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21 - The Free Sea

An Antislavery Idea of Human Rights

from Part III - Rights and Empires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Amy Dru Stanley
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter studies how the ocean became a realm of human rights aspiration. It illuminates the emergence of an oceanic idea of human rights as an antislavery work, the invention of African Americans who had been held as slaves as well as of freeborn abolitionists. In antislavery thought, the ocean constituted not a space for traversing, creating wealth, or making war – of commerce and of empire – but a realm of natural human liberty. The chapter traces the origins of this idea to a slave rebellion aboard an American ship sailing on the Atlantic ocean in 1841– a coastwise slave trade voyage– and the conflict of laws caused by the rebellion. Out of this conflict, the chapter argues, emerged emancipatory doctrine that contributed to a burgeoning antislavery invocation of human rights while transforming a conception of the free sea that was centuries old.

Keywords

free seaslaveryslave rebellionoceanshuman rights
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 499 - 522
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bashford, A., “Terraqueous Histories,” Historical Journal 60/2 (2017), 253–72.Google Scholar
Benton, L., “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39/3 (2011), 355–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Channing, W. E., The Duty of the Free States, or, Remarks Suggested by the Case of the Creole (Boston, William Crosby and Co., 1842).Google Scholar
Douglass, F., The Heroic Slave, in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Griffiths, J. (Boston, John P. Jewett & Co., 1853)Google Scholar
Grotius, H., The Free Sea, ed. Armitage, D. (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, [1609] 2004).Google Scholar
Hyde, C., “The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in the Creole Case and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” American Literature 85/3 (2013), 237–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jay, W., The Creole Case and Mr. Webster’s Despatch: with the Comments of the N.Y. American (New York, New York American, 1842).Google Scholar
Johnson, W., “White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery Aboard the Slave Ship Creole,” Atlantic Studies 5/2 (2008), 237–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerr-Ritchie, R., Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oxman, B. H., “Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” in Charney, J. I. et al. (eds.), Politics, Values and Functions: International Law in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Professor Louis Henkin, ed. (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), pp. 377–404.Google Scholar
Schemerhorn, C., “The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest,” in Beckert, S. and Rockman, S. (eds.), Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 209–24.Google Scholar
Sinha, M., The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
“Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807–1860,” Microfilm Serial: M1895, Records of the US Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC [database online via Ancestry.com].Google Scholar
Steckel, R. H., and Ziebarth, N., “A Troublesome Statistic: Traders and Coastal Shipments in the Westward Movement of Slaves,” Journal of Economic History 73/3 (2013), 792–809.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinberg, P. E., The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Tadman, M., Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Wesley, C. H., “Manifests of Slave Shipments Along the Waterways, 1808–1864,” Journal of Negro History 27/2 (1942), 155–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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