Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

In 1831, however, Jackson’s attorney general, John M. Berrien of Georgia, basically reversed Wirt on the question of South Carolina’s still-controversial Negro Seamen Act. Responding to continuing pressure from Great Britain, Berrien insisted, as Benjamin Hunt had earlier, that there was “perfect harmony” between the South Carolina law and the US Constitution. The Negro Seamen Law was a matter of “internal police” only and did not interfere with Congress’s power over international or interstate commerce. Drawing on language in the US Constitution, Berrien claimed that federal laws, including those regulating commerce, could override state laws only if the federal laws were “both necessary and proper to the preservation of the commerce of the Union.” Free movement of Black sailors in southern ports was by no means necessary to the nation’s commerce, he argued, and therefore laws that excluded or regulated them were “a justifiable exercise of the reserved powers” of the states.