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Slavery and the Conceptual History

of the Early U.S. State


R YA N A . Q U I N TA N A

In an 1822 treatise on internal improvement in South Caro-


lina’s Lowcountry, renowned architect Robert Mills, then a superinten-
dent for South Carolina’s Board of Public Works, argued “the period
has now arrived when it is our best policy and true interests to begin a
work with the labor of these slaves (for they only can effect it with any
probability of success) which, when accomplished, shall make it no
longer necessary to retain them.” Mills was advocating an improvement
project that called for the state—already committed at that point to one
of the nation’s largest per-capita expenditures on infrastructural
development—to transform the coastal plain from the deadly but lucra-
tive site of plantation agriculture into a space for the exclusive “residence
of a white population.” As Mills made clear, the state’s improvement
agenda was focused on creating exclusive spaces of freedom, stability,
and wealth for its white inhabitants; and yet, the only possible means by
which he could imagine a space freed from slavery was through the un-
free labor of black Carolinians. Mills’ proposal was swiftly rejected;
removing slaves from the coastal plain simply was not feasible to most
South Carolinians, particularly those whose wealth and power was born
out of the maintenance of the brutal institution of slavery.1

Ryan A. Quintana is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College. His


book Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina will
come out this year from the University of North Carolina Press.
1. Robert Mills, Internal Improvement of South-Carolina, Particularly Adapted
to the Low Country (Columbia, SC, 1822), 14. Ryan A. Quintana, “Planners,
Planters, and Slaves: Producing the State in Early National South Carolina,” Jour-
nal of Southern History 81 (Feb. 2015), 79–116.

Journal of the Early Republic, 38 (Spring 2018)


Copyright 䉷 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.

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78 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2018)

And yet his plan for internal improvement, despite its rejection, was
revelatory. Mills could not envision the improvement of South Carolina’s
state space by any means other than the labor of slaves. This was not
merely a matter of convenience. Instead, Mills’ ideas were born out of a
long history of slaves laboring for the state. For more than a century
before Mills wrote his thesis, black Carolinians had worked for South
Carolina’s government: building South Carolina’s roads, canals, bridges,
causeways, fortifications, and public buildings. Slaves’ state labor,
importantly, was not limited to their physical work. Black Carolinians
produced the state and shaped South Carolina’s territory through their
everyday labors; their daily movements, both in service of their owners
and for their own purposes; and, as the objects around and upon which
South Carolinians crafted their governing discourse.2
Revealing the varied roles that enslaved black Carolinians, and slaves
more generally, played in the production of the state not only illuminates
their significance to South Carolina and the American South but also
uncovers the easy compatibility between un-free labor and modern gov-
ernance. Though often perceived as the historical foes of the national
state in large measure because of their dedication to the institution of
slavery, South Carolinians, and southerners more broadly, fully commit-
ted themselves and their enslaved property to the project of modern
political development. South Carolinians were among the first in North
America to embrace the techniques of modern statecraft: from carto-
graphic surveys and the appointment of a civil engineer, to the reform of
their legal system and the establishment of asylums for the incapacitated.
South Carolina was the first state to construct a long-distance summit

2. Ibid. For more on the role of slaves and the creation of the state in the
antebellum era, see Aaron Hall (PhD candidate, University of California–
Berkeley), “Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in
the Antebellum South,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. For slaves
laboring for the Confederate state, see Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning:
Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 11–37, and
218–309. For a more global perspective, see Richard Graham, “Slavery and Eco-
nomic Development: Brazil and the United States South in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (Oct. 1981), 620–55; and
John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings, eds., Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree
Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500–1914
(Leiden, Netherlands, 2016).

