The Moral Contagion of Freedom in the Antebellum South With Professor Michael Schoeppner

Making of a Historian

For show notes, links, and book lists, check out our website at historian.live. Today I talk with Professor Michael Schoeppner, Assistant Professor of History at University of Maine, Farmington, about his book Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. I was initially drawn to talk with Professor Schoeppner simply because he wrote a book about something I knew nothing about: between the early 1820s and the Civil War, many Southern States had rules that barred free Black sailors from coming into their ports. If you were a free negro seaman and came into a Southern port, you’d be brought ashore and put in jail until your ship departed. But Professor Schoeppner uses these now-forgotten laws to tell a much bigger story about the nature of citizenship in the US. The idea of the Negro Seamen Laws as that free Black seamen brought to the otherwise pacific slaves of the south the moral contagion of freedom. We have a deep conversation about the nature of citizenship both in the past and in contemporary America.