Black Sailors Research Articles

James H. Bruns, Black Sailors in the Civil War. A History of Fugitives, Freemen, and Freedmen Aboard Union Vessels by Louis Arthur Norton

James H. Bruns, Black Sailors in the Civil War. A History of Fugitives, Freemen, and Freedmen Aboard Union Vessels by Louis Arthur Norton

Equiano's African Methodist Appetite: Feasting and Purification Rituals as Community and Resistance

Abstract: This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism.

Amnesty in Brazil: Recompense after Repression, 1895–2010

After 15 years of dictatorship, the Brazilian military leaders issued Law No. 6683, an amnesty law that started a slow process of democratic transition in the country. The law granted an official pardon to individuals accused of political crimes and to those who had their political rights suspended between September 1961 and August 1979. Ann Schneider's Amnesty in Brazil: Recompense after Repression, 1895–2010 examines this amnesty law, contextualizing it as part of a long history of amnesty laws in Brazil. Schneider shows that to understand how Law No. 6683 was interpreted and contested after the 1980s, we need to study the history of how Brazilian politicians, lawyers, writers, and other members of civil society developed a tradition of demanding and creating amnesty policies to resolve conflicts and crises since the First Republic—in 1891, when the first amnesty decree was issued. She demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century amnesty became an “institution to secure rights” in Brazil (p. 24).Schneider shows that the Brazilian state resorted to amnesty laws since the First Republic as a political solution to reconcile civil and human rights violations and that the first one, enacted by President Prudente de Morais, set a precedent for the use of amnesty in Brazil. Throughout the twentieth century, politicians and activists deployed the arguments that jurist Rui Barbosa first drafted in 1895 as a key part to settling civil and political conflicts. Amnesty became a government tool to both secure peace and turn toward new political regimes in Brazil.One of the book's main contributions is to illustrate that while amnesty laws and decrees of the post-1979 era in various countries often granted amnesty to the perpetrators of human rights violations, shielding them from accountability, in Brazil they also provided mechanisms for possible restitution to victims. Chapter 8 shows that because perpetrators were amnestied, the families of disappeared members of the Araguaia guerrilla movement never got justice. One example that the author discusses is the case of Major Curió, accused of the aggravated kidnapping of five guerrillas who were last seen in 1974. The judge assigned to his case rejected the complaint against him, suggesting that it would not be in the public's interest to rule against the amnesty law. Nonetheless, Schneider shows that while the law worked for state agents, it also benefited victims of the dictatorship. In 2001, for example, the Brazilian state created an amnesty commission that formally acknowledged state repression and offered monetary restitution and an official apology to the victims of the 1964–85 dictatorship. With this, amnesty in Brazil became associated not only with the pardoning of crimes and accusations but also with reparation and compensation. Schneider examines how amnesty laws in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries came to incorporate the civil justice principle that quem causa dano repara (the one who harms must repair).In addition to discussing the amnesty laws, this book examines the crises and conflicts that led to their creation—over public health, racial relations, and class difference. One of the many valuable aspects of Schneider's analysis is the focus on the perspectives of victims—such as João Cândido, a Black sailor who rebelled against the navy's punitive methods, and Victória Grabois, whose husband, father, and brother, members of the Araguaia movement, disappeared during the 1970s. Schneider differentiates the anistiados (amnestied) from the anistiandos (those in the process of seeking amnesty). One important consequence of highlighting this difference is to show that the history of amnesty is ongoing. Those who got amnesty only considered themselves amnestied after they received reparations for the violence that the state subjected them to. Those who did not continued fighting for restitutions.While claiming amnesty became associated with restitution in Brazil, Schneider understands the limits of this legal framework. She disagrees with the idea that amnesty was triumphal or that it ended in the recognition and restitution of all rights in Brazil. Yet her argument that these laws and decrees represented an important legal basis for how people framed their access to rights is still valid and important. She provides a careful examination on the multiple groups who participated in the processes leading to the creation and application of amnesty laws. Even though amnesty did not benefit all groups who claimed to have a right to it, the groups who demanded amnesty influenced a tradition in which these laws were created and used this legal framework to their advantage. Schneider's analysis, therefore, provides a novel perspective for understanding how different groups in Brazil negotiated their rights in the public sphere.Lastly, Schneider's writing is accessible, and her narrative style is easy to follow. All students interested in human rights and transitional justice across disciplines will benefit from reading this well-researched and carefully organized book.

