of a friendly nation” (MP, 27). The novel minces no words in its condemnation of the Negro Seamen Act as a “municipal pretense” sustained only by the “demoralization of social life in Charleston” (MP, 29). The “head of police,” in Adams’s view, stood foremost among the city’s “innumerable unmarshalled men.” Digressions into the hidden and scandalous personal lives of local officials and jurists repeatedly postpone the dénouement of the story once Pereira leaves the ordered maritime world of the Janson for the corrupt moral universe of Charleston.

Characters in the novel, circumscribed by slave law and custom, cannot be moved to identify against their interests, as the novel thwarts the sentimentalist promise of a transformative intersubjective engagement with another’s suffering through individual acts of identification.¹⁹³Close  Manuel Pereira depicts characters entirely bereft of the empathy usually found in sentimental fiction.¹⁹⁴Close “Everything,” according to the novel, “is made to conserve popular favour, giving to those in influence power to do what they please with a destitute class, whether turned into despots for miserable espionage, where the most unjust schemes are practiced upon those whose voices cannot be heard in their own defence” (MP, 343–44). Good-hearted, civic-minded southern characters ranging from the kindhearted jailor who supplements the prisoners’ meager diet with his own humble fare to the influential Charleston solicitor (based, most likely, on Benjamin Fanueil Hunt) who befriends Capt. Thompson are all powerless to assist Pereira before the supreme authority of the city sheriff. These morally sound characters and their fruitless efforts to secure Pereira’s release undercut the political efficacy of sentimentalism’s moral injunction to “feel right.” Moral sentiment fails before the “same cold opinions about the law, and the faith and importance of South Carolina, and her peculiar institution,” and even the sympathetic heart of Mrs. Bird—the paragon of virtue from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—could not sway, one jot, the strict construction that Pereira was, in the oft-repeated phrase, “contrary to law” (MP, 213).

Unlike many other antebellum southern cities, Charleston had by the 1850s an established agency for law enforcement. The unredeemable and aptly named Sheriff Grimshaw stands as the representative figure for the wrongs of a city administration that stretched back to the enactment of the first seamen act in 1822. That same year, the South Carolina legislature also established a municipal guard in Charleston to “carry into effect the laws of the State and the city ordinance, for the government of negroes and free persons of colour” and levied a heavy tax of ten dollars on all black households and licensed black mechanics within its limits to defray the expenses of establishing and maintaining this force.¹⁹⁵Close Not only was the Charleston municipal guard founded on an onerous tax on black residents; it was established to police and enforce “the laws of the State” against them. Sheriff Grimshaw’s actions are continuous with this long legislative history and the city’s punitive policing of its free black population. “Jail,” according to the defensive sheriff, “was intended for punishment,” even though these black mariners had committed no crime. They were incarcerated simply for being “contrary to law” (MP, 215). Adams’s repetition of this key phrase reveals that the law criminalizes not actions or deeds but an entire class of raced persons.

Sheriff Grimshaw is all too happy to fall back on the “strict construction” of the police laws in Charleston: the law “was imperative, and no consideration could be given to the circumstances, for such would be virtually destroying its validity, and furnishing a precedent that would be followed by innumerable cases” (MP, 95). Grimshaw repeatedly appeals to the purported objective authority of law to rebuff British Consul Mathew’s requests to release Pereira: “I never do anything inconsistent with my office. The law gives me power in these cases, and I exercise it…. I act for the State, and not for you” (MP, 190, 192). Mathew recognizes the law’s sanction of Grimshaw’s action, yet he critically observes, “You make all these legal inconsistencies a simple and most subservient life-rent to serve your own purposes, without giving them that broad view which looks to the general interests of our people” (MP, 194). Sheriff Grimshaw may be a morally reprehensible character, but his repeated invocations of legal sanctions for his ruthless actions reveal that Adams’s critique extends well beyond the realm of individual authority.

Grimshaw and his lackeys, whose sole interest lay “in the spoils of law,” shamelessly exploit the broad discretionary powers delegated to them by the state (MP, 202). They prey on the vulnerable and take the life of innocents such as Tommy Ward, the petted English cabin boy and bosom companion of Pereira; unlike the orchestrated deathbed scene of Stowe’s angelic Evangeline, Tommy’s death symbolizes neither transcendence nor sacrifice and brings forth no redemption or moral transfiguration at the novel’s end. Leaving Pereira’s jail cell well after hours, Tommy becomes lost in the labyrinth of downtown Charleston; policemen arrest him for vagrancy and thrust him into a dank jail cell, where the boy, innocent of crime, contracts his mortal sickness. Charleston’s lawless “contagion,” as Adams plies the discourse of public health so long used to defend its police law, reaches across the Atlantic to afflict and ultimately kill Tommy well after he reaches the shores of Pereira’s beloved England. There, too, is no final scene of redemptive reunion for Pereira and Tommy in the masculine universe of the novel. Pereira bathes Tommy’s brow with “kisses of grief,” but he arrives at the hospital too late: “Life was gone” (MP, 352). Tommy “breathed his last as Manuel entered the sick-chamber,” and the novel concludes with his somber funeral procession. Loss mars Pereira’s return to his adopted nation, and the novel ends in lamentation, “with a picture at once painful and harrowing to the feelings.” “We do this,” the narrator explains, “that we may be sustained by records in what we have stated, rather than give one of those more popular conclusions which restore happiness and relieve the reader’s feelings” (MP, 351). The novel stubbornly refuses to leave the reader with any sentimental resolution: it cannot imagine a redemptive universe for the likes of Pereira or Tommy, and in resisting the supposed moral edification of a sentimental closure, it insists on the need for legal and political reform. Great Britain, the novel suggests, cannot hold itself aloof from the unfinished project of Western freedom. No one may rest complacent on his rights as a British subject as long as slavery exists in the Atlantic world.

