Civilizing the Colonial Subject: TheCo-Evolution of State and Slavery inSouth Carolina, 16701739DARAGHGRANTSociety of Fellows, University of ChicagoI N T R O D U C T I O NInspiteoftheaspirationsofAnthonyAshley-CooperandJohnLocke, whoframed the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, the colonysettledat Charles Townin1670was anythingbut awell-orderedpolity.1Duringthefirst threedecadesof settlement, theLordsProprietors chargedthe colonists with disorganization, idleness, piracy, and the illegal enslavementof indigenous peoples.2In 1708, Rev. Gideon Johnston, the commissary of theSociety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the colony, com-plained that the English in Charles Town were the Vilest race of Men upon theEarth and the most factious and Seditious people in the whole World.3Thecolony seemed to fare no better after the colonists revolted against proprietaryrule in favor of royal government in 1719. By 1724, the first royal governor ofthe province, Francis Nicholson, described a colony at risk of collapsing into aAcknowledgments: For helpful comments I thank David Akin, Gordon Arlen, Rohit Goel, RehaKadakal, DianaKim, AinsleyLeSure, J. J. McFadden, GuyMount, TiannaPaschel, MoishePostone, BarnabyRaine, JonRogowski, JulieSaville, AndrewShryock, MatthiasStaisch, andChrisTomlins,andworkshopparticipantsattheUniversityofChicago andtheNewSchool forSocial Research. I am especially indebted to Michael Dawson, SarahJohnson, Patchen Markell,Jonathan Obert, Jennifer Pitts, Aziz Rana, William Sewell, and Lisa Wedeen, as well as CSSHsanonymous reviewers, for their detailed and incisive feedback.1On the authorship of the constitutions, see David Armitage, John Locke, Carolina, and theTwo Treatises of Government, Political Theory 32 (2004): 60227, 6079.2LangdonCheves,ed., TheShaftesburyPapers(Charleston:Tempus,2000), 311, 315, 367,441; Noel Sainsbury, ed., Records inthe Public RecordOffice RelatingtoSouthCarolina,16631782,36vols.(Columbia:SouthCarolinaDepartmentofArchivesandHistory,1971),1:28485; 2: 5960, 12124 (hereafter PROSC); Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, eds., TheStatutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia: A. S. Johnston, 18361841), 2: v (here-after SSC); A. S. Salley, Jr., ed., Journal of the Grand Council of South Carolina, 2 vols. (Columbia:Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1907), 1: 1112.3FrankKlingberg, ed., CarolinaChronicle: ThePapers of CommissaryGideonJohnston,17071716 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 22.Comparative Studies in Society and History 2015;57(3):606636.0010-4175/15 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015doi:10.1017/S0010417515000225606PrimativeStateofNature.4Thispredictionwasalmost borneout whenadispute over paper money caused the collapse of regular governance in17281729.5Despitethisupheaval, theSouthCarolinacolonistsestablishedarobust plantationsystemthatboastedthehighest slave-to-freemanratioinmainland North America after 1708. Before 1720, to be sure, many Carolinaplantations were relatively small frontier operations, where masters workedandlivedincloseproximitytotheirslavesproducinglivestock,lumber,andcrops. However, larger plantations became increasingly common, and by1720 half of the colonys enslaved population lived on plantations with morethantwentyslaves.6SouthCarolinasplantation-colonialcomplexwouldgoontofuelthemostprosperousofthethirteencoloniesby1775.7Thispaperasks howthe disorderly colonists of South Carolina, lacking in materialstrength, outnumbered by slaves, and surrounded by Indians, managed to estab-lish such a prosperous colonial state.Traditionally, scholars of slavery have highlighted the role played by racein reinforcing colonial governance. One historiographical tradition has argued thatthe institution of racial slavery provided both a solution to the problem of laborshortages and an avenue for co-opting poor whites to the political program of co-lonial elites.8Colonial states, in this view, established and maintained order by de-ploying racializing ideologies to separate dangerous free whites from dangerousslave blacks, as Edmund Morgan put it in his study of early Virginia.9However,as scholars have long noted, it is still necessary to account for why the danger-ous freemen were overwhelming European while the dangerous slaves wereexclusively African and Native American.10Certainly this pattern was4PROSC, 11: 110.5Ibid., 14: 220; M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 16631763(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 158.6Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake& Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 57, 1617, 3942; PeterH. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebel-lion (New York: Norton, 1974), 5455, 95103.7Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina LowCountry, 17401790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 3236. By linking plantation slaveryand settler colonialism, my plantation-colonial complex differs from Philip Curtins plantationcomplex;seeCurtin,TheRiseandFallofthePlantationComplex:EssaysinAtlanticHistory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1116.8Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia(London: Norton, 1975), 295337; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From theBaroque to the Modern, 14921800 (London: Verso, 1997), 12, 32324; T. H. Breen, Puritans andAdventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980),12747; DavidBrionDavis, SlaveryandHumanProgress(Oxford: OxfordUniversityPress,1984), 7677; Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia,16601740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 5579, 10534.9Morgan, American Slavery, 328.10WinthropJordan, White over Black: AmericanAttitudes towardthe Negro, 15501812(NewYork:Norton, 1968), 63;DavidEltis,TheRiseofAfrican Slavery intheAmericas (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 607significantly shaped by the existence of an infrastructure of slave trading in Africathat offered Europeans a source of relatively cheap labor, which colonists wereable to augment by inaugurating a slave trade with indigenous Americans.11Asecond tradition has located the racial character of the slave trade in preexistingEuropeanconceptions of Africans as raciallyinferior.12ThoughI findmoresupport for the view that racial slavery had its roots in the American colonial ex-perience, neither ofthesehistoriographical traditionsadequatelyexplainswhyonly Africans and Native Americans were enslaved in early America.Here I will bridge these two historiographical traditions as I situate the rise ofracial slavery, and the ideology of white supremacy that underpinned it, within thewider ideological logic of settler-colonialism. South Carolinas colonial state didnot develop through the accumulation of material power in a centralized govern-ing apparatus. Instead, it emerged as authoritative by rooting the twined processesof plantation slavery and colonization in a juridical distinction between savageryand civility.13The plantation-colonial complex that the state sought to secure func-tioned through the interactions of three archetypal figures: the savage, who wasuntamed by any law; the slave, whose savagery could only be governedthrough harsh repressive techniques; and the colonial freeman, who, as the jurid-ical subject of a civilized polity, was supposedly ordered and endowed with rightsby the law.14Chattel slaves and juridical subjects were denizens of a rising com-mercial society that they brought into being through their relations of productionand exploitation.15While the juridical subject was endowed with the civic rightsafforded by the law, and the savage allegedly existed in a wilderness beyond thelaw, the slave was at once bound by the law and deprived of those same civicrights by it, inhabiting a state of civic death.1611Ibid., 4954, 11463; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,14001800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 72125; Christina Snyder, Slavery inIndian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2010), 4679; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1994), 1820.12Jordan, White over Black, 343; Carl N. Degler, Slavery and the Genesis of American RacePrejudice, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (1959): 4966; Alden T. Vaughan andVirginia Mason Vaughan, Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (1997): 1944.13For theclassicstudyofdiscoursesofsavageryandcivilityinAmerica, seeRoyHarveyPearce, SavagismandCivilization: AStudyof theIndianandtheAmericanMind(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), esp. 349. I diverge from scholars who treat the language of savag-ery and civility as necessarily racialized.14I borrowMichel Foucaults definition of the juridical subject as the possessor, among otherrights, of the right to exist. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans.(New York: Vintage, 1977), 13.15Blackburn, New World Slavery, 1012, 16, 311; Eltis, African Slavery, 8084; Onur Ulas Ince,Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention,Rural Sociology 79 (2014): 10431, 11024.16Inrestrictingitself totheslavesstatusbeforethelaw, thetermcivicdeathavoidstheproblem of Orlando Pattersons influential notion of social death, which risks obscuring the au-tonomous social lives slaves fashioned within the plantation system. Slavery and Social Death: A608 D A R A G H G R A N TThe savage/civilized distinction was crucial to the establishment of a func-tioning state apparatus in the colony.17Lying beyond the reach of the repressiveapparatus of the metropolitan state and intertwined with the emergence of thenovel economic apparatus of plantation slavery, the colonial state emerged asan independent and specifically colonial locus of authority.18In South Caroli-na, this state was centered on the Commons House of Assembly, which gaineda monopoly on legislating for the colony in 1693 and increasingly deployed anideology of white supremacy that drew, in part, on parallel ideological devel-opmentsacrosstheAtlanticworld.19Yet it istellingthat whenchoosingtojustify the racializing order that it was producing in the colony, theCommonsHousemadeexplicit referencetothestrugglebetweensavageryand civility.20The authority claimed by the colonial state, then, was the authority of acivilized,law-boundpolitysupposedlyconstitutedamidstaseaoflawlesssavagery. But, in contrast to European states that were formed in this sameperiod through the centralization of material power in state institutions, the co-lonial state in South Carolina had little or no material capacity with which toenforce its authoritative claims.21The colony depended on Indian allies,slaves, and free militiamen to defend itself during Queen Annes War (17021713)andtheYamaseeWar(17151717), andsocialdisorderremainedrifein the colony until around 1730. Although in this early period the colony didestablisha watch, a colonial militia, andafter 1704a slave patrol, theseforces depended on the willingness of freemen to serve, which wassubject toshirking, andtheywere organizedona local level rather thanComparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 3851; Vincent Brown, SocialDeath and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, American Historical Review 114 (2009): 123149. For accounts of the cultural lives of slaves in colonial America, see Morgan, Slave Counter-point; Olwell, Masters; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 152271; Wood, Black Majority.17I treat the state as an assemblage of repressive, economic, and ideological apparatuses. SeeLouis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses(London: Verso, 2014), 23272; Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000),2834.18Although the colonists acknowledged that they were subject to the sovereignty of the LordsProprietors, and later of the Crown, they frequently ignored their supposedly sovereign commands.Nevertheless, they continued to envision themselves as loyal British subjects, aping the fashions ofEnglish society, actively seeking royal government in 1719, and frequently invoking the kingssovereignty. PROSC, 7: 27199; Olwell, Masters, 16, 3842.19A. S. Salley Jr., ed., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, 21vols. (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 190746), 1693: 2122 (hereafter CH);Sirmans, Colonial SouthCarolina, 6768; JackP. Greene, TheQuest ForPower: TheLowerHouses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 16891776 (New York: Norton, 1963), 3539.20SSC, 7: 352.21Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974); Norbert Elias, TheCivilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Edmund Jephcott, trans., EricDunning, JohanGoudsblom, andStephenMennell, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); CharlesTilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 9901992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 609centrally.22Far from monopolizing legitimate force, as in Max Webers ca-nonical formulation, the colonial state rested precariously on its claim to an ex-clusive authority to decide on the question of legitimacy itself, a claim that wassecured only by co-opting the material force of colonizer and (putatively) col-onizedalike.23Byassertingaprerogativeoverlegislationwhilelackingthecentralized means to enforce its laws, the colonial state extended relations ofauthorityandobligationoverapopulationthat retainedforitselfthemeansof violence necessarytogive the states authoritativepronouncements theforce of law.By paying attention to the savage/civilized binary that underpinned bothsettlercolonialismandslavery, it ispossibletoisolateanintermediarystepbetweenthe establishment of plantationslaveryandits solidificationinaracial order. This step can account for why other marginalized and racializedpopulationsJews, South Asians, Turks, or the Irishwere not generally sub-jected to enslavement in English colonies. By the turn of the eighteenth century,Englishcolonists, slave-traders, andphilosophersacknowledged, at least intheory, that onlythosecapturedinajust warcouldlosetheir freedom.24However, as I will show, where a juridical subject whose rights were guaran-teedbyacivilizedbodyof lawdidnot faceenslavement if capturedinsuch a war, those savage peoples who supposedly lived beyond the