Ports in the Medieval European Atlantic: Shipping, Transport and Labour, ed. Ana María Rivera Medina

The synergy of legal, environmental, slavery and socio-economic historians marks this book, edited by Ana María Rivera Medina, as an important addition to existing scholarship. The book consists of seven chapters, each meticulously prepared. The opening chapter, by Mathias Tranchant, examines the jurisdictional frameworks of the Atlantic ports of medieval France. Tranchant stresses that ports had three geographical layers: the supralittoral zone (land the tide never reaches), the intertidal zone (area covered by the tide range), and the infralittoral zone (shallow water region closest to the shore). From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries a series of overlapping prerogatives had been collected by lay and ecclesiastical lords (seigneurie rivagière) which created a complex web of rights and jurisdictions. Tranchant carefully describes this process through an in-depth analysis of the available source material. Ana María Rivera Medina’s chapter discusses Basque stevedoring and analyses the port services which ensured the safety of ships, such as placing buoys over sandbanks and employing pilots who knew local sea conditions. She carefully reconstructs the busy working lives of port workers, the intricacies of using lighters to unload ships, and how storage spaces provided opportunities to collect revenues from maritime trade. The chapter by María Álvarez Fernández complements Medina’s essay by discussing port infrastructures and cargo handling in Asturias and Galicia in the later Middle Ages. These were small ports that focused on fishing, but which, nonetheless, contributed to local economies in a variety of ways. Amândio J.M. Barros’s chapter on the slave trade and Portuguese ports in the sixteenth century is an important contribution. His focus is on the smaller ports involved in the slave trade and through this fascinating study draws our attention to black sailors, and how the presence of enslaved people in port communities supported the maritime economy through activities such as carpentry and shipbuilding. Also focusing on Portugal, Sara Pinto examines transport and shipping in the port of Caminha. Pinto pays close attention to the environmental conditions that affected Caminha and examines the administrators employed to supervise port services. Enrique José Ruiz Pilares’s chapter analyses the development of port infrastructure in the coastal regions of Atlantic Andalusia. He points out that, prior to the fifteenth century, much of the infrastructure was built in wood, but from the mid-fifteenth century a significant expansion in trade encouraged authorities to undertake initiatives to improve facilities. Drawing on a case-study of Jerez de la Frontera, Pilares shows that these building projects led to labour specialisations and the development of warehouses, lodgings and markets, which encouraged the growth of a vibrant merchant community. Roberto J. González Zalacain focuses on the development of Tenerife’s ports from the late fifteenth century through to the sixteenth century. The author’s focus here is on showing how Tenerife was integrated into the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’ and how it facilitated links between Europe, Africa and America.

Black Sailors in the Civil War: A History of Fugitives, Freemen and Freedmen Aboard Union Vessels

Black Sailors in the Civil War: A History of Fugitives, Freemen and Freedmen Aboard Union Vessels

The Early Portuguese Slave Ship and the Infrastructure of Racial Capitalism

AbstractThis article argues that an infrastructural analysis of the early Portuguese slave trade permits a detailed account of the emergence of what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism.” The early Portuguese slave ship is one of the clearest examples of how an infrastructure of accumulation accelerated the racialization of capitalism. As denounced by the 1684 Portuguese Law on Tonnage, the holds of the early slave ships created spatial regimes that regularly killed captives through asphyxiation, a unique form of death resulting from the reduction of human life to capital. If enslavement was defined by this spatial regime of suffocation, the early slave trade extended the grounds for racialization through extensive networks of credit and debt. This financial system established the parameters of enslavement and freedom, bridging shipboard and terrestrial social relations. Early slave ships included Black sailors, known as grumetes. A term that became adopted throughout the first region of the Portuguese slave trade in Africa, grumete referred to African wage laborers who worked with Luso-African traders. As wages were likely paid in credit that could only be cashed out by participating in the sale of humans, the freedom of the grumetes was constrained by the system of credit that financed the early trade. The infrastructure of the early slave trade was thus the nexus and conduit between interconnected financial modes, commodified life and debt, that together account for the racialization of the early Atlantic world.

