This Negro Thoroughfare

This chapter examines the everyday spatial practices of enslaved Carolinians, particularly focusing on the Lowcountry. It closely illuminates the varied landscapes, communities, and politics that such daily practices produced and maintained, demonstrating that black South Carolinians took advantage of their requisite movement and the demands of the plantation enterprise to stake their own claims to South Carolina’s territory.

Their Intentions Were to Ambuscade and Surround Me

This chapter argues that as a consequence of the transformation of the plantation enterprise in the revolutionary and early national eras, South Carolinians depended on enslaved mobility for the maintenance of their economic lives. This movement brought the developmental aspirations of South Carolina’s state leaders to life, but also presented challenges to governing officials. Subsequently, as the chapter explains, slave patrols and slave passes were shaped to accommodate this essential movement, rather than prohibit it.

With the Labor of These Slaves

This chapter explores South Carolina’s developmental policy and reform agenda in the post-War of 1812 era, arguing that public works and the labor of state slaves were part of a broader project seeking to produce both the state as well as liberal subjectivity. As the chapter argues, while South Carolinians were influenced by broader governing trends throughout the Atlantic world, their experience was directly shaped by the everyday practices of the state’s enslaved majority, who they absolutely relied upon. Subsequently, leaders broadened their vision of the state to accommodate the violence required for its maintenance.

Conclusion

This very brief concluding chapter both summarizes the preceding chapters, and argues that South Carolina’s reliance on the enslaved for their political development was prescient, as unfree labor remains essential to modern statecraft.

The Strength of This Country

This chapter examines the several ways that black Carolinians helped transform South Carolina into a modern independent state during the American Revolution and in the years immediately following its conclusion. Beyond looking closely at slaves’ wartime labor, the chapter further examines the important discursive role that enslaved men and women played in the early production of the state. It also interrogates the role of black Carolinians’ rebellious activities, and how such acts directly shaped early statecraft and challenged the state’s claims to authority.

The “Within Enemy”

This chapter illuminates the various ways that black Carolinians stood at the center of South Carolina’s colonial state-building process. It does by first considering the developmental policies and practices of the provincial government. The chapter argues that slaves were essential to this governing praxis, both as infrastructural laborers, but also as the objects around which governing discourse was structured.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument, explaining the emphasis on state space, developmental politics, and slavery. It examines the broader historiography of political development in early America, and the South in particular. And it explains the importance of focusing on the everyday practices of the enslaved to better understand the production of the modern state.