Moral Contagion

Moral Contagion examines how eight southern U.S. states barred the admission of free black maritime workers between 1822 and 1857. Southern proslavery ideologues implicated foreign corruption (so-called moral contagion) as the key reason for slave revolts (p. 2). To prevent a “pandemic” race war, they imposed “quarantine” measures through Seamen Acts to prevent the spread of the “infectious diseases” of liberty and rebellion (pp. 2, 59). Consequently, free black workers were brought ashore in chains, whipped at slave whipping posts, sexually assaulted, forced to labor on plantations, and even enslaved. By denying that antebellum citizenship was a stable category, this work expands upon the historiography, notably the work of Kunal Parker and William Novak. However, Schoeppner goes further, demonstrating that “the act of defining federal citizenship did not begin with the Dred Scott decision, the Civil War, or the Fourteenth Amendment” (p. 9). Schoeppner compellingly argues that the Seamen Acts exposed the “most polarizing constitutional issues of the whole antebellum era: the rights of citizenship, the racial boundaries of national citizenship, and the relationship between federal commercial authority and state racial policymaking” (p. 32

Citizenship · Criminology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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