Introduce you to michael schoeppner. Dr. Michael schoeppner is an associate professor of history at the university of maine in farmington. Hes an expert on the social and legal history of the 19th century United States. Hes an expert. Oh, i said that already. His research focuses on the movements of black migrants, seeing them as a window to understand both the broader africanamerican experience, as well as formal political and legal change. In 2019, Cambridge University press published dr. Shatners first book, moral contagion black atlantic soldiers, sailors, citizenship and diplomacy in antebellum america, which the Southern Historical association awarded the 2021 james a raleigh prize for the best book on the sectional crisis. Please join me in welcoming him. Thank you. Thank you, bethany, for the wonderful introduction. Its wonderful to be here. This is actually my first time in newburyport and my first time at this museum. And i know im preaching to the choir here, but what a quaint, beautiful, charming town. And the facilities here are fantastic. So obviously, you all that are here know that the people that are watching remotely, you can take my word for it, but you should not just take my word for it. I cant wait to come back to the museum and do some research when my calendar is not so not so cramped. Its an honor to be here. I want to make a special thank you to bethany. She put all of this together along with her staff and the work they do here is fantastic. I am a fan of any public history resource that has at its heart at least part of it, illustrating how important the Maritime World is to Key Developments in American History. We live in an era of planes, trains and automobiles, and sometimes we forget the fact that for a good chunk of American History, transportation was all about the water, or at least primarily about the water. So a lot of things that happened, we can sort of trace back to the Maritime World and trace back to places well, like newburyport. So with that, id like to talk to you a little bit about an epidemic of moral contagion. To get started, i want to go i want you i want to go about 1000 miles south of where we are right now. Actually, its almost exactly a thousand miles south. Look, i left it up to charleston, South Carolina, 1823. Thats an oil painting of charleston antebellum. Charleston. And i want to put you on board one of these ships that would be sailing into Charleston Harbor in the summer of 1823. A vessel that looked like one of those, the homer sailed into Charleston Harbor from its home port of liverpool as it moored and local officials boarded the ship. Thats a sort of standard fare for for customs agents, etc. And they interrogated a man by the name of henry ellison. Henry albertson was then arrested, put in chains, escorted from the ship to the middle of charleston, where the city jail is. And he was basically incarcerated. The law that caused him to be incarcerated was a brand new port regulation. And when the captain asked about what was going on, the Deputy Sheriff who arrested him said, well, Henry Albertson is being arrested because he is a free black man. That was that was his crime. The crime of being of being black and not being enslaved. The captain was absolutely aghast, as many of you were a literally heard. You be aghast. He had the same sort of reaction after consulting with the British Council in charleston. He hired an attorney to sue for henry atkinsons release. There are plenty of treaties on the books between the great war, between Great Britain and the United States that emphatically say that the citizens of the United States and the subject of Great Britain, theyre allowed to go to each others port cities to conduct trade. So elkins arrest must be illegal. So they sued for a writ of habeas corpus to get henry up and sit out of jail. But an up and coming attorney in charleston steps up in the courtroom, and he answers this charge of sort of treaty violations with a very interesting response. And this attorney, by the way, was from massachusetts, benjamin hunt, and he said that the law that mandated atkinsons arrest was not a police regulation. The way that youre thinking about its not only a criminal law, its a quarantine. The problem with henry hudson is hes infected with a moral contagion. And that phrase moral contagion doesnt really make a whole lot of sense in contemporary sort of. Were coming out of covid and we think of contagion in like virus bacteria. Right. But but hes infected, Henry Appleton is infected with a moral contagion. And because he is sick with a moral contagion, we can isolate him and we can regulate him without violating any treaty rights. And in a sense, that that kind of makes sense, right to this day. We may have the right to go travel to england or whatever, but if we are visibly sick with a contagious disease, they can isolate us until were better. Right. So this would not violate the treaty. He is, in fact, dangerous. And even though the judge disagreed the heavily with this argument, there were some legal rules that prevented him from freeing wilkinson up and then remain in jail for two more weeks. And the law that caused him to be arrested in the first place remain on the books for 40 years in South Carolina. By the time we get to the civil war, seven other Southern States have passed similar laws outlawing the ingress of free black sailors or on this concept of moral contagion. So what i want to do today and tonight is to talk about these laws. What was the motivation behind it . What what is so morally contagious about this sailor from jamaica sailing through liverpool . Well, why is this person being targeted . Why