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

Auteurs-es

  • Johnathan Thayer City University of New York, Queens College

DOI :

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

Mots-clés :

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

Résumé

En 1897, la Cour suprême des États-Unis a statué contre quatre marins marchands qui protestaient contre leur arrestation pour désertion de la barque Arago à Astoria, en Oregon, définissant ainsi de façon tardive la clause du treizième amendement qui abolissait l’asservissement involontaire. Cette décision de la Cour suprême contre les marins de l’Arago a été le point culminant de la transformation des conceptions du travail libre de l’époque de la reconstruction en un système de plus en plus draconien qui insistait sur la liberté contractuelle absolue jusqu’à l’auto-asservissement. Les diverses conceptions du paternalisme et de la tutelle des marins ont motivé la cooptation du discours d’émancipation par les réformateurs maritimes visant à affirmer les droits des
marins à la pleine protection du treizième amendement et, par conséquent, à la citoyenneté américaine.

Biographie de l'auteur-e

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.

Références

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

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Publié-e

2025-01-24

Comment citer

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