Pereira cannot turn to the law for redress in Adams’s staged scenes within and without the Charleston jail. His resistance only begets more appalling forms of punishment. Sheriff Grimshaw punishes Pereira with three weeks of solitary confinement in “a dark, unhealthy cell” for the offense of defending himself against theft (MP, 287). The narrator walks the reader through the dehumanizing conditions that welcome those who fall prey to the law: “you ascend a narrow, crooked stairs, and reach the second storey; here are some eight or nine miserable cells—some large and some small—badly ventilated, and entirely destitute of any kind of furniture” (MP, 144).¹⁹⁶Close But Adams purposively omits the most painful scenes of Pereira’s suffering in solitary confinement; he derives neither moral self-satisfaction nor pleasure from these scenes of violence. Digressions and asides delay the narrator’s reportage of Pereira’s story once he is placed in solitary confinement, as if the roving eye of the omniscient narrator is incapable of describing the suffering that awaits him: “To describe this miserable hole would be a task too harrowing to our feelings. We pass it for those who will come after us” (MP, 287). Removed from the collaborative sustenance of the other black stewards, Pereira is indeed reduced to “bare life.” Digressions again overtake the narration as Pereira, caught in this prolonged political interval of civil death, threatens to disappear from the story.¹⁹⁷Close The psychic and physical privation of this extended solitary confinement renders Pereira “so pale and emaciated” that Capt. Thompson would scarcely have recognized him “had he met him in the street” (MP, 306).¹⁹⁸Close The novel thus falters before this radical devaluation of Pereira in its failure to capture, in print, his prison experience.

Pereira’s entrance and eventual exit from the Charleston jail are registered in the criminal calendar, and Adams typographically reproduces these records in Manuel Pereira as they appeared in registry. In fact, each black mariner in the novel exits the Charleston jail and the narrative through the formal mechanism of this official bill of charges:

In a footnote annotating Pereira’s discharge, Adams informs us, “There were no less than sixty-three cases of colored seamen imprisoned on this charge of ‘contrary to law,’ during the calendar year ending on the twelfth of September, 1852” (MP, 342). Adams, again blurring documentary fact with fiction, reports that Grimshaw, when pressed by Governor Means for a fiscal account of the jail, kept out “the number of coloured seamen” (MP, 342). “The real statement,” he informs us, “showed a bounty to the sheriff of fourteen hundred and sixty-three dollars in the provisions alone—a sad premium on misery” (MP, 342). For the jailed sailors, these financial charges stand as the only documentation of their injury. In Reuben Roberts’s lawsuit against Sheriff Yates, presumably the Grimshaw of Adams’s novel, his lawyers likewise sought to quantify, and thereby make legally legible, the injuries he suffered while incarcerated in Charleston. Can this quantification offer an adequate formula for justice, given the untold abuse, privation, and shame that these men underwent within and without the prison walls? Indeed, Adams’s accounting of Pereira’s bill of costs is, perhaps tellingly, miscalculated ($22.81 instead of the correct $22.91).

Manuel Pereira thus resists individual identification, the hallmark of the sentimental narrative, and its accompanying orchestrated scenes of suffering, to emphasize the institutional and economic mechanisms of state violence. Indeed, its relentless antisentimentalism only emphasized the urgent need for some form of legal or legislative redress. As Capt. Thompson discovers, law becomes an easy rationale for men to act inhumanely despite their sympathetic words: “for while they all talked sympathy, they acted tyranny. Cold, measured words about niggers, ‘contrary to law,’ constitutional rights, inviolable laws, State sovereignty and secession, the necessary police-regulations to protect a peculiar institution, and their right to enforce them, everywhere greeted his ears” (MP, 201). Such passages implicitly critique the limits of moral sentiment to translate into individual action, let alone a course of diplomatic action. Parliamentarian Lord Stanley, reported a pleased Charleston Mercury, “paid all homage to anti-slavery opinion … by pronouncing the laws of which he complains ‘a disgrace and a scandal to civilization,’ yet this “outbreak of sentimentalism did not, however, lead him to any expression which committed his Government to any specific action.”¹⁹⁹Close Adams’s frustration with the city constabulary, corrupted by avarice and political bias, suggests that there may be no legal redress or justice to be had under slave law, even as his literate endeavors betray a powerful investment in the law’s ability to dispense justice in the face of its ongoing failure.

The historical Pereira was reported to have been, like Bowers and Roberts, of African descent, although Adams transforms him into “a sort of mestizo,” “born in Brazil, an extract of the Indian and Spanish” (MP, 101, 11).²⁰⁰Close Adams may have elected to craft a variant of the “tragic mulatto,” in the manner of Lydia Maria Child’s The Quadroons or William Wells Brown’s Clotel, to facilitate the (white) reader’s sympathetic identification with the protagonist, yet this choice also illuminates more vividly the processes of state racialization and criminalization. “Color and not crime,” the Liberator reported, “was the only indictment to be found” in these cases, as the newspaper denounced this identification of black personhood with punishment.²⁰¹Close The uncouth pilot who boards the listing Janson insists on calling Pereira a “nigger” despite the equally racialist correction of the first mate: “‘Nigger? Not he!’ said the mate. ‘He’s a Portuguese mixed breed; a kind o’ sun-scorched subject, like a good many of you Southerners. A nigger’s mother never had him, you may bet your ‘davie on that’ (MP, 47). But Pereira’s ethnic and national difference make him “black” as the novel exposes the legal mechanisms by which foreigners become racialized. “The law,” the Charleston pilot explains, “snaps ‘em up once in a while, and then, if they’re ever so white, it makes ‘em prove it” (MP, 50). Ethnic, cultural, and national differences become collapsed into “blackness,” which is assumed until “proven” otherwise. The novel thus illustrates, in its own terms, that blackness is, as legal scholar Devon Carbado writes, “a form of bare life” in the slave state, given the mechanisms by which it is “included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, its capacity to be subordinated).”²⁰²Close

The testimony of affected seamen and antislavery fictions such as Manuel Pereira reveal just how difficult it was for sailors to prove themselves “white” once Charleston police deemed them to be black. “Ye can’t pass him off for a white man nohow,” insists the pilot, “for the thing’s contrary to law, and pays so well that them contemptible land-sharks of officers makes all the fuss about it, and never let one pass” (MP, 52). Pereira becomes black at the moment of arrest so that the law may punish him, even as the law sets up the conditions by which he is presumed to be black. Black life, in other words, is given over to an absolute state of abandonment where it is “put outside the law and put under its banner and its ban.”²⁰³Close The law as represented in Sheriff Grimshaw and his officers re-creates Pereira’s racial identity to suit the workings of the municipal law once the Janson enters Charleston Harbor. This powerful discursive formation of “blackness” justifies Pereira’s arrest and the violence he subsequently must endure. Blackness, as illustrated in these proceedings, becomes, as Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman describe, “the consequence of violence, the residue of an exercise of power.”²⁰⁴Close Once turned “black,” as it were, Pereira becomes both slave and prisoner in the eyes of the Charleston police and is treated accordingly.

