Free Black Sailors and Quarantine in the Antebellum South: An Epidemic of Moral Contagion

Join us for the talk "An Epidemic of Moral Contagion: Free Black Sailors and Quarantine in the Antebellum South" by Dr. Michael Schoeppner. Exactly 200 years ago, a free Black Jamaican named Henry Elkison was arrested when the vessel on which he worked arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. Law enforcement officials boarded the ship, interrogated the captain, and then escorted Elkison to the city jail. His crime? He violated the state’s new quarantine law. But Elkison was not suffering from any sickness, contagious or otherwise. Instead, the quarantine law targeted him for his moral contagion. South Carolina lawmakers were convinced that free Black men like Henry Elkison were infected with a contagion of liberty that might infect local enslaved people and initiate an epidemic of slave unrest. Elkison was not alone. Some 20,000 free Black maritime workers faced similar treatment at the hands of officials in Southern port cities. Dr. Schoeppner’s talk explores these so-called quarantines and the Black sailors who suffered under them. Michael Schoeppner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine Farmington. He is an expert on the social and legal history of the nineteenth-century United States. His research focuses on the movements of Black migrants, seeing them as window to understand both the broader African American experience as well as formal political and legal change. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published Dr. Schoeppner’s first book, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America, which the Southern Historical Association awarded the 2021 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the sectional crisis. In Dr. Schoeppner’s lecture this evening, he will be pulling from his award-winning book as he discusses the experiences of the Black maritime workers as they entered the port cities of the antebellum South