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Quintana, SLAVERY AND HISTORY OF THE EARLY U.S. STATE • 79
canal, and in 1827 chartered a railroad corporation to construct what
was at the time the longest route in North America. They accomplished
these things not in spite of slavery, but rather because of it.3
To begin to consider the role that slaves played in the production of
the early state requires that we not only turn our sights to the South,
but more importantly that we reframe our understanding, analysis, and
conceptualization of modern governance in North America. We must
return our attention to local and state-level political development, in
order to focus on the mundane practices and often-invisible practitioners
of governance: the local road administrators, isolated contractors, legisla-
tive committees, and most importantly the often un-free laborers who
labored at every level of government, but especially at the local level,
throughout the early national era. It is there where we are able to see
most clearly the various ways that all members of society, including
enslaved laborers, participated in early political development.4
We must also reconsider our understanding of the state as government
and politics. Doing so requires that we broaden our examination of insti-
tutions, policies, and governing techniques, to focus on the everyday
social practices that reinforced, reshaped, and gave meaning to the state.

3. Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave


Society (Baltimore, 2009); Barbara Bellows, “ ‘Insanity Is the Disease of Civiliza-
tion’: The Founding of the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum,” South Carolina His-
torical Magazine 82 (July 1981), 263–72; McCurry, Confederate Reckoning;
Milton Sydney Heath, Constructive Liberalism: The Role of the State in Economic
Development in Georgia to 1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1954). For an alternative per-
spective, see Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and
the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2009).
4. William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American
Historical Review 113 (June 2008), 752–72, esp. 765–67; and Thomas J. Sugrue,
“All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century
America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political
History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ,
2003), 301–26. This emphasis on the state and local activity is not meant to deny
the extent to which the institution of slavery directly shaped national governance
from the Revolution through the Civil War and beyond. See for example Robin
Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2008); Adam Rothman,
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2007).

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80 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2018)

One way to accomplish this is through a closer examination of the histor-


ical production of state space, or territory. More than the sum of its built
environment, institutions, and administrative capacity, a state’s territory
is rather the effect of the social relations and practices that occur within
it. In other words, the order that seems to cohere to the state is born not
simply out of the will imposed on it by a powerful governing entity but
rather from the accumulation of commonplace activities that occur in
space, from travel on roads and highways to local and international bor-
der crossings. Historical analysis of such acts reveals how mundane
social practices brought the state into being, gave it meaning, and recon-
figured governing praxis.5
This focus on the local production of state space reveals the varied
ways that the enslaved participated in early national political develop-
ment. In South Carolina, for example, slaves produced early state space
in four distinct ways: through their physical labor; as the objects upon
and around which governing discourse evolved; as a consequence of
their daily movements delivering goods, supplies, and labor, which gave
meaning to the state’s planned infrastructure; and, finally through the
varied social and cultural meanings that slaves imposed on the landscape,
which challenged the notion that the state’s built environment could have
limited access or significance. Slaves’ labor was central to all of this. In
South Carolina, enslaved men and women built the colony and then

5. For an introduction into state space, see Neil Brenner et al., “State Space in
Question,” in Neil Brenner, et. al., State/Space: A Reader (Malden, MA, 2003),
Weber quote, 1–2; Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State,” in State, Space, World:
Selected Essays, ed. Stuart Elden et al. (Minneapolis, 2009), 223–53, 224–25;
Stuart Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory,” in Progress in Human Geography 34,
no. 6 (2010), 799–817; John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical
Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” in Review of International Polit-
ical Economy 1 (Apr. 1994), 53–80. For recent examples: Jo Guldi, Roads to
Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Juliana
Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the
Early Southwest,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (Jan. 2011), 5–46; Rachel St.
John, A Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US–Mexico Border (Princeton,
NJ, 2011). Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist
Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (Mar.
1991), 77–96; Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/
Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz, (Ithaca,
NY, 1999), 76–97; and Joyce, The State of Freedom, 1–27.