Manuel Pereira is deeply cynical about the possibility of redress for such injuries, even though it insists on legal reform and federal checks on what constituted the legitimate exercise of police power. The narrator derides South Carolina for its outdated “feeble majesty,” saying that “[t]he day will yet come when such a majesty will blush at its reign, and disown itself among the nations of the earth. It will look back upon itself like a gloomy curtain hanging its dark folds in the horizon of nations” (MP, 178). But such anachronistic allusions belie the powerful modernity of the slave state. The state of exception found in the Negro Seamen Act created a “structure of abandonment” that demarcated, in Ian Baucom’s words, “a zone of law within the law in which the law legally fails to operate.”²⁰⁵Close This racial state of exception, far from what abolitionist reformers such as Adams denounced as social atavism, constituted the political modernity of the sovereign slaveholding state.²⁰⁶Close The thoroughgoing discourse of archaism in Adams’s impassioned exhortation, like Lahitte’s barely disguised disdain for America’s regrettable barbarism, characterized the tenor of abolitionist arguments in the 1850s, in newspapers from the Liberator to Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In the hands of a skillful writer-editor such as Douglass, South Carolina’s oft-repeated defense became another instance of the archaic: “The Governor makes the old tyrants plea for this law—i.e., necessity. It is necessary to prevent the dissemination of dangerous ideas among their happy population! … It would not be a bad idea to establish in the city of Charleston an ‘inquisition’ on the model of that of Venice, only making slavery instead the church the thing for conservation.”²⁰⁷Close The “contagion,” in Douglass’s biting commentary, was not of “negro liberty” but of an unfettered modern police power seemingly antagonistic to the tenets of a democratic nation based on individual rights. Manuel Pereira’s narrator, likewise, ends his attack on the police law with the telling query “How is it in this progressive nineteenth century?” (MP, 179). This mix of anguish and rage surges from an internal struggle: the impasse of reformers such as Adams and Douglass who found their investment in progress and the modern state at odds with both their moral humanism and the promised egalitarianism of liberal democracy. “We struggle,” Adams insists, “between a wish to speak well of” the sovereign state “whose power it is to practice” the laws “and an imperative duty that commands us to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves” (MP, 156).

The novel powerfully galvanized international public attention toward the repeal and modification of these southern regulations against free blacks. “Thousands,” according to the London Daily News, “are interested in this case manuel pereira, and his cry for justice excites our ears to listen for what is said of such matters.”²⁰⁸Close The novel meaningfully individuates Pereira and other black sailors from the perspectives of the police, statesmen, and diplomats. Pereira becomes a figure invested with personal history, national loyalties, and sentiments, and he offers a counterpoint to the oft-invoked specter of racial menace pervasive in South Carolina legal and legislative discourses. The Pereira fashioned in Adams’s novel is a pointedly mild-mannered laborer incapable of the threat that police officials and legislators alike claimed was posed by free “foreign negroes” to the civic order and public safety of Charleston. Adams manages, through his fictional retelling of the case, to leverage public opinion in the absence of legal remedy.

Adams’s campaign against the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act did not end with the publication of Manuel Pereira; he drew on these Charleston cases in his lectures before the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to enlist British nationalism in the cause of these imprisoned sailors. Such cases, Adams insisted in an impassioned 1854 address before the London Anti-Slavery Conference, signaled the expansion of American slavery into a “free” postemancipation Britain. “Slavery,” in the figure of the Charleston police, “boarded British vessels, manacled British subjects, set at naught the appeals of Consuls, and made prison cells do the work of reducing honest freemen to the same level with her slaves.”²⁰⁹Close Embedded in these discussions was a sharp critique of Britain’s failure to defend the rights of its formerly enslaved colonial subjects. The racialized subordination found in the South Carolina act, as Adams forcefully argued on page and stage, can only be understood as the perpetuation of slavery against British subjects whose self-ownership did not make them free.²¹⁰Close The popularity of Manuel Pereira is perhaps not surprising in a decade that, according to William Andrews, saw the dramatic increase of international public interest in the “romantic racialism” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Pereira became a touchstone for the transatlantic antislavery platform.²¹¹Close The experiences of incarcerated seamen such as Pereira had a powerful discursive afterlife in the antislavery activism of the 1850s, and campaigners later attributed South Carolina’s grudging amendment of its laws to the “well-directed and continued batteries of the Press.”²¹²Close

The near simultaneous lawsuits of Pereira and Roberts in South Carolina initiated a new spate of highly public and controversial international negotiations that helped further galvanize reform movements throughout coastal southern states in the 1850s.²¹³Close South Carolina’s enforcement of its “obnoxious law for imprisoning free blacks,” in studied disregard of all national and international petitions, became increasingly at odds with southern popular opinion, as neighboring states such as North Carolina began to modify their regulations in response to local reform campaigns.²¹⁴Close The New York Observer remarked in 1851, “We have known that, for some time past, there has prevailed among the best classes of Charleston, a disposition to modify the offensive law.”²¹⁵Close South Carolina may have been the “head-quarters of pro-slavery ultraism,” but its longstanding doctrine of self-preservation did not remain uncontested as the changing public discourse on slavery and federalism began to affect lawmaking decisions within the state. The Charleston Courier, marking a radical shift after three decades of support for the police law, declared, “it seems to us that our law ought to be changed on the principle of the Indiana and Illinois Constitutions,” which restricted black sailors to their vessels.²¹⁶Close The Charleston Mercury likewise asked whether the “safety of the community” could be “as effectually guarded by other and less exceptional restrictions” and suggested, with uncharacteristic sharpness, that the state “persists, from the pride of consistency, or a reluctance to make an apparent concession, in maintaining severe restrictions after the reason for them may have passed away.”²¹⁷Close The paper went on to note “the fact that Charleston city, in mass, favors a modification of the South Carolina law; but that through fear of Abolition incendiarism, opposition to it comes from the country planters, or country residents.”²¹⁸Close