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Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur

Reviewed by: Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur Christopher James Bonner (bio) Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction. By Kate Masur. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. Pp. 456. Cloth, $32.00; paper, $20.00.) In the summer of 1826, Washington, D.C., authorities arrested a Black New Yorker named Gilbert Horton on the suspicion that he had escaped slavery. Black travelers were presumed enslaved in much of the South, and when Horton could not produce documents to verify his freedom, authorities sent him to jail with plans to sell him into bondage if he could not provide such documentation. Horton’s arrest drew the attention and ire of prominent New Yorkers, such as Governor DeWitt Clinton. Clinton and others insisted that the arrest violated Horton’s rights as a free person and as a citizen of New York State. In so doing, they made significant claims about Black rights and the federal system as a whole. Horton’s story thus reflects central themes in Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done. Black people lived under a raft of oppressive state and local laws, and an interracial cadre of activists challenged those laws in ways that helped reshape the legal order in the mid-nineteenth century. Masur illuminates how the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment came to exist as measures that legalized racial equality in civil rights. She traces the roots of these policies through interconnected stories of state and federal government, Black and white activism, and a shifting party landscape to reveal how a civil rights movement functioned in the early United States. This book offers a clear and careful narrative of persistent advocacy and political possibility. Masur covers a broad geography, reflecting connections in political and legal development across state lines. Much of this focuses on state restrictions of Black freedom. In 1804, Ohio legislators approved a measure requiring Black people to document their freedom upon entering the state, and in 1807 the state outlawed Black testimony in legal cases involving white people. Virginia had previously enacted similar controls, and Ohio lawmakers embraced restrictions, in part, because they feared an influx of African Americans seeking refuge within their borders. Masur shows that these laws had roots in both racism and anxiety about poverty. State officials invoked a broad power to police communities, restricting Black [End Page 267] life, criminalizing vagrancy, and limiting who could claim state residency and be entitled to poor relief. Ohio’s laws offered a blueprint for measures in Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; lawmakers across the North could justify racist legislation while claiming that they sought only to secure the public good. Black and white activists struggled against these laws for decades. They developed a robust concept of civil rights, understood as distinct from political rights, the latter being viewed as privileges reserved to a select few. Advocates for civil equality demanded that Black people have rights to sue, to testify in court, to move freely, and to receive equal protection of the law. They protested such measures as Ohio’s residency restriction, as well as the Negro Seamen Acts, which empowered southern officials to jail Black sailors, purportedly to protect the South from dangerous outside influence. As Masur notes, activists called Black men citizens and said these laws violated the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. But they also made a broader argument that jailing free Black sailors “violated fundamental rights to which all persons were entitled” (122). The breadth of that claim is central to the civil rights movement Masur explores. Many white Americans opposed Black political equality and doubted claims that African Americans were citizens, but by the 1840s growing numbers were open to the idea that Black people were entitled to civil rights. Some white abolitionists viewed equal civil rights as essential to the fight against slavery. Masur highlights a series of petition campaigns that challenged exclusionary laws in specific states, and also urged people across the country to think about the harmful results of racist legislation. Masur builds on recent studies of African American protest with...

Looking for black sailors in the eighteenth-century French navy

This article explores the presence of black sailors in the French maritime world during the second part of the eighteenth century. It is apparent that both French and British navies at this time of war seem to have had opposite policies with regard to the employment of black sailors as almost none can be found on French warships whereas several examples may be found in the British Royal Navy . This article further explores whether the military navy was the rule or the exception in the French maritime world, seeking black sailors – either slaves or freemen – in the maritime activities of the French West Indies, and the islands of Guadeloupe in particular. Finally, the third part of the article examines the use of black sailors in the French merchant navy in not only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but also the Indian Ocean.

