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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the Antebellum South,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.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).
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.