Proposed amendments to the law, including a modification that Governor Adams vigorously endorsed, came before the South Carolina legislature on several occasions, but they were all struck down by statesmen claiming, as before, that “[a]ll nations have the right of protecting themselves by police laws and provisions excluding from their borders those who may be regarded as dangerous to their internal peace and security.”²¹⁹Close The “public sentiment of the State,” noted one South Carolina legislator, “is against the Act, as evidenced by memorials to the legislature, presentments of grand juries, the press, and the recommendations of every Governor for the last eight or ten years.”²²⁰Close The Charleston Mercury cautioned that this “right of self-protection” should be exercised “with the least injury and inconvenience to others,” as it echoed those sentiments long expressed north of Mason-Dixon and across the Atlantic.²²¹Close

The public outcry in Charleston to amend its police regulations, however, did not necessarily mean a corresponding recognition of black citizenship. Far from an admission of either antislavery or antiracist politics, this public inclination toward modification emerged out of loyalty to the Union and the desire to further stabilize slavery in the state. An 1851 antisecessionist gathering in Greenville, for example, offered an apocalyptic vision of South Carolina as a “black State, a second San Domingo,” as a result not of slave insurrection but of the state’s intransigent insistence on sovereignty independent from the federal compact. The antisecessionists marshaled the specter of black Haiti as the inevitable consequence of South Carolina’s extreme territorial doctrine of sovereignty, since secession would create the conditions in which “[w]hite persons may leave the State, but slaves cannot.”²²²Close In this counterfactual new South, the radical immobility of the slave, central to the theory of mastery, would become, ironically, the very means of the undoing of slaveholding society.²²³Close Neither did the local press find the desire for municipal reform incompatible with the racialist advocacy of slavery. The Charleston Mercury dismissed the very idea of “danger” that state officials had used to defend the state’s expansion of police power: “This being forever fretfully upon guard when there is no appreciable danger, this seeming admission that we are always on the tenter-hooks of expectation of some mysterious and terrible catastrophe. Is it not a sort of justification of the everlasting fear of the enemies of Slavery, that we have no confidence in the stability of our institutions, and no [t]rust in the loyalty of our servile populations?”²²⁴Close This ever-present threat of black insurrection, as the Charleston Mercury admitted, plainly betrayed the fallacy of slavery as a benevolent “paternal institution”; it represented institutional slavery as under continual assault. These heightened policing measures maintained a perpetual state of emergency that only served to confirm the power of revolutionary black agency. “Why should we, then, counterfeit fears that nobody really entertains?” the Mercury asked.²²⁵Close These “counterfeit fears” revealed the deep-seated fissures between the ideologies of slavery and its practice as a legal institution. Police violence was necessary to the maintenance of a subjected black population, even if southern paternalism insisted on the inherent docility of the slave.

Manuel Pereira was one of a number of cautionary tales of postemancipation freedom that made their way across the Atlantic and into British antislavery print culture at midcentury. Such accounts of incarcerated black sailors placed uncomfortable pressure on the lawful liberty that Britain had purportedly secured to its black subjects, forcing the island nation to make sense of its Atlantic empire even as they deflected attention away from the growing political unrest in Britain’s eastern empire.²²⁶Close Abolitionists directed these stories to British audiences as they condemned the nation’s inability to protect its own citizens from the depredations of U.S. slavery. This section charts the curious circulation of another cautionary tale of British freedom to examine how Anglo-American abolitionism reappropriated South Carolina’s rhetoric of self-preservation to secure British popular consensus against U.S. slavery. Black and white abolitionists rallied around the figure of John Glasgow, a “free-born British subject” shorn of his freedom through the inexorable workings of South Carolina’s “most barbarous and oppressive law.”²²⁷Close Glasgow lived out the remainder of his life on a Georgia plantation, far from Liverpool, where he had left wife and children, and perished in slavery. His story, however, continued to live in speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and a popular British slave narrative as a reminder of the precariousness of British freedom in a partially free world. Countless American and British abolitionists summoned Glasgow in their efforts to rally the power of British public opinion against U.S. slavery.

The British government’s failure to protect the rights of its free black subjects elicited powerful outpourings of pathos and indignation. “Think, too, of poor John Glasgow,” Samuel J. May admonished the crowd gathered at the 1854 Manchester Anti-Slavery Conference, “stolen from a British ship by South Carolina officers, and now, if alive, wasting away his life as a South Carolina slave. Have the government and people of Great Britain done their duty by that man?”²²⁸Close Glasgow’s story offered a powerful challenge to triumphalist narratives of British freedom that had begun with Somerset. Unlike the establishing scenes of “natal alienation” that typically begin the fugitive slave narrative, Glasgow’s story began in the familiar settings of England, as readers and auditors followed the torturous passage of a free man into chattel slavery. The story presumes the reader’s identification with Glasgow from the outset; it also shares the formal emplotment found in Solomon Northrup’s popular Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Kate Pickard’s The Kidnapped and the Ransomed (1856).²²⁹Close By thus depicting the unlawful theft of freedom, transatlantic antislavery activists more effectively insisted on the U.S. institutional processes that made these free British subjects into chattel slaves. These writers and orators gave powerful expression to the poetics of theft that had earlier organized Peter Still’s dictated autobiography and Lucy Ann Delaney’s postemancipation slave narrative.

A “native of Demerara, born of free negro parents, whose free condition he inherited,” Glasgow, according to the first iterations of his personal history, was an enterprising young man who took to the sea, quickly working himself up from cabin boy to able-bodied seaman on the ship’s register.²³⁰Close Various versions of the story took pains to show that Glasgow rejected the itinerancy of seafaring life to embrace full integration into British society ashore. He prospered, married a Liverpool lass, commenced farming, and returned to the sea only to “meet the expenses of a large family.” Glasgow was a model of masculine providership, and he “engaged to go out to Savannah in Georgia, in an English vessel, and under a English captain” on what was to be (pathetically) his “last voyage to so distant a country.”²³¹Close This unfortunate journey parts Glasgow forever from his family and country, as the “black law of Georgia, like that of South Carolina is no respecter of freedom.”²³²Close The “English captain” turns out to be unprincipled and, since Glasgow is “‘only a nigger after all,’ … refused to pay the jail-fees, and set sail without John,” consigning him to the “auction-block.”²³³Close Glasgow suffers a life of unremitting psychological and physical subjection enslaved to his vindictive new master, “Thomas Stevens, of Baldwin country, Georgia.” Graphically orchestrated spectacles of violence chart his bloody passage from a “free-born British subject” to an abject American slave as Stevens brutally forces Glasgow, like young Peter and Levin Still, to renounce his past in order to reconstruct him into a thing without history. “Similar has been the fate,” cautions the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “of hundreds of others, black, brown, and white, free men and women, born on British, Portuguese, or any other soil, and of whose melancholy end their relatives have never learnt.”²³⁴Close

