The Justice, the Sailors, and the Founders’ Legacy

This chapter delves into a searing moment of legal and political controversy in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1823, a free Black British sailor named Henry Elkison brought a case in federal court in which he challenged a state law requiring that any “free negro or person of colour” debarking in any South Carolina port be immediately jailed for the duration of his vessel’s stay. The battle over the law involved numerous levels of governmental and private actors, each with its own views concerning the constitutionality of the state regulations. Those participants included British diplomats; the U.S. secretary of state and attorney general; South Carolina lawmakers; the sheriff of Charleston; the Black sailors whose freedom was jeopardized by the act; a group of planter vigilantes; and William Johnson, Jr., the Charleston-born Supreme Court justice who heard Elkison’s case. The story of South Carolina in the 1820s illustrates the variegated nature of constitutional thought even within a single, self-consciously insular society. It also suggests that courts were one but by no means the only voice in establishing what counted as constitutional argumentation.

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