Description Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free Black maritime workers.
Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of Citizenship championed by Antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with \'Moral contagion\'..
By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national Citizenship - one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation - they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national Citizenship as a legal category.
They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts.
The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment.
Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement.
According to lawmakers, they carried a \'Moral contagion\' of abolitionism and Black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves.
Description Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free Black maritime workers