protec-tionof lawscouldbefreelyenslaved. Thesavage/civilizeddivisionisthusindispensible for understandingwhyAfricans andNative Americans werethe only populations systematically enslaved in English North America.In what follows, I trace the process by which the colonial state establishedits authority in South Carolina and through which the plantation system estab-lished its mechanisms of control over an unfree labor system increasingly dom-inated by slaves of African ancestry. I begin by exploring how the colonial stateasserted its authority over the master-slave relationship, a relation that evolvedbetween the founding of the colony in 1670 and the emergence of a slave ma-jority before 1708. I then examine the response of the Commons House to thisslave majority. I highlight the conscious efforts of the legislature to order unfreelabor, and organize colonial life more broadly, through the conflation of legalstatuses (slave/free) with racializing phenotypic descriptions (black/white). Thepapers third section is motivated by instances where this conflation of22Salley, Grand Council, 1: 1012; SSC, 2: 913, 25455; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Lawand Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1424.23Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols., Guenther Rothand Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1: 54. Michael Braddickemploys a formulation similar to my own: State Formation in Early Modern England c. 15501700(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18.24John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, [1690] 1988), II 2324, 180; W. L. McDowell, Journal of the Commissioners of theIndian Trade: September 20, 1710August 29, 1718 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Depart-ment, 1955), 16.610 D A R A G H G R A N Tphenotype and legal status broke down, and seeks to explain these anomaliesbyanalyzingtheideological justificationthat theCommonsHouseofferedforslavery. Ishowthat eligibilityforenslavement wastightlyboundtotheideaofsavagery.IncontrasttoNegroesandIndians,thosewhoweredeemed civilized were ineligible for perpetual slavery, even if they were cap-tured in a just war and even if they were not recognized as white or Chris-tian. Finally, I turn to how authority was transformed into effective power andconsider the policing of slavery in South Carolina. I offer an account of how thestate enforced its authority over the entire colonial population through diffuseanddecentralizedmechanismsofpowerandhowthispolicingsystemrein-forced the emergent racial order in the colony.T H ER I S EO F T H EP L A N TAT I O N- C O L O N I A LC O M P L E XMotivated, inpart, byadesiretoattract settlers fromtheCaribbean, andperhaps by their own financial stakes in the African slave trade, the Lords Pro-prietors of Carolina always envisaged the use of slave labor in the colony.25Inthe Fundamental Constitutions, however, they emphasized the use of Englishleet-men workingona systemof lordlymanors, suggestingthat slaveswould merely supplement a largely English workforce.26This neo-feudalvisionwasultimatelyundonebytherefusal ofEnglishsettlerstopart withtherelativefreedomtheyhadbecomeaccustomedtounder theCommon-wealth,aswellasbytheproprietors successinattractingBarbadiansettlerswho were already accustomed to the use of enslaved labor.27Althoughthe constitutions themselves were a deadletter,28theydidoutline the initial legal status of the Negroe slave inthe colony. Mostlikely reflecting the influence of the family of Sir John Colleton, a Barbadianplanter and Lord Proprietor, the constitutions afforded the slave-owner an ab-solute power and Authority over his Negroe slaves, of what opinion or Religionsoever.29Locke, then secretary to the Proprietors, had edited this provision toaugment the initial right of absolute Authority with absolute power. Whilescholars have paid considerable attention to Lockes role in this addition, they25Inconsistent understandings of the terms slave and servant led the Proprietors to clarifythat headrights for each imported servant also applied to slaves. Shaftesbury Papers, 164; Christo-pher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America,15801865(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress, 2010), 43233; OscarHandlinandMaryF. Handlin, Originsof theSouthernLabor System,WilliamandMaryQuarterly, 3dser., 7(1950): 199222, 2038; Wood, Black Majority, 1416.26The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in Mark Goldie, ed., Political Essays (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17, 2225, 98, 101.27S. C. Hughson, The Feudal Laws of Carolina, Sewanee Review 2 (1894): 47183, 47273;M.EugeneSirmans,TheLegalStatus ofthe SlaveinSouthCarolina, 16701740,Journal ofSouthern History 28 (1962): 46273, 46364.28PROSC, 3: 8183.29Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 101; Sirmans Legal Status, 46364. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 611havedonelittletoexplorewhythisaugmentationwasnecessary.30Lockesother political writings offer one way of uncovering the additionsmeaning.31In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke based the con-dition of slavery on an intersection of the dual authorities of just war theory andnaturallaw.Theslavewastooccupyastatusofsuspendeddeath,whichisnothingelsebut theStateofWarcontinued, betweenalawful Conquerour,andaCaptive[inajust war],whilethemaster wasaffordedanabsolutepower over the Lives of those, who by putting themselves in a State of War,haveforfeitedthem.32Intheory, aslavewasajustlycapturedcombatantwhose death was held in abeyance so that he might serve the will of his captor.Given the divergences between Lockes theoryof slavery in the SecondTreatiseandthepracticesofenslavingIndiansandAfricansinCarolinaandthe Atlantic world, I am less interested in his theory than in what his use of lan-guagemighttellusaboutwhathemeantbypowerandauthorityintheFundamental Constitutions.33Richard Tuck has argued that the power/author-ity binary in English political thought was an innovation of the Civil War era.34According to Tuck, Locke replaced the power/authority binary of his contem-porarieswithadistinctionbetweenforce(might,orwhathiscontemporariescalled power) and power (the power of the law, or what his contemporariescalled authority).35But it is noteworthy that in place of the power/authoritybinary of his contemporaries Locke spoke of authority alongsidethe termspower and force. Although he used the terms authority and power in-consistently across his writings, the meaning of his addition to the FundamentalConstitutions canbegraspedinthosemoments whenheusedthesethreetermsforce, power, and authoritytogether.As Tuck notes, force referred to material capability, which is a functionof might, and power connoted a use of force that was authorized under thelaw.36Authority, then, denoted a further, curious capacity, sometimesgrounded in popular consent and sometimes in natural law, which transformedforce into power.37For Locke, authority was not a synonym for power asdistinct from force, but was instead a necessary condition for the exercise of30Armitage, John Locke, 609. James Farr argues that the addition is not in Lockes hand, butagrees that he was likely present and raised no objection to this change; Locke, Natural Law, andNew World Slavery, Political Theory 36 (2008): 495522, 499, 518 n26.31Armitage, John Locke, 609.32Locke, Two Treatises, II 24, 180.33Slavery was not heritable for Locke, and his theory prohibited the enslavement of noncom-batants; ibid., II 18283.34Richard Tuck, Power and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England, Historical Journal 17(1974): 4361, 4345.35Ibid., 5051, 5557.36Ibid., 57.37Locke, Two Treatises, II 155, 202. For ambiguity in Lockes use of these terms individually,see ibid., 87, 89, 12526, 152.612 D A R A G H G R A N Tpower, viz., forthelawfuluseofforce.38Claimstothiskindofauthorityweretoprovecrucial totheproject of colonial stateformation. However,ratherthanmerelyderivingfromtheapriori assertionsofcolonial charters,theseclaimstoauthorityalsodrewuponanddevelopedalongsidematerialandideological innovations that were affectingthe entire Atlantic World.TheytooktheirspecificforminSouthCarolinafromthecollectivematerialand ideological life of a self-constituting moral community of civilized set-tlers, a colonial moral community from which slaves were expresslydebarred.39In the final formulation of the masters power and authority under the Fun-damental Constitutions, then, the slave was placed under the total control of theCarolina slave-owner and deprived of any legal status in his or her own right. Ina strong statement of slaverys patriarchal foundations, the masters relationshipto the slave, whether brutal or tender, was a matter of private rather than publiclawa question of private propertywithin which the master could authorizehis own use of force against the slave.40As paterfamilias, Locke argued in theSecond Treatise, the master could exercise a limited right to punish his wife,servants, andchildren, thoughover his slaves he possessedaDespoticalPoweranAbsolute, ArbitraryPoweroneManhasoveranother, totakeawayhisLife, whenever hepleases.41InSouthCarolina, at least initially,theslavesufferedasimilar fate, existinginthecivil dominionhismasterhasover him.42Unlesstheactionsof theslavebreachedthepeaceof thewider society, thelegal power of themagistratedidnot touchtherelationbetween master and slave.38Ibid., II 202. Althoughdifferingoverwhat wouldrenderauseofforceauthoritative,Lockes model of force-power-authority is similar to Webers distinction among