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Quintana, SLAVERY AND HISTORY OF THE EARLY U.S. STATE • 81
state’s earliest roads and bridges. They waded deep into murky swamps
and marshes to carve out cuts and canals. They constructed fortifications
during times of war, and cooked, cleaned, and carried supplies for the
state’s army and navy. Slaves erected jails and courthouses as the popula-
tion grew and migrated. And they met regularly to maintain the infra-
structure that they painstakingly built over generations. At almost every
moment, and at nearly every site that marked the state’s development and
expansion, black Carolinians could be found, on the ground, working.6
But slaves’ role was not limited to their labors. Black Carolinians were
also the objects of material and informational exchanges between white
freeholders and provincial and later state administrators. In the immedi-
ate aftermath of the Revolution, as South Carolina implemented its policy
of punitive confiscation of Loyalist property, black Carolinians found
themselves distributed to the state’s recruiting service, deployed to aid
General Nathaniel Greene’s army in securing the peace, and sold to fund
the everyday maintenance of the state. To facilitate such exchanges,
administrative bodies and hierarchies had to be created, and relation-
ships established between South Carolina’s government, individual
slaveholders, soldiers, and private merchants. For instance, near George-
town, the state relied upon Robert Heriot and Daniel Tucker, local mer-
chants, to facilitate its sale of confiscated slaves. With the assistance of
soldiers provided by Governor John Mathews, Heriot and Tucker trav-
eled south from Georgetown, on a road built and maintained by slaves,
to the Smith plantation on the Santee River. There they confiscated an
unspecified number of enslaved black Carolinians and marched them
back to Georgetown, where they were held until sold by the two mer-
chants. Such transactions occurred numerous times in the months and
years following the war’s end. In official ledgers, government officials
reported the number of black Carolinians the state acquired, their names,
their previous masters, and their new owners. These social practices—
the organization of government workers, the movement of enslaved peo-
ple, and the (sometimes) meticulous record-keeping that took note of
each of these actions—repeated again and again, brought the early state
into being. Some of these men and women went to the army; others were

6. Quintana, “Planners, Planters, and Slaves,” 102–16. For more detail on the
specifics of slave state labor, see Quintana, Making a Slave State: Political Devel-
opment in Early South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018).

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82 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2018)

sold to balance the state’s accounts or pay soldiers. Regardless of their


fate, slaves’ movement, alongside the flow of information to and from the
Committee of Forfeited Estates, sat at the center of South Carolina’s
earliest governing practices.7
Moreover, through the discourse concerning enslaved state labor,
individual white Carolinians solidified their relationship to their govern-
ment, while simultaneously crafting ideas of citizenship, duty, and the
public good. In discussing the labor of his slaves for local road commis-
sioners, for which he sought a reprieve, Henry Laurens, for example,
noted that he would send his overseer “with my male slaves” for annual,
mandatory infrastructural labor. Doing so, Laurens wrote, was part of
his duty “as a citizen & member of my community.” Laurens considered
his slaves’ labor on state roads not as a benefit for himself alone but
rather as an activity specifically oriented toward the production and
maintenance of what he termed the “public good,” against which, he
argued, “private Interest must not be set in competition.” In such
exchanges, slaves were transformed from the private, protected property
of individuals into the material strength of the state. The knowledge
created out of these interactions not only solidified the relationship
between citizen and government, but also made the state, as Chandra
Mukerji argues, an epistemological possibility. Such knowledge permit-
ted white Carolinians and South Carolina’s newly created government to
envision and make real their material development. For instance, as state
leaders considered a revision of their road laws in 1807, local commis-
sioners reported on the existing roads under their jurisdiction, the regu-
lar traffic that passed through their districts, and the number of laborers
at their disposal. In St. Luke’s Parish, commissioners argued that the
existing system of road maintenance was sufficient for the developmental
demands of the state, noting that “the length of the roads being ninety
three miles & the number of male slaves liable to work said road being

7. “Gov. Matthews to Col. P. Horry, May 27, 1782,” in Documentary History


of the American Revolution: Consisting of Letters and Papers Relating to the Contest
for Liberty, Chiefly in South Carolina, From Originals in the Possession of the
Editor, and Other Sources, Vol. 1, ed. R. W. Gibbes (New York, 1857), 182.
Records from the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates include details of numerous
acquisitions and sales of confiscated slaves. See Sale of Land & Negroes, Negroes
for Public Service (Box 2-1), Commissioners of Forfeited Estates, South Carolina
Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH), Columbia.

