It may have been relatively easy for the US government to ignore unhappy northern shipmasters, but legal action by British officials prompted a federal judge, South Carolinian William Johnson, to condemn the South Carolina law in 1823. The British case involved a Black sailor named Henry Elkison, whose lawyer sought a writ of habeas corpus in Charleston’s federal court to bring his client out of state custody and test the law’s constitutionality. Elkison’s lawyers insisted that the law violated commercial treaties between the United States and Great Britain and interfered with Congress’s power
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