There was a witness to “tell the tale” of Glasgow’s “agonizing case,” unlike for the countless others that undoubtedly went unknown and unheard. An escaped slave “who was many years John Glasgow’s companion in bondage” related Glasgow’s story to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which first published it on 1 July 1853 in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. The fugitive informant hoped that the publication of Glasgow’s narrative “would lead to a discovery of the whereabouts of the poor fellow’s English wife and children,” since he owed Glasgow “a debt of gratitude, for he it was who taught him to love and seek liberty.”²³⁵Close Glasgow’s story, as mediated through this informant, bore out the inflammatory threat that South Carolina lawmakers had endeavored to prevent with its punitive antiblack police laws. Indeed, the police law created the conditions of Glasgow’s radicalization as it transformed him into the very figure of the proscribed “free foreign negro” that states such as South Carolina had sought to cordon from its “domestic” slave populations. The enslaved Glasgow, in turn, “taught” this American slave “to love and seek liberty.” His presence radically altered the lives of those slaves whose status the Negro Seamen Act had mandated that he share. The Anti-Slavery Reporter thus transformed for its own purposes the amorphous threat of black revolt so often exploited by slave states into its certainty.

The British abolitionist Wilson Armistead immediately published a more embellished version of Glasgow’s story in his Leeds Anti-Slavery Tract series, which Frederick Douglass’ Paper republished the following year. Armistead’s version named the fugitive informant in London as one “John Brown.”²³⁶Close This was the American fugitive slave Fed, who renamed himself John Brown upon his escape to England, where he remained until his death in 1876 (see figure 4.3). He dictated his experiences in slavery to Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, who edited and originally published the account as Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). Copies were available for one shilling, and it was successful enough to warrant a limited second edition, which was later translated into German.²³⁷Close  Slave Life in Georgia was among a number of widely popular American slave narratives that were published in Britain and written for primarily British audiences, including those of Moses Roper (1837), William Wells Brown (1852), William and Ellen Craft (1860), and Jacob Green (1864). Glasgow’s tragic story is embedded within Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia. The fourth chapter, “The Story of John Glasgow,” interrupts the first-person narrative in one of three chapters speculated to be primarily the work of Chamerovzow. “I must interrupt my own narrative here,” Brown insists, “to relate the story of John Glasgow. I had it from his own lips; and acting on the advice of the Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, I have made a declaration in his presence, before a notary public, to the effect that, as given below, the narrative is substantially correct” (SL, 29). What follows in Brown’s narrative is the verbatim text of Glasgow’s story as it first appeared in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, and Brown’s duly notarized “Declaration,” dated 29 May 1854, numbers among the many paratextual supplements included at the autobiography’s end.

Brown’s account of political radicalization through sympathetic identification with the black Briton helped reaffirm, even while possibly unsettling, the prevailing narratives of British national culture. Brown finds himself irresistibly drawn to the black stranger: “It was reported and believed amongst the slaves on the plantation that this John Glasgow had been a free British subject, and this circumstance … has tended to fix the following facts strongly in my recollection” (SL, 188). Their shared loss cements their intimacy: “He also felt for me in my grief at parting from my former relations, and endeavoring to console me as best he could, frequently spoke to me of his own previous history, particularly of his residence and relatives in England” (SL, 188). Glasgow’s longing for kin and country incites in Brown a sympathetic yearning that reestablishes the nationalistic contours of British freedom. “These kind words from John Glasgow,” he recalls, “gave me better heart, and inspired me with a longing to get to England, which I made up my mind I would try and do some day” (SL, 24). Later chapters further emphasize the direct causal relation between these fugitive desires and Glasgow’s stories of British freedom: “My mind had long been made up to run away,” and “I was constantly dwelling on what John Glasgow had told me about freedom, and England, and becoming a man” (SL, 61, 64). “[G]etting off to England” became firmly fixed in Brown’s mind, and he found himself in July 1850 “safely landed in the town where poor John Glasgow left his wife and children so many year before” (SL, 77, 141). “These are the facts,” Brown announces, “I thus learnt and believe” (SL, 188). Brown “returns” to Britain in Glasgow’s stead, as if to emphasize further the painful fungibility of black personhood under slave law, as the historical Glasgow undergoes the transformation into an abolitionist story.

Glasgow’s cautionary tale of freedom offered British abolitionists the opportunity further to define their cultural identity against a tyrannous American nation, becoming, for abolitionists such as Armistead, the groundwork for an ever more powerful national advocacy of a deterritorialized, and indeed universal, freedom. The events that befell Glasgow demanded British “interference,” for, in Armistead’s words, an “unscrupulous aggressive tyranny, such as the slave power has shown itself, endangers all its free neighbors; and therefore an ordinary regard for self-preservation should lead us, in our national capacity, to resist its assumptions.”²³⁸Close The slaveholding United States could not exist peaceably within a community of free European nations. In these acts of aggression against black British subjects, the United States threatened a uniquely British way of life. The doctrine of self-preservation is here mobilized for entirely different ends, as Armistead reshapes it into a rallying cry for the extension of British freedom to the Americas—which he sees as a “national obligation.”