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Quintana, SLAVERY AND HISTORY OF THE EARLY U.S. STATE • 83
one thousand five hundred & fifty two.” Such mundane reports reflected
the evolution of political development in South Carolina, and reified the
idea that the enslaved would bear the heavy burden of nineteenth-
century internal improvement.8
Beyond their role as laborers, black Carolinians also brought the state
to life through their everyday movement. Peripatetic slaves—a necessity
brought on by the transformation of the plantation enterprise in the dec-
ades that surrounded the Revolution—were the circulating lifeblood of
South Carolina and the broader South’s infrastructure. In South Caro-
lina, slaves were often the primary, if not at times the sole occupants of
the state’s roads, canals, and bridges. They animated South Carolina’s
infrastructure when they transported information to their owners, com-
modities to market, and supplies to scattered plantations; moved to new
labor camps; or were forcibly marched to market. In each instance, slaves
conveyed meaning to the developmental aspirations of South Carolina’s
leaders, and made real the modern state’s promise of free economic
exchange.9
However, the motivation for blacks’ movement was not limited to the
whims and desires of their masters, and the enslaved were not simply the
passive objects of state development. As they traveled, black Carolinians
also transformed the state’s infrastructure to meet their own social, eco-
nomic, and cultural needs. They used roads, canals, bridges, and cause-
ways to create marketplaces, maintain spiritual and cultural practices,
and to preserve social ties. They used the state’s built environment to

8. Henry Laurens to James Cordes, Jr., Aug. 31, 1765, in The Papers of Henry
Laurens, Vol. 4: Sept. 1, 1763–Aug. 31, 1765, ed. George C. Rogers, Jr. et al.
(Columbia, SC, 1974), 670–71. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Tech-
nology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 36–59.
Commissioners of Roads Saint Peters Parish, Report of the Miles of Road to Be
Maintained and Number of Persons Liable for Road Duty, 11/27/1807, Item
No. 17, Misc. Reports to the General Assembly, Series S165029, Legislative
Papers, SCDAH.
9. Quintana, “Planners, Planters, and Slaves,” 102–16; and Quintana, Making
a Slave State. Also see S. Max Edelson, “Affiliation Without Affinity: Skilled
Slaves in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina,” in Money, Trade, and Power: The
Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society, ed. Jack P. Greene et
al. (Columbia, SC, 2001), 217–55; Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Cul-
ture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC,
1998), 146–223.

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84 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2018)

run away from their masters, to plan insurrections, and to create their
own independent communities. These activities, like their labor, directly
shaped South Carolina’s state space.10
It became clear, for instance, by the early nineteenth century, that an
unintended consequence of infrastructural growth and economic expan-
sion was the rise of an illicit trade amongst black Carolinians. Accessible
river landings, for example, were extremely important to coastal white
Carolinians whose property did not abut waterways. Their economic
lives—their ability to acquire supplies and ship their commodity produce
to market—hinged on the convenience and dependability of river land-
ings. But wealthy landowners often refused to provide river access to
their white neighbors as they grew more concerned with black Carolini-
ans’ activities, interactions, and movement. In an early nineteenth-
century petition, Nathaniel Heyward, John Gibbes, Ann Gibbes, and
Daniel Blake pleaded with the Assembly to refuse a request for a new
riverside landing near their properties. They argued that “the establish-
ment of a public landing” at or near their plantations “would be attended
with very great inconvenience.” Specifically, they believed that “public
landings” would be “productive of much evil” as they would provide
“free access to their plantations to the bold and the vagrant who resort
to places of that sort.” They noted that there were “many pedling boats
which frequent the river, who want only a public landing as a station to
enable them to remain in the vicinity of the large and productive rice
plantations.” The planters believed that itinerant traders sought such a
landing “for the purpose of trading with the negroe slaves to the very
great loss of the owners and corruption of such slaves.” As these wealthy
planters made clear, black Carolinians used the state’s economic infra-
structure for their own purposes. Subsequently, white Carolinians were
forced to re-conceive their developmental agenda, denying river access
to white Carolinians to manage the everyday practices of the enslaved.
And yet, even as state leaders and individual white Carolinians ordered

10. For more on just some of the ways slaves used space, see Thomas
Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western
Steamboat World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic
Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (New York, 2014); David Cecelski,
The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2001); and Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and
Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