is the entire southeastern United States targeting free black sailors like Henry Robinson so thats thats objective number one. Whats the motivation behind these laws . The second thing i want to talk about is, to me, way more interesting. And thats where the rubber meets the road and i know im mixing metaphors with the maritime talk. Right. But but this is when the laws are being enforced. So its one thing to have a law on the books. What did it actually look like when the laws were being enforced . What did enforcement look like . And for me, whats even more important, how are people responding to these new laws . So thats the second thing i want to cover. The third thing that i want to talk about are the larger implications of these struggles in the southern port cities of the United States. And by large, i dont mean like we should not think about what happened to free black sailors, that that those are inconsequential to other things. I mean, larger as in those events, those react patterns have rippling effects. Now i have my metaphors down right, rippling effects that go way beyond 1860 and actually inform parts of american legal and Constitutional Development that that we would not think happened because of whats going on in these port cities. So those are the three things motivation sort of when the laws are being enforced and resisted and then what does this mean after the civil war, when sort of the south looks very different than it did than it did beforehand . Okay. Almost perfect transition, right . Thank you. That was to remind me to to do the slide. Right. So this is a portrait from 1853. I know its 1823, but thats thats the best. You get with the antebellum period. Right. And thats a picture i took of the charleston jailhouse in 2016. If youve been to charleston, it is incredibly gentrified. And the Historic District is one of the largest in the United States and one of the only places in charleston, south of the neck, that is not sort of completely redone is the old jailhouse. And so i took this picture was completely abandoned. There was nothing there. I had to walk through the the back area, the yard. And it was it was really eerie, to be honest. All right. So first things first. Motivation. There are really three reasons why these laws go into effect. The first reason is the notion of moral contain. The first law passes in South Carolina in 1822, and im a bit of a charleston buff. So 1822, if you ask a charleston nian, that is the year of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy. Right. So i dont know, dozens and dozens of enslaved people and a couple of free people of color are arrested and executed for supposedly orchestrating a massive slave conspiracy. Supposedly, Denmark Vesey and his conspirators were going to cut off the charleston that that the charleston peninsula sort of like, you know, a little neck and then a big, huge peninsula there. And they cut off the Charleston Neck and they were going to initiate a race war and they were going to overthrow slavery in charleston. And then they were going to wait for reinforcements from haiti in west africa to supposedly end slavery in the United States. With this sort of violent overthrow. Now, historians have debated exactly how extensive this plot was. Was this really a huge conspiracy or was this some overanxious City Employees who were perhaps trying to cover their backsides when they thought a slave conspiracies was to happen . But then nothing actually precipitated on the night of the of the conspiracy, regardless of how extensive the plot was in the aftermath of denmark, vesey is arrest a White Charles etonians are convinced that theyre in the precipice of a of a of a slave war. They are terrified that the enslaved population in charleston is waiting for the next opportune time, and they are convinced that they have to do a lot of things to prevent another Denmark Vesey from taking place. So one of the things they want to do is they want to protect the slave system in South Carolina and they want to protect it by isolate them from what they call the dangerous currents of the Atlantic World, the dangerous currents. Thats thats the quote of the Atlantic World. Denmark vesey was not born in charleston, Denmark Vesey was born in west africa. He traveled around the Atlantic World as a sailor. He visited saintdomingue before the haitian revolution, before he ends up in charleston as an enslaved person. There. So charles etonians were convinced that if theyre going to prevent another Denmark Vesey, we should prevent those people who are traveling around the dangerous atlantic from coming into charleston and wreaking havoc. Now, this made a lot of sense for a couple of writers. Two of them are sort of here, right . Thats thomas do at the bottom. He was a law professor at william and mary, and thats james henry hammond. And the top. He was a politician and plantation owner and enslaver in South Carolina. These two gentlemen use that term loosely were advocates of something called proslavery ideology. Right. So if we think back to the american revolution, there were a lot of enslavers like thomas jefferson, patrick henry, george washington, who even though they were enslavers, expressed a very deep reservations about slavery in the new republic. Right. They were apprehensive. They had fought this war based on ideas of natural rights and the idea of liberty and equality. And at the same time, they were Holding People in slavery and they acknowledged fact that there was a paradox there. They acknowledged it. They didnt do enough about it. But they acknowledge the paradox and they describe slavery in a republic as a necessary evil. We should