The stories of Bowers, Pereira, Roberts, and Glasgow forced Britain to wrestle with its governmental responsibilities to the black Britons living in its far-flung territories.²³⁹Close Armistead openly questioned the place of black subjects within postemancipation Britain and intimated that the national project of freedom was far from complete: “has not our Government a right to insist that all its subjects should travel when they please, in the territories of our allies, as long as they keep the peace?” He denounced Great Britain for failing to live up to its own political ideologies: “As long as we suffer a million of our countrymen…to be excluded from entering the territories of our allies, simply and solely on the score of colour, we recognize the right to degrade those whom we have raised to political equality with ourselves, and show a cowardly falseness to our own convictions.”²⁴⁰Close

The transatlantic abolitionist campaigns of the 1850s also endowed Glasgow with a long afterlife. Black American abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, for example, dedicated numerous speeches to informing the public about these “obnoxious laws” against black sailors in southern ports; he took Glasgow as the text for his speech before the fifteenth annual meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. He later reiterated Glasgow’s story before a “very crowded” public meeting in Lincolnshire, which concluded with the formation of a permanent Anti-Slavery Committee in the city and the adoption of a legislative petition to be laid before Parliament in protest of these police laws.²⁴¹Close Ward recounted how he was obliged to meet, at different points in his transatlantic antislavery lecture tour, the “strong objections … that as there are no slaves in the British empire now, there is nothing for the British people to do on the subject.”²⁴²Close He deployed the specter of British slaves, used so effectively by Thomas Pringle in the earlier campaign for West Indian emancipation, to mobilize Britons to the cause of U.S. abolition. The “odious law” against black sailors, Ward criticized, “is made for the security of slavery, by preventing free Negroes from associating with the slaves and teaching them the way to a free country.”²⁴³Close Ward thus emphasized that British abolitionism could not be dismissed as “intermeddling with other people’s affairs” when Great Britain had yet to address its “guilty complicity” in accommodating (and therefore, sustaining and perpetuating) these U.S. slave laws against its own free black subjects.²⁴⁴Close “The rights of a British subject, of whatever colour,” he insisted, “ought not to be suffered thus to be jeopardized for the accommodation of our trade in slave-grown cotton.”²⁴⁵Close Transatlantic abolitionists such as Adams, Armistead, and Ward argued that the futures of free black Britons and American slaves were necessarily intertwined: black sailors such as Pereira and Glasgow, regardless of their national allegiances, could not possess absolute freedom without the hemispheric abolition of racial slavery. Their stories roused British national sentiment against slavery in the Americas by showing that the problem of American slavery was also the problem of British freedom.

The sweeping racial dimensions of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act itself helped determine this particular political appeal to black transatlanticism. When the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society first began to address the seizure of British sailors in U.S. ports, it strategically called on “the entire body of coloured persons in the emancipated colonies and in England, to make a special effort to obtain their rights in this particular.” It advised all black British subjects “to call public meetings, to collect facts, and to memorialise the Government on this important point; not to desist, until the Foreign Minister shall do them justice, and extend an equal protection to them with that enjoyed by their white fellow-subjects.”²⁴⁶Close Black American abolitionist William C. Nell, likewise, offered a transnational narrative of the causes behind British Consul Mathew’s intervention into the “local” laws of South Carolina. In a letter to Douglass that Douglass subsequently published, Nell wrote, “It was by the representations principally of the people in the Bahamas, that the British government was indeed to direct the consul, Gov. Matthews, to agitate the subject at Charleston. A recent number of the Nassau Guardian, the most influential journal in the Bahamas, recommends reprisals upon citizens of South Carolina.”²⁴⁷Close In 1850, a memorial signed by more than four hundred colonial subjects of the Bahamas Islands protesting the treatment of free black seamen in the ports of the southern states, Cuba, and Puerto Rico was brought before Governor John Gregory.²⁴⁸Close Nell’s revisionist account placed black colonial subjects at the center of British radicalization against American slavery. He represented Consul Mathew’s efforts on behalf of Pereira and Roberts as a response to this unprecedented outpouring of black protest.

Four years passed after Pereira’s misbegotten lawsuit before the South Carolina legislature approved a law that substituted the confinement of black seamen to their vessels rather than to city prisons.²⁴⁹Close Black crewmembers would not be imprisoned as long as they remained on board their vessels and “in all respects obey the laws of the State, and ordinances and regulations of the city or town.”²⁵⁰Close According to the British consul’s report, not one of the seventy-three black seamen who arrived in Charleston on British vessels that year was imprisoned.²⁵¹Close That fact did not, however, mean the end of racialized measures against the mariners, renegades, and castaways of the black Atlantic. In 1856, Texas began imposing heavy fines on all ship captains who brought free blacks into the state, and Louisiana reenacted its police law against free black seamen in 1859.²⁵²Close The British Board of Trade instructed all shipping masters to “warn such seamen, and the masters who engage them, of the inconvenience and risk to which they may be exposed through the operations of the … stringent laws in force in the Southern States of America, with regard to the admission of free negroes,” and advised those seamen to carry with them “full evidence of their place of birth and nationality.”²⁵³Close

“The enactment” of these Negro Seamen Acts, as the Anti-Slavery Reporter noted, “not only failed wholly in its effect, but was actually the cause of increasing the very dangers which the law was intended to obviate.”²⁵⁴Close The specifically racialized aspect of the South Carolina law, it appears, helped to create the conditions for the further radicalization of the black Atlantic in unexpected ways. Indeed, Pauline Hopkins returned to these events in her historical novel, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), to transform the law’s negativity and limits into the source of further radicalization. Her white protagonist, Warren Maxwell, was a free British subject divested of rights and committed to a filthy Missouri jail. Awaiting his sentence of death—since he, as a white man, could not be converted into a slave—Maxwell witnessed the “full operation of the slave system”:

Infamous outrages were committed upon free men of color whose employment as cooks and stewards on steamers and sailing vessels had brought them within the jurisdiction of the State. Such men were usually taken ashore and sold to the highest bidder. One man who had his free papers on his person, produced them to prove the truth of his story; the official took the papers from him, burned them, and sold him next week at public auction.²⁵⁵Close

These scenes bear a striking resemblance to those found in Manuel Pereira and share that novel’s condemnation of crimes committed under the sanction of law. “Experience,” admits Maxwell upon his rescue, “is a stern teacher…. I understand the slavery question through and through.”²⁵⁶Close Slave law thus provides the groundwork for Maxwell’s radicalization, although Hopkins’s historical fiction, written in the postemancipation United States, charts a reverse course from Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia. The “free British subject” in Hopkins’s novel no longer effects the radicalization of the American slave; rather, the combined forces of the enslaved heroine, Winona, and the charismatic Capt. John Brown work their political transformation on Maxwell. Once rescued from jail, Maxwell joins Brown’s retaliatory strike against proslavery forces at Pottawatomie Creek.