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Quintana, SLAVERY AND HISTORY OF THE EARLY U.S. STATE • 85
and imagined public highways and cleared rivers as exclusively white
spaces, they continued to task their slaves with the construction of their
roads and canals, as well as the transportation of goods and supplies
between Charleston and the ever-expanding plantation complex. As a
consequence, the enslaved were provided with countless opportunities
to challenge the presumed exclusivity of South Carolina’s state space.11
Black Carolinians’ everyday activities—from the mundane to the
rebellious—not only motivated and produced South Carolina’s territory
and particular governing practices but also shaped, challenged, and gave
meaning to emergent ideas of sovereignty, authority, and surveillance.
When a group of approximately one hundred enslaved men, women,
and children created a maroon community on the Savannah River in the
immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, they directly challenged
the sovereign claims of both Georgia and South Carolina. Moreover,
they did so at the precise moment that officials from both governments
were meeting to discuss the very river boundary that the maroons occu-
pied. Ironically, the runaways were able to establish their freedom on the
Savannah River, at least for a time, by using the very skills and practices
they had learned while laboring for the British, Georgia, and South Car-
olina armies during the Revolution, building intricate fortifications on
their island hideaways. To defeat the maroons, state leadership from both
Georgia and South Carolina negotiated jurisdictional responsibility,
called out their militias, and violently proclaimed their sovereignty on
either side of the Savannah River. In this way, the maroons’ actions gave
shape and meaning to the early state, arousing government leaders to
articulate in statute, treaty, and practice the shape of their sovereign
claims. As one observer noted, to do otherwise, “to have despised or
neglected them, or permitted their robberies, might have led them on to
equally ambitious and extensive views with those [maroons] of Jamaica
and Surinam, where the best stationary regiments could not subdue
them,” and where consequently, “they are now an actual independent
colony.” Expressing a sentiment shared by many across the new nation,

11. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, 215;
Petition of the Inhabitants of Colleton District Asking for the Building of Public
Landings, Nov. 11, 1805, Item No. 135, Series S165015, Legislative Papers,
SCDAH; Petition of Nathaniel Heyward and Others Requesting That a Public
Landing May Not Be Established on Their Plantations, Dec. 4, 1806, Item
No. 92, Series S165015, Legislative Papers, SCDAH.

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86 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2018)

and Robert Mills a generation later, the author exclaimed, “It is, perhaps,
the wish of interest, as well as philosophy, that they [slaves] were all in
Africa.” His anti-slave sentiment hinted at the predicament white Caro-
linians fostered in their effort to secure and materially produce their state:
The very slaves whom they despised and feared were also the very peo-
ple upon whom they relied to make their state real. Without them, with-
out their labor, it could not exist.12
Black Carolinians, then, did much more than simply provide labor for
early infrastructural development. Through their laboring movement and
day-to-day practices, they imbued the state’s territory with significance,
and, more importantly, directly and indirectly challenged South Caro-
lina’s narrow vision of the modern state. White Carolinians imagined
into being an expansive, if isolated, state that provided economic oppor-
tunity, security, and individual freedoms exclusively for themselves. That
vision, however, depended on enslaved men and women who consis-
tently undermined and challenged the presumed limits and boundaries
of that state. Consequently, white Carolinians integrated surveillance,
overt violence, and brutal racial policing into their vision and practice of
governance. But even as black Carolinians constructed and maintained
the state’s infrastructure and reshaped its governing policies, they also
enacted their own practices within South Carolina’s territory. They used
roads, canals, and rivers to create social and economic ties, maintain
cultural practices, and to survive and even resist slavery, and in so doing,
imposed their own meaning onto South Carolina’s state space.13

12. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton
Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 209–43; Camp, Closer to Freedom. For more
on South Carolina and Georgia’s boundary dispute and resolution, see Louis De
Vorsey, Jr., The Georgia South Carolina Border Dispute: A Problem in Historical
Geography (Athens, GA, 1982), 21–50. “Charleston, South Carolina,” Columbian
Herald (SC), May 28, 1787. For more on the Savannah River Maroons see,
Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York,
2014), 187–207.
13. For more on the political possibilities of everyday enslaved practices, see
Camp, Closer to Freedom; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge,
MA, 2003), 13–61; and Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the
Study of Slavery,” in American Historical Review 114 (Dec. 2009), 1231–49.

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