User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Negro Seamen’s Acts

Negroes Seamens Acts were a series of laws during the antebellum period in the United States prohibiting free black sailors from entering slave states such as South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The first law was enacted by South Carolina in 1822. The United States federal government honored states rights "to restrict the entrance of paupers, the infirm, and the diseased." Southern lawmakers used the argument that free black sailors "were infected with a 'moral contagion' that could threaten white citizens and were therefore susceptible to quarantine.

Context
Free black men in the nineteenth century chose a life at sea to escape the "brutality of segregation, disfranchisement, and economic marginality." Even though they visited "the sugar islands, cotton plantations, and other slave-societies" and their own lives were not secure, they preferred the freedom on the sea.

Historian Philip Hamer claimed that by 1848, there was a turning point in British diplomacy with British Consuls "securing liberalization" of the Seamen Laws in some slave jurisdictions by negotiating with individual states that were part of the federation—Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina—instead of with Washington. Alan January focused on Palmetto State, South Carolina and argued that Seamen Acts‟ debates informed, even prefaced the South Carolina's November 24, 1832 Ordinance of Nullification, which declared that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832-known by their opponents as the Tariff of Abominations were unconstitutional. The Nullification Crisis