In this fashion, the Negro Seamen Acts provided the means for their own undoing. By December 1856, South Carolina was the only remaining southern state that had not amended, repealed, or modified in some form its regulations against black seamen.²⁵⁷Close Officials from the other slave states had largely withdrawn their support of the South Carolina law, fearing that it would “involve [them] in a war on account of black sailors.”²⁵⁸Close One South Carolina statesman finally proposed the expediency of modification, explaining, “[the] present law is injurious to our slaves…by attracting their attention to the coloured seamen, manacled and marched through the streets of Charleston, thus opening to their mind the very matters we wish to protect them from by the law.”²⁵⁹Close Antislavery activists had anticipated the radicalizing potential of these Negro Seamen Acts in transforming sailors such as John Glasgow and Manuel Pereira into the very revolutionary firebrands the laws proscribed. The “one effectual way … to make him dangerous,” John Palfrey dryly noted in Papers on the Slave Power (1846), is to “[g]o on board the ship; order him over the side; row him on shore to jail. There he will be shut up with some hundreds of his own color,” where he will have “free, unrestricted, unwatched communication with them, night and day, such as no other place in Carolina would afford.”²⁶⁰Close In the hands of abolitionists such as Adams, Armistead, and Ward, the stories of sailors such as Glasgow and Pereira further radicalized the Atlantic world against American slavery.

Statesmen, diplomats, abolitionists, merchants, slaves, and free blacks imagined (for various and even antagonistic ends) a revolutionary black Atlantic world. Insurgency, South Carolina officials insisted, was necessarily racialized as “black,” and this dogged persistence helped make publicly accessible a discourse of revolutionary black agency that they could neither control nor contain. Local governments in the early Atlantic world, according to Bolster, had long legislative histories of enacting laws against black mariners whom they perceived as “agents provocateurs.”²⁶¹Close The complex discursive history of South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act, and the freedom suits and accompanying antislavery print culture that energized the struggle for its repeal, reveals the radicalizing possibilities within black Atlantic travels, broadly conceived. Indeed, southern lawmakers sought to recast revolutionary agency as the inevitable product of such black cosmopolitan travels. The unfettered mobility of these “free foreign negroes” of the Atlantic world unsettled slave law, even as antiblack police regulations lent further impetus to their radicalization. Southern lawmakers enlisted the fear of black seamen circulating revolutionary ideas to establish the political groundwork of their modern slave states, even as they created the conditions for further disseminating the revolutionary consciousness they so feared. “With a population of nearly 9000 free persons of colour, and with the constant transit of travelers from other States and countries,” British Consul Mathew sardonically declared, “it cannot be imagined that any slave in this city or State is uninformed of the existence of negro freedom, or of the geographical limits of slavery” (MP, 384).

To understand better this “worlding” of black revolutionary discourse in its changing course around the Atlantic, this chapter ends, with travel’s characteristic circuitousness, at the beginning. South Carolina’s early insistence in 1822 on the threatening potential of black revolutionary agency became a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts with the curious circulation history of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Antislavery activists such as Walker, as this chapter has shown, participated in the creation and re-creation of the law’s meaning in a variety of contexts and with different ideological consequences.²⁶²Close Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, and, according to Peter Hinks’s research, he journeyed to Charleston sometime in the 1810s.²⁶³Close No record of this journey exists other than a tantalizingly brief reference in the Appeal. A number of scholars speculate that Walker was exposed to, if not a participant in, the events surrounding the Denmark Vesey “plot,” which issued in part from the “social controversy swirling about” the newly established AME Church and its espousal of revolutionary Christianity in the heart of the slaveholding South.²⁶⁴Close The radical spirit of the Vesey conspiracy probably influenced, to a degree, the exhortatory rhetoric found in the Appeal, even though Walker never mentions it directly in the text.²⁶⁵Close

Walker’s powerful manifesto of black radicalism tellingly begins and ends with the self-authorizing act of travel. The “Preamble” begins, “Having traveled over a considerable portion of these United States, and having, in the course of my travels, taken the most accurate observations of things as they exist—the result of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken conviction, that we, (coloured people of the United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began” (AA, 3). Hinks speculates that Walker began his wide-ranging perambulations soon after the Vesey trials in the summer of 1822 and ended them two years later in Boston, where he established himself as a dealer in used clothing.²⁶⁶Close These travels, as Walker forcefully relates, radicalized him into a passionate antislavery and anticolonial advocate. Walker’s broad geographical knowledge of the slaveholding states may have inspired his unprecedented mode of circulating the Appeal widely throughout the South, an act that predated William Lloyd Garrison’s likeminded efforts to distribute the Liberator in the slaveholding states.²⁶⁷Close Congress had anticipated concerns about the mail being used to coordinate slave revolt when it restricted free blacks from the postal service as early as 1802, well before the American Anti-Slavery Society’s 1835 postal campaign.²⁶⁸Close

Although most of the slave uprisings that shook the South, including those that were stopped short of actualization, were local in character, Walker’s Appeal embraced the global South in its expansive address to “enslaved brethren all over the world.” Walker confronted southern authorities not only with a plan that was orchestrated from a distant northern city but with one that was hemispheric in character.²⁶⁹Close Walker ends the Appeal with words that again stress the eyewitness testimony of his self-directed travels throughout the United States: “I do not speak from hear say—what I have written, is what I have seen and heard myself. No man may think that my book is made up of conjecture—I have traveled and observed nearly the whole of these things myself” (AA, 79). Walker’s radicalizing travels were given yet another literary redaction in the plot of Martin Delany’s serialized novel of slave conspiracy, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–61). The novel charts the extensive peregrinations throughout the South and Southwest of the eponymous hero, Henry Blake, as he widely disseminates his designs for a hemispheric slave revolution, designs that remain strategically undisclosed to the reader. Blake’s southern peregrinations, like Walker’s, radicalize him in unexpected ways, as this young Cuban aristocrat-turned-sailor is violently remade into a slave upon arrival on U.S. shores. Indeed, Blake, like Glasgow and Pereira, becomes the “foreign” incendiary so feared by southern legislatures.