Pedro João: A black sailor between Portuguese Catholicism and English Protestantism (1614-1637)

Resumo Este artigo analisa a religiosidade de um marinheiro escravo seiscentista, Pedro João, preso pela inquisição portuguesa. Forçado a professar a fé dos seus senhores, Pedro João passou do catolicismo (no qual foi batizado e crismado em Olinda, sua cidade natal) para o protestantismo ao ser aprisionado em alto-mar por um corsário inglês, em 1629. Levado à Vila de Plymouth e depois à Millbrook, lá se casou com uma mulher protestante e teve um filho. Em 1637, ao aportar em Lisboa a bordo do navio em que trabalhava, Pedro João foi preso pela inquisição. Questionado pelos inquisidores em matéria de fé, Pedro João nos legou elementos para sondar o seu protestantismo, de cunho calvinista-zwingliano, embora convivesse com reminiscências católicas. Procuramos demonstrar que nosso personagem, uma figura atlântica, nasceu católico na América portuguesa e teve sua alma “pescada” no Atlântico pelo protestantismo inglês, vivenciando na pele as agruras dos conflitos religiosos que marcaram a chamada primeira modernidade europeia.

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Reviewed by: Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner Christopher James Bonner (bio) Negro Seamen Acts, Black mobility, Black sailors, Quarantine laws, Citizenship Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. By Michael A. Schoeppner. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. Cloth, $59.99; paper, $32.99.) Early in the 1820s, reports placed Denmark Vesey at the head of a conspiracy to dismantle South Carolina's racial power structure. Michael Schoeppner notes a revealing thread in these narratives: the idea that Vesey came to Charleston after having inhabited the fluid society of the Atlantic world. In response, Charleston authorities tried to prevent other black people deemed foreign and dangerous from entering through the city's ports. Schoeppner explores the Negro Seamen Acts enacted across the South in the early republic, laws intended to suppress the spread of revolutionary ideas and to curtail the black mobility that threatened southern racial hierarchy. Moral Contagion examines critical questions these laws raised about federalism and citizenship, and the negotiation over these concepts in state, national, and international politics. A vigilante group known as the South Carolina Association played a key role in the early implementation of the state's Negro Seamen Act. First enacted in 1822, the measure required black soldiers on ships that entered Charleston Harbor to be jailed, or quarantined, until their ships departed. Members of the Association, including some prominent and [End Page 313] powerful white Charlestonians, petitioned for strict enforcement of the law, helped craft more stringent arrest policies, and policed the docks themselves. By the late 1820s, the Association became "a publicly recognized, private policing agency" (60), endorsed by the state government to arrest black sailors. The group's actions offer a compelling story about people engaging with the flexible legal order in the early republic, a point Schoeppner makes by building on work such as Laura Edwards's The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). The South Carolina Association worked to make the legal order more rigid, not only by arresting hundreds of black sailors in the 1820s but also by securing a state law that levied a hefty fine on any sheriff who failed to enforce the Seaman Acts. A combination of legal and extralegal activity ensured that state government operated to uphold racial order. Schoeppner also looks outward from South Carolina. In the 1830s, lawmakers across the coastal South enacted similar quarantine laws. These laws responded in part to anxieties over British abolition in the West Indies. And the laws produced tensions with authorities in both the northern United States and in Britain who sought to protect black sailors from the indignity and brutality of southern imprisonment. Quarantine laws intersected often with early U.S. diplomacy. When British authorities insisted on free mobility for black British subjects, they challenged the Seamen Acts and questioned the entire legal system that marginalized black Americans. In response, state legislators, attorneys general, and U.S. Supreme Court justices solidified their commitment to securing slavery and insisted on a constitutional right to restrict people from bringing "moral pestilence" (106) into American communities. In 1837 Spain enacted its own law restricting black sailors from colonial ports like Havana. Initially, U.S. Consul Nicholas Trist contested the policy, claiming it restricted commerce, but ultimately he acquiesced. Schoeppner suggests Spanish authorities swayed Trist by telling him a black British sailor had been arrested in Cuba carrying antislavery literature. Even as it troubled Anglo–American diplomacy, the threat of moral contagion felt real enough to unite some Atlantic empires. Given this, it is surprising when Schoeppner aligns Trist with the opponents of quarantine laws, such as black newspaper editors who argued black sailors were citizens entitled to free movement. Schoeppner suggests both parties envisioned citizenship as a status that might obligate a government to protect individuals, but it's important that Trist considered [End Page 314] yet declined to make public an argument that black men were citizens. Most American authorities would have found it unacceptable for a U.S. diplomat to claim that black men were entitled...

Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America

Michael A. Schoeppner, <i>Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America</i>

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America

Michael A. Schoeppner. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America.

Michael A. Schoeppner. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America.

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Reviewed by: Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner Joseph P. Reidy (bio) Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. By Michael A. Schoeppner. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. $59.99.) Among the historical works on the relationship between African-descended people and the sea, W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African [End Page 401] American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997) continues to command respect for its interpretive insight and stylistic grace. In one particularly effective chapter, Bolster explores the perilous interactions between free seamen of color and the institution of slavery by focusing on the Negro Seamen Acts, which the states along the southern Atlantic and the Gulf coasts enacted from the 1820s through the 1850s. Despite their differences, these laws all required the confinement of black seamen whenever they entered port, a form of quarantine nominally designed to prevent the visitors from spreading sedition among the enslaved population. Michael A. Schoeppner’s Moral Contagion builds effectively on Bolster’s work and that of scholars such as Philip M. Hamer, Harold D. Langley, and Martha S. Putney, upon which Bolster relied. At one level, Moral Contagion may be approached as a thorough legal history of the acts and their impact, but it is much more. By focusing closely on challenges to the laws, Schoeppner tells two tales. One traces the off-again, on-again attempts by commercial interests for whom the laws posed an inconvenience and by government officials—in Washington, assorted northern states, and the British Foreign Office—for whom the laws presented jurisdictional disputes over the limits of a state’s authority. The other story follows black sailors who, with their families, home communities, and assorted allies, claimed citizenship rights that superseded the laws and therefore rendered their enforcement invalid. These largely unheralded activists pressed their claims via mass meetings, letters to editors, and petitions to government officials at every level. Their advocacy helped to make “national citizenship and federal citizenship rights an important element of antebellum constitutional thought and politics” (213). The history of the Seamen Acts begins in South Carolina following Denmark Vesey’s abortive insurrection of 1822, when state lawmakers mandated the incarceration of free black seamen while their ships were in port. A group of prominent citizens, styling themselves the South Carolina Association, first lobbied for passage of the law and then worked to guarantee its strict enforcement. For the next three decades, the association actively stoked the ideological fires, employing such episodes as publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1829, the abolitionist mail campaign in the mid-1830s, and northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to demonize black seafarers as threats to the social order that rested on slavery. Over time, other coastal states jumped on the quarantine bandwagon in response to perceived threats, and Cuba did too. Schoeppner perceptively surveys the experience of British sailors, both before and after abolition in the British West Indies. At various points in time, officials invoked the Commercial Convention of 1815 to protest the [End Page 402] laws, often citing commercial or diplomatic concerns but never squarely challenging the abridgement of the sailors’ rights as free persons. Instead, consuls tried to achieve local amelioration (including by obtaining the release, in one case, of a ship’s officer of African ancestry and, in another, of a female steward who had been sexually assaulted by a jailor). Most strikingly, the British Foreign Office left unquestioned Attorney General Roger B. Taney’s 1833 opinion in support of the South Carolina law on the grounds that black subjects of the British Crown were not recognized as citizens when the convention was signed. Taney’s view that “constitutional modernity was strictly a Caucasian accomplishment” (90) intended for the sole benefit of Caucasians, Schoeppner caustically observes, guided his jurisprudence steadily from then through the Dred Scott case of 1857. Northern states also found federal authorities unsympathetic to claims that the acts violated federal authority over maritime commerce and flouted constitutional protections of the rights that citizens of any one state enjoyed in the several states—most notably, freedom. When Massachusetts...

'Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen' Een Afro-Atlantische gemeenschap in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam

This study shows that in the mid-seventeenth century there was an Afro-Atlantic maritime community in Amsterdam. It is possible to reconstruct this community on the basis of marriage information and baptismal registers combined with notarial records. From around 1625 until 1665, Africans present in Amsterdam mainly married each other and, in important events such as marriage and baptism, also took African witnesses. The community consisted of black women present in Amsterdam, many of whom had probably entered the city as servants. They often married to black sailors, who were mostly employed by Dutch West-India Company (WIC) and Dutch East-India Company (VOC). In Amsterdam, this heterogeneous community settled in the east of the city, in the area around the Jodenbreestraat.

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones Richard D. Brown (bio) Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. By Martha S. Jones. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii, 248. Paper, $27.99.) Birthright Citizens is an important, path-breaking study that brings readers deep into the subject explored in Henry Louis Gates Jr., et al., The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship (New York, 2012). Martha S. Jones's eight concise, gracefully written chapters reveal the complexities of citizenship among free blacks, from the 1790s through adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Although Baltimore and Maryland supply her primary focus, the reach of her study includes the entire United States. Jones takes William Yates's little-known Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury (Philadelphia, 1838) as her point of departure. Yates, a white New York abolitionist, supplied evidence supporting the citizenship of free people of color. Jones, however, reaches beneath "high court opinions and legislative edicts" to probe real life experience so as to reveal "the ideas of former slaves and their descendants" (9). Consequently, Jones demonstrates the ways free blacks asserted and exercised rights commonly ascribed to citizens. The city and state practices Jones investigates possess more than local significance. After all, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the majority Dred Scott opinion, played a prominent role in Baltimore as well as national affairs. If the right to vote was the measure, Jones explains that free blacks were citizens in 1800. However, Maryland legislators erased that right in 1801, denying black suffrage by law. Nationwide, this policy would be imitated and challenged in the first half of the nineteenth century. This dynamic of contestation—the assertion and restriction of rights—is a powerful theme of Birthright Citizens. Jones shows readers a multitude of anomalous cases, as growing numbers of free black men asserted rights to property and freedom of movement. The debate over Missouri's admission to the union brought black citizenship to the forefront of national debate in 1820–21 because Missouri leaders proposed barring free blacks from entering the state—a common slave-state policy. Jones explains how free blacks in Maryland responded. Prompted by white Marylanders' movement to colonize them, people of color in Baltimore focused on citizenship. Since the U.S. [End Page 575] Attorney General, Baltimore's William Wirt, argued publicly in 1821 that the Constitution automatically made every state citizen a U.S. citizen, free blacks turned to him. Yet when they pressed him to defend their citizenship, Jones reports, Wirt declined. Moreover, Octavius Taney, brother of the future Chief Justice, advocated removal of all free blacks from not only Maryland but the entire United States. Maryland's legislature sought to push free people of color out of state. Yet efforts to deny black citizenship encountered obstacles. Black sailors in the U.S. Navy possessed rights and testified against whites in courts martial. In Baltimore courts, blacks defended their property and could even win an assault case against a white. By engaging in legal procedures and seeking court recognition, free people of color asserted themselves as rights holders. Moreover, as they built and incorporated churches, their claims to citizenship achieved a kind of reality. Jones explains, however, that often the exercise of black rights was contingent on white sponsorship. A Baltimore person of color capable of enlisting a prominent white patron could claim—and enforce—rights that no black outsider could. To leave and re-enter Maryland persons of color required certificates, and Jones's examination of the records shows that a white gentleman's endorsement was necessary. Though free blacks asserted their birthright citizenship, in Maryland that citizenship was no better than second class. Jones's careful exploration of "Courthouse Claims" (in Chapter 7) shows how the non-racial aspects of Baltimore's legal procedures commonly recognized the rights of free blacks. Though Maryland law forbade the practice, blacks testified against whites. Insolvency statutes made no racial distinctions, though officials might note them. The Orphan's Court adjudicated the contracts of apprentices and admitted the testimony of black children...

