In August 1823, the British vessel Homer arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, after sailing from Liverpool, England. Several days after the ship docked, Charleston sheriff Francis G. Deliesseline boarded, placed crew member Henry Elkison (a Jamaican-born British subject) in chains, and led him off the ship to be jailed. The offense for which Elkison was arrested was nothing more than being a black man who arrived at the port of Charleston as part of a ship’s crew. In accordance with the Negro Seaman Act, passed by South Carolina’s legislature in December 1822, Elkison was to be incarcerated until the Homer was ready to leave port. At that point, the ship’s captain could end his captivity and bring him back on board by paying the costs of his detention. If the captain failed to do so, however, Elkison would be sold into slavery and Deliesseline would be entitled to a portion of the proceeds.
The case that resulted from the arrest, Elkison v. Deliesseline, presented a federal court with the question of whether a state could summarily incarcerate and enslave a free subject of a foreign government. Despite the importance of the case to the man whose liberty was at stake, considerations of human rights took a back seat to other issues. The clash between the federal government and the state of South Carolina sparked debates about federalism presaging those leading up to the Civil War. Foreign relations were additionally at stake, as the incident threatened the nation’s relationship with Great Britain, a peace less than a decade old. Elkison further involved the federal judiciary’s first interpretation of the federal government’s power to regulate foreign and interstate commerce in relation to the states.
At the center of Elkison was the controversial Negro Seaman Act. In addition to its inhumanity, the Act had the strong potential to damage Charleston’s standing as one of the busiest and wealthiest port cities in the United States. Ship owners from the North and abroad might be reluctant to send their vessels to Charleston if those ships had any “free negros or persons of color” (as the statute put it) among their crew. Nevertheless, the state legislature was motivated to pass the Act by an event of the previous year: a slave revolt that never happened. Denmark Vesey, who was formerly enslaved but had purchased his freedom, allegedly hatched the plot early in 1822, convincing several local enslaved people to kill their enslavers and take over the city of Charleston. One reported the planned uprising, foiling the plot and resulting in the arrests of Vesey and his alleged co-conspirators.