Walker first published the Appeal in September 1829, and two more editions, each with different variations, appeared within a year. Copies of the Appeal began surfacing almost immediately in coastal southern towns including Savannah, New Orleans, Wilmington, and Charleston.²⁷⁰Close With the possible assistance of John Eli, Walker’s close friend and political associate, Walker specifically employed as his agents mariners traveling to key southern ports such as Charleston. Police arrested Edward Smith, a white sailor from the Boston brig Columbo, for distributing copies among local black longshoremen in Charleston Harbor.²⁷¹Close Smith disavowed knowledge of the Appeal’s inflammatory contents and testified that “a decent looking black man whom he believed to be a Bookseller … required … that he Should give them secretly to the Black people.”²⁷²Close Found guilty of “seditious libel,” Smith was fined one thousand dollars and sentenced to a one-year term in prison.

The legal documents surrounding Smith’s trial and conviction yielded yet another curious facet in the discursive histories of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act. Attorney General James Petigru, who later represented Pereira and Roberts, charged Smith with “falsely and maliciously contriving and intending to disturb the peace and security of this State” and to illustrate his accusations cited a verbatim transcript of some of the more inflammatory passages from the Appeal. Walker’s ringing condemnation of the racial nation-state, in fact, constitutes almost the entire text of Smith’s grand jury indictment. The unusual syntactic structures that characterize the Appeal’s passionate and breathless pace subtly disrupt the document’s legal meanings through the absorption of the dashes that Petigru used to set off the text of his charge. Petigru offered four distinct examples of Walker’s “false seditious and malicious Libel,” excerpted methodically from the three longer articles of the Appeal (one, two, and four). Petigru did not and, it appears, simply could not summarize Walker’s words, and he reproduced them at the cost of deforming his own legal language:

a printed pamphlet entitled Walke[r]’s Appeal in Four Articles together with a Preamble to the coloured Citizens of the World but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America, in which said false and scandalous Libel are contained, among other things, divers false seditious scandalous and malicious matters according to the tenor following—Fear not the number and education of our enemies against whom we (meaning the coloured people and slaves in the United States) shall have to contend for our lawful right, guaranteed to us by our maker—for why should we (meaning the black people and slaves aforesaid) be afraid when God is, and will continue, (if we continue humble), to be on our side…. Remember Americans that we (meaning the black people and slaves of the United States) must and shall be free and enlightened as you are, will you wait until we (meaning the black people and slaves aforesaid) shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power? Will it not be dreadful for you (meaning the whites)—I speak Americans for your good—We must and shall be free I say in spite of you—You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery to enrich you and your children, but God will deliver us from under you—And wo, wo, will be to you (meaning the white people of America) if we (meaning the slaves aforesaid) have to obtain our freedom by fighting—against the form of the Act of the General Assembly in such case made and provided and against the peace and dignity of the same state aforesaid.

James L. Petigru Attorney General²⁷³Close

The final excerpted line of Walker’s Appeal—“And wo, wo, will be to you (meaning the white people of America) if we (meaning the slaves aforesaid) have to obtain our freedom by fighting”—syntactically takes over the meaning of Petigru’s legal document to sharply transform the indictment into a localized delineation of the racial struggle at hand: “to obtain our freedom by fighting—against the form of the Act of the General Assembly.” Petigru’s selection of this line to end the text of the indictment eerily resembles the menacing utterance of black Cuban insurrectionist Gofer Gondolier—“Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!”—that concludes Delany’s famously unfinished Blake.²⁷⁴Close Walker’s characteristic deictic utterances resist recontextualization into Petigru’s indictment (with its reappropriation of meaning), while offering an unexpected instance of black testimony, generally inadmissible against whites within southern courtrooms, without the mediated paraphrasing of white officers or witnesses. Although this epiphenomenal text is formally similar to the legal structure of Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner, in that it also offers a statement embedded within a counterstatement, the idiosyncratic rhetorical and syntactic forms that characterize Walker’s Appeal lie beyond the proscriptions of the legal apparatus.²⁷⁵Close This alternative reading scenario, like the Appeal’s imperative to, in Elizabeth McHenry words, “bridge the gap between the literate and illiterate,” enables us to see how Walker’s text subverts the controlling mechanisms of the law through the introduction of meanings exorbitant to Petigru’s indictment, as it reforms the legal document into a vehicle for black revolutionary thought.²⁷⁶Close

Did Walker’s Appeal justify South Carolina’s concerns about the inflammatory presence of “foreign negroes” and its specific targeting of free blacks, or did the punitive dimensions of the Negro Seamen Act facilitate the dissemination of the black radicalism that Walker espoused? The law, working according to its own logic, sought to purge from its boundaries the specter of black radicalism embodied in the figure of the “foreign negro,” even while it inadvertently helped conjure the powerful imaginary of a revolutionary black Atlantic that writers later mobilized as a rallying call to end slavery and its racial oppressions.²⁷⁷Close Perhaps, as one Liberator editorial sharply suggested, the real “incendiary publications” so feared by slaveholding legislatures were less the work of radical antislavery activists such as Walker than of “the makers, printers and publishers of the black codes” themselves. The anonymous writer of the editorial (identified only as V.V.) notes with subtle sarcasm, “If any person were desirous of exciting an insurrection in Virginia or South Carolina, he could not, in my opinion, adopt any more effectual means than to print the slave laws of the State in a cheap form, and circulate copies among the slaves; and if he were to address them for the same purpose, he could say nothing more inflammatory, than to read extracts from these statutes, without a word of comment.”²⁷⁸Close Indeed, when hecklers prevented Frederick Douglass from reading from his Narrative aboard the transatlantic steamer Cambria in 1845, he incited a riot with a dramatic reading of “what the southern legislators themselves have written—I mean the law.”²⁷⁹Close Black revolutionary potential was powerful even when it did not pass into action or legislative act, and writers such as Walker pushed what Agamben describes as “the aporia of sovereignty to the limit,” without necessarily freeing themselves from its paradoxes.²⁸⁰Close In the hands of southern lawmakers, revolutionary black agency became the groundwork for the expansion of state power that oppressed black subjects. Yet those very regulations, as many antislavery activists noted, became the conditions of possibility for the unexpected alliances across a partially free Atlantic world that sought to challenge and dismantle that state power. The lawsuits of sailors such as Isaac Bowers, Rueben Roberts, and Manuel Pereira, and the circulation of pamphlet, articles, and novels that accompanied those lawsuits, provided the foundation for these increasingly radicalized alliances. These peripatetic struggles forced lawmakers to draw and redraw the thresholds of exclusion from and containment within the slave state, as they brought increasing pressure to bear on the fictions of South Carolina’s modern sovereignty.