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Different Tales of John Glasgow: John Brown’s Evolution toSlave Life in Georgia

This article seeks to advance conversation on the literary and political agency of fugitive slave narrators and their far-reaching archival footprints by focusing on the evolution of John Brown’s narrative of John Glasgow, a Demerara-born free Black sailor with whom Brown toiled side by side on a Georgian plantation. In British and U.S. abolitionist discourse, Glasgow’s tragic story—he was imprisoned under Georgia’s seamen law upon arriving in Savannah and eventually fell into bondage—made him the symbol of the southern seamen acts’ egregious infringement of British freedom. Brown, a formerly enslaved expatriate resident in England, told this tale in his autobiography Slave Life in Georgia, but the authorship of this story has some ambiguity. It is believed by some scholars that the narrative’s editor, London-based White abolitionist Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, concocted the tale. By drawing on newly discovered documents, this article demonstrates that Brown originally attributed Glasgow’s enslavement to kidnapping by deceit, not to a Black seamen law. Furthermore, an examination of British diplomatic dispatches and the details of the Black seaman law operating in Savannah at that time posits the likelihood that Glasgow became enslaved by deception rather than law. What do we make of these findings? Instead of marshalling them to confirm Chamerovzow as the story’s creator, this article speculates that John Brown himself invented the Glasgow story and imagines a transatlantic Black political circuitry connecting England and Canada.

Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement by Thomas W. Cutrer

Reviewed by: Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement by Thomas W. Cutrer Alex Macaulay Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement. By Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish. Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 140. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-62349-602-9.) This brief, briskly paced work tells the story of Doris Miller, an African American sailor in the U.S. Navy who garnered national attention for his heroic actions manning an antiaircraft gun and saving the lives of several fellow seamen during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Born in 1919 near Waco, Texas, Miller grew up in a place and time marked by deep and dangerous racial tensions. Joining the navy in 1939 to help his family financially and to see the world, he served as a messman, the only position available to African American sailors at the time. Stationed aboard the USS West Virginia, he trained to pass ammunition to the ship's Browning machine guns but not to operate them. Nevertheless, on December 7, 1941, Miller jumped into the seat of an unmanned gun and began firing at Japanese bombers. After spending all his ammunition, Miller helped rescue drowning and injured sailors before abandoning ship himself and swimming to safety. News of the heroic, but unnamed, black sailor spread rapidly. The editor of the Pittsburgh Courier identified Miller publicly and began a concerted effort to have him honored and rewarded for his actions. Several congressmen and black leaders pushed for Miller to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, something navy officials refused to do, eventually awarding him the Navy Cross instead. The fight continued, with the black press promoting Miller as a direct refutation of the Jim Crow mind-set that denied black soldiers and sailors equal access to the armed forces. In the process, Miller emerged as a hero within the black community, rivaling boxer Joe Louis as the most popular African American member of the U.S. military. After completing a war bond tour, Miller returned to duty as a cook on the USS Liscome Bay. On November 24, 1943, he was one of hundreds of casualties when that ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo off the coast of Butaritari Island. In about a hundred pages of text, Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish address several key historical developments, including discrimination within the U.S. Navy, the emergence of the Double V campaign, and, most notably, the influence and activism of the black press. Indeed, African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier in particular, kept Miller's story in the public eye, using it to demand recognition of the wartime contributions made by all [End Page 1049] African American service personnel and to challenge segregation in military and civil society. Their efforts resulted in successes, setbacks, and stagnation, with Miller serving more as a symbolic icon whose deeds appeared in poems and song lyrics and whose name came to adorn buildings, parks, memorials, and schools. In their concluding chapter, the authors quote Miller's father, who saw no signs of racial progress soon after the war ended, and they note that racist naval policies survived into the 1970s. The magnitude of Miller's heroism combined with the limited impact it had on the lives of African Americans, including his immediate family, mark this episode as an inspiring and frustrating tale of the modern civil rights movement. Alex Macaulay Western Carolina University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association