ABSTRACT
The exclusion of black seamen from Southern ports and their frequent arrests there not only threatened their livelihood, but jeopardized their very status as freemen. The denial of national citizenship not only withheld a panoply of rights and privileges, but it could, if the denial prevailed, undermine state citizenship and the civil rights of blacks founded upon it. The United States Constitution declared "That the citizens of each State shall be entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states." The view of the Boston memorialists sustained by the majority of the House Commerce Committee was, that both the "Privileges and Immunities" and the Commerce clause in the Constitution made the law of 1822 unconstitutional. Fundamentally, the best Northern rebuttal to Southern denials of black citizenship was to dramatize, if it dared, its own acknowledgement of the citizenship rights of its black population.