probably get rid of it, but if we did, our entire society and would fall apart and then we wouldnt have a republic to begin with. And so they expressed slavery as sort of this necessary evil. And ill leave it to the jefferson scholars to debate whether he really meant that or if that was some sort of like facade. But. These two individuals and the people that write like they are not their fathers ideologues. They believe in something called pro slavery ideology. Theyre writing about slavery not as a necessary evil, but as a positive institution, a benevolent institution, an institution that was good not just for the enslavers, but for the enslaved, too. They described as a sort of like a family relationship where the enslaved was sort of like the patriarch, the father. He provided protection and food and clothing, you know, a roof over their heads, education, civilization, christianity. And in exchange for this, he expected good, firm discipline so that they would make money to keep this whole society afloat. So to enslave people supposedly, according to the city ology, were receiving civilization and the necessities of life and the enslavers were receiving extreme money so that they could ruminate about important things like Public Policy and philosophy and poetry, things that. So that was thats precisely every ideology in a nutshell. Right. And if we think about it, this proslavery ideology has a really long shelf life. I if we think about it, if youve ever seen gone with the wind, you can see remnants of this proslavery ideology. Right. Okay. So for those ideologues that are writing about proslavery ideology, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy is really helpful in pushing their case. All right. So so theyre saying that that slavery is this benign institution, that that that people that are enslaved are like children they are naturally happy, docile content, and theyre enslavement. But that poses the problem because if youre explaining enslaved people in that way, how do you explain Denmark Vesey . How do you explain that, turner . How do you explain insubordination on a daily basis . How do you explain all of these instances in which enslaved people are obviously not happy, docile and content . And this is where the democrats the conspiracy comes in really handy, right . Oh, if if our enslaved population in the south was left alone, if they were just sort of like hands off, this is how it would be. But outside agitators who come in like Denmark Vesey, they corrupt, they infect people of color with ideas of racial equality, with ideas of liberty, with ideas of racial uplift. So if long as we can keep those individuals away, then this slave system that thats itll manifest itself. Thats the natural sort of way of things. So they framed the Denmark Vesey conspiracy as Proof Positive that there philosophy of proslavery ideology, that this is the proof is in the pudding here. Right. So the law that emerges in the aftermath of Denmark Vesey is highlighting the fact that free people of color who come into South Carolina are dangerously, morally infected. And so you had to create a quarantine to prevent them from interacting with enslaved population with sort of a pandemic of slavery revolt. If you dont do this. Right. Okay. So thats thats reason number one, why they enact this law. But theres another reason to and that other reason has to do with maritime networks. And i dont know if any of you have seen this book. This is tim walkers book. Hes a professor down at umass dartmouth, and he edited this volume. And basically, this volume is all about i dont know if you can read the subtitle, but its the its the maritime dimension of the underground railroad and usually we think of the underground railroad, at least when i used to think about it when i was in college, i thought about it as sort of like its overlap and youre enslaved, people are escaping through the woods. Then you have sort of the momentous crossing of the ohio river to get from a slave territory to free territory. And so i thought about it in those sorts of terms. But it turns out that for most enslaved people who are escaping to freedom, the maritime highway is the way to go. I mean, if you live in charleston and you want to go to free territory, that is a arduous journey. Its going to be dark. Near impossible. Near impossible. But if you take the maritime route way easier, way and youre much less likely to get caught. So if you pass a law that says we keep free black sailors away from the slave population, not only, do you protect this this notion of of sort of contented slaves, not only do you prevent slave unrest, but you also prevent enslave people from using the conduits by which they would get on board of a ship and escape to freedom. So these laws against free black sailors protect against slave insurrection. But they prevent slaves from running away, making it north. So its sort of killing killing two birds with one stone. Now youre paying attention, right . So, you know, said two birds with one stone. And then this. Theres three birds with one stone. It is not a mistake. Maybe a mistake. But theres one more thing that happens with this law. Right . Because, again, if the if the concern of the slaveholding class is to keep these two groups separate, there would be another way to sort of do this. Right. And that would be to very closely regulate enslaved people in urban places. Right. Very closely regulated. And then you dont have to worry about these sorts of things, do you . You can maintain that sort of sequestered sort of objective. But if you do that, the urban economy of the south would completely fall apart. A recent book th