“Fugitive Slave / Fugitive Sailor”: Sailors’ Wardship and the Rhetoric of Emancipation in United States Maritime Reform, 1895-1898

Authors

  • Johnathan Thayer City University of New York, Queens College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/2561-5467.1248

Keywords:

citizenship, free labor, merchant seamen, Progressive Era, Sailor's Union of the Pacific, US Constitution

Abstract

In 1897, the United States Supreme Court ruled against four white merchant seamen protesting their arrest for desertion from the barque Arago in Astoria, Oregon, providing belated definition to the Thirteenth Amendment’s clause abolishing involuntary  servitude. The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Arago sailors represented a nadir in the devolution of Reconstruction-era  conceptions of free labor into an increasingly draconian system that insisted on absolute freedom of contract up to the point of self-enslavement. Competing conceptions of paternalism and sailors’ wardship motivated the cooptation of the rhetoric of emancipation by maritime reformers with the aim of affirming sailors’ rights to the full protections of the Thirteenth Amendment, and by
extension United States citizenship.

Author Biography

Johnathan Thayer, City University of New York, Queens College

Johnathan Thayer is Associate Professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches classes in Archival Studies and Public History. He holds a PhD in History from the CUNY Graduate Center, an MLS with concentration in Archival Studies from Queens College, CUNY, and a BA in English from Wesleyan University. He is the author of Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance in US Ports: Sailors Ashore (2023), and is co-editor of Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815-1940 (2021), both titles in Palgrave Macmillan’s Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History series.

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Barque Arago (Clatsop County Historical Society, Astoria, Oregon)

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Published

2025-01-24

How to Cite

Thayer, J. (2025). “Fugitive Slave / Fugitive Sailor”: Sailors’ Wardship and the Rhetoric of Emancipation in United States Maritime Reform, 1895-1898. The Northern Mariner Le Marin Du Nord, 34(2), 211–234. https://doi.org/10.25071/2561-5467.1248