power(Macht), domination or authority (Herrschaft), which he took to be a special case ofpower, and legitimacy. Economy and Society, 1: 53, 21216, 2: 94142, 946. Lockes notionofpowerisalso akin toFoucaultssovereign power,notleast inrelations ofslavery, wherefor Foucault the appropriation of bodies was too violent to be a form of disciplinary power. Disci-pline & Punish, 137.39On the roots of ideology in material life, see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The GermanIdeology(NewYork:International Publishers, 1947), esp. 143. Iborrowmyunderstandingofmoral community fromEmile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, KarenE. Fields, trans. (NewYork: FreePress, 1995), 20911. Colonistswerenot theonlypeopletoform authoritative moral communities in colonial America. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown,slaves also fashioned autonomous and morally authoritative communities exemplified by mecha-nisms of self-policing on plantations. Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves Experience of CriminalJustice in Colonial Suriname, Law and History Review 29 (2011): 92584.40On the patriarchal (and later paternalistic) character of colonial American slavery, seeKathleenM. Brown, GoodWives, NastyWenches, &Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, RaceandPowerinColonial Virginia(Chapel Hill: Universityof NorthCarolinaPress, 1996), 31966;Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 261300.41Locke, Two Treatises, II 71, 86, 172 (quoted), 174. Patriarchy, as Kathleen Brown notes,remained a highly contested form of authority in early America. Good Wives, 45, passim.42Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 98. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 613The Fundamental Constitutions offer crucial insight into how the project ofsettling Carolina was imagined. However, they were quickly replaced by the set-tlers own visions for the new polity, which were substantially shaped by a pow-erful group of Barbadians that made up almost half of Carolinas European settlersin 1670.43These Barbadians aspired to an economy based on plantation agricul-ture, and they imported African slaves fromthe West Indies to the colony fromtheoutset.44Yet Africanswerenot theonlyunfreelaborersintheinfant colony;Indian slaves were a growing demographic until the end of the Yamasee War in1717, andthe earlyyears of the colonyalsosawthe arrival of significantnumbers of Europeanindenturedservants.45Bythe endof the seventeenthcentury,though,andcoincidingwiththeadoptionofriceasastaplecrop, thecolony turned more and more toward the use of slaves, primarily from Africa.46As slavery emerged as the colonys primary source of labor, the coloniallegislature redefined the power of the master over the slave. Without a firm pre-cedent in English law, the colonists looked to the Caribbean in their search for adefinition of slavery.47In the colonys first better ordering statute, of 1691,theslavewas definedas freeholdproperty.48As freeholdor real estate,slaves were attached to and inseparable fromspecific landed estates andcouldonlybealienatedinsettlement of adebt.49By1696, theCommons43Richard S. Dunn, The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina, SouthCarolinaHistorical Magazine72(1971): 8193, 81; JackP. Greene, ColonialSouthCarolinaand the Caribbean Connection, South Carolina Historical Magazine 88 (1987): 192210, 19799.44Between a quarter and a third of the colonys earliest inhabitants were of African descent, allor most of whom were unfree laborers. Wood, Black Majority, 2025.45William Ramsey, All and Singular the Slaves: A Demographic Profile of Indian Slavery inColonial South Carolina, in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds.,Money Trade and Power: The Evolution of South Carolinas Plantation Society (Columbia: Univer-sity of South Carolina Press, 2001), 16686; Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servi-tude and Convict Labor in America, 16071776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1947),57, 33132; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the AmericanSouth, 16701717 (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 4850. Early prohibitions on Indian en-slavement wereignoredandlatersupersededbyalicensedtradeinIndianslaves. ShaftesburyPapers, 367; PROSC, 2: 5960.46Wood, Black Majority, 3562. For a critique of the claim that settlers turned to African slavesbecauseoftheirskillinricecultivation, seeDavidEltis,Philip Morgan,and DavidRichardson,Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultiva-tion in the Americas, American Historical Review 112 (2007): 132958. On the shift away fromwhite servant labor in Anglo-America, see Eltis, African Slavery, 4554.47Hadden, Slave Patrols, 89; Thomas J. Little, The South Carolina Slave Laws Reconsidered,16701700, South Carolina Historical Magazine 94, 2 (1993): 86101, 97; Edward B. Rugemer,The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Carib-bean during the Seventeenth Century, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 70 (2013): 42958,45253; Sirmans Legal Status, 46465. Bradley Nicholson argues that colonial slave codes bor-rowed features of English laws against vagabondage. Legal Borrowing and the Origins of SlaveLaw in the British Colonies, American Journal of Legal History 38 (1994): 3854.48SSC, 7: 34344. This act was disallowed by the Lords Proprietors only to be reenacted by theCommons House in 1693 and 1695. Ibid., 2: 78, 96; Little, Slave Laws, 97 n33, 99 n43.49Sirmans Legal Status, 465; Wood, Black Majority, 5152 n63.614 D A R A G H G R A N THouse again redefined the slaves status. This definition remained in force until1740,anddeclared:AllNegroes,Mollatoes,andIndianswhichatanytimeheretofore have been bought and Sold or now are and taken to be or hereafterShall be Bought and Sold are hereby made and declared they and their ChildrenSlaves to all Intents and purposes.50In resting on a vague all Intents and pur-poses language, the legal definition of the slave became a matter of custom.That is to say, according to this statute a slave was a person who was knownto be a slave, with the specific understanding of this term being derived fromthe existingpractice of slavery.51Bythe earlydecades of the eighteenthcentury,thispracticetooktheformofchattelslaverythroughoutthecolony,which allowed slaves to be freely alienated by their masters.52This transformation in the legal foundation of slavery took for granted thestates role in mediating the master-slave relationship.53By defining the slavesstatus in law, the colonial state was both acknowledging the peculiarity of aninstitution of property in human beings and making itself the arbiter of the con-dition of slavery. Even though the definition of the slave was to be a matter ofcustom, the authority of custom was itself rooted in positive law.54As such, therelationship between master and slave depended on the recognition of the state,which also took it upon itself to regulate that relationship. The master-slave re-lationshipwas replacedbythenexus slave-state-master at theheart of theplantation-colonial complex, withthecolonial statetakingresponsibilityforlimitingthefreedomandentitlementsoflaborandforpolicingtheactivitiesoflaborersand mastersalike.By assertingaright to legislate and adjudicatethemaster-slaverelationshipinthenameofpublicorder, thecolonial statedenied that this was a purely private relation.Thoughitisimpossibletodeterminewithcertaintywhatmotivatedtheturn to policing the master-slave relationship, two persistent concerns inbetter ordering statutesfraternization among unfree laborers on theSabbath,andthelaxitywithwhichsomeslave-ownerstreatedtheirslavessuggest that thestatesprogressivearrogationofauthorityoverthisrelationwasmotivatedbytheconcernthat alackofdisciplineonsomeplantationscould precipitate a widespread slave revolt.55Moreover, at least initially, this50Quoted in Sirmans, Legal Status, 466. See also L. H. Roper, The 1701 Act for the betterordering of Slaves: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina, Williamand Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64 (2007), 395418, 408 (hereafter 1701 Act); SSC, 7: 352, 371,385.51Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 43940 n122; Sirmans, Legal Status, 466.52Ibid., 46668. South Carolinas judiciary consistently treated slaves as chattels. A. Leon Hig-ginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color. Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 21112.53Alan Watson sees this public law dimension as peculiar to English colonial slavery. Slave Lawin the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 66.54Cf. Sirmans, Legal Status, 471.55SSC, 7: 347; 1701 Act, 41415; CH, 1702: 99101. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 615concern extended to the prospects of an alliance between indentured Europeansand enslaved Africans and Indians, which had well-known precedents in NorthCarolina, Virginia, and across the Caribbean.56The policing of slaves beyondtheplantationalsocameunder scrutinytowardtheendof theseventeenthcentury, with the colonists establishing special criminal courts for tryingslaves for petty and serious offenses in 1691.57The earliest such court, estab-lished in 1687, was designed to prosecute slaves and servants for trading awaytheir masters possessions without permission.58Although the authority of themaster to police petty offenses on his plantation remained the norm, this 1687procedure marked an early institutional intrusion into the master-slaverelationship.However, even if the master retained the authority to punish petty offensesontheplantation,thestateaddedtwoconstraintsontheuseof forceagainstslaves. First, masterswere now required to punish slaves guilty of minor of-fenses, withanyfailuretodosoincurringafine.59Themaster becameanagent of the state within the jurisdiction of the plantation; he possessed thelegal powerofamagistrateandhewasstrictlyobligedtoapplyit overhisslaves. His relationship to the slave was no longer the purely private relationof ownership, but was now saturated with a public obligation to ensure the or-derliness of his slaves, often through the application of harsh and life-threateningpunishments.60Second, theforcethat masterscouldlegallyuseagainsttheirslaveswasconstrainedtoasetofcarefullyenumeratedpunish-ments. They could punish a slave only to the extent allowed by the law, andanyexcessiveuseof forcewasprohibited.For example,in1691anyperson(including the slave-owner) who killed a slave out of wilfulness, wantoness,orbloodymindednesswastobeimprisonedandforcedtopay50totheslaves owner.Overthe nextfourdecades,the Commons House reduced thepunishment for the inhumane treatment of slaves to a fine, even as imperial au-thorities in London called for masters who willfully killed their slaves to be ex-ecuted.61The colonial state, that is, claimed for itself the authority to judge amasters punishment of his slaves.That the restrictions the Commons House placed on the masters power topunish did not mark a humanitarian concern for slaves was evidenced by thefact that legislatorssimultaneouslyrequiredmasterstomutilatedisobedient56Blackburn, New World Slavery, 317; Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 13639; Little, SlaveLaws, 8990, 95; Morgan, American Slavery, 25070.57SSC, 7: 34546.58Ibid., 2: 2223.59Ibid., 7: 345, 353; 1701 Act, 410.60In a further extension of state power over the plantation, after 1722 state-appointed constablesand slave patrols took over the masters prior responsibility for searching negro [slave] houses forweapons. SSC, 7: 37273.61Ibid., 7: 34647, 363, 381; 39394; PROSC, 8: 136; 14: 186.616 D A R A G H G R A N Tslaves.62By 1701, for instance, slaves who repeatedly ran away faced escalat-ing punishments from public whipping to mutilation, castration, and ultimatelydeath. In an effort to overcome laxity in the punishment of slaves, the colonycompensated slave-owners in the event that a slave died in the course of a man-datedpunishment, andthreatenedfineswherepunishmentswerenotcarriedout.63Whileofferingnocomfort totheslave, then, limitationsonthelegalpower of the master exemplified a shift in the legal foundation of the master-slaverelationshipawayfromapurelyprivaterelationshiptoonesaturatedwith public authority. Moreover, the obligation to police slaves fell to the pop-ulationofwhite freemenasawhole.Freemenwererequiredby lawtochal-lenge slaves encounteredoutside of a plantationtoproduce a ticket ofpermissionfromtheir master, andafter 1701couldbeimpressedintotheserviceof thecolonysslavepatrols.64ThustobefreeinCarolinawastobear a dual obligation to defend the property of the slave-owner and tosecure the public interest of the colony.We should bear in mind that slave codes do not tell us everything about theday-to-day practice of slavery, not least because they were often unevenly en-forced.65But because South Carolinas slave codes were the result of a delib-erative process in a popularly elected assembly, they reveal a great deal abouttheideological groundonwhichtheplantation-colonial complexwascon-structed.66Moreover, the failure of slave-owners to enforce the colonysbetter ordering statutes suggests that the colonial state was increasingly arro-gating authority over the master-slave relationship against the interests of indi-vidual slave-owners. Rather thanaffordingthe master unfettered personalpower andauthorityover hisslaves, thestatesought toplacehislocalizedpower on the plantation in the service of public order.R A C I A L I Z I N GP H E N O T Y P I CD I F F E R E N C EThe better ordering statutes evolved, as I have noted, alongside the emergenceof a non-European majority in the colony. By 1703, the colonial population wasalmost evenly divided between free and unfree persons, with all but two hundredof the 3,550 unfree laborers being non-European slaves. Within five years, theCarolina slavepopulationhadballoonedto5,500, including1,400Indians.This comparedwith120white servants and3,960free whites.67It is62CH, 1697:20. Reverend Francis LeJau expressed horror atwitnessing severe punishmentsmetedouttoslaves.FrankKlingberg,ed.,TheCarolinaChronicleofFrancisLeJau (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1956), 55, 108, 116, 130.63CH, 1697: 20; 17341735: 8283; 1701 Act, 41011; SSC, 7: 35960.641701 Act, 408, 415; SSC, 3: 45960, 7: 35254.65Davis, Slavery and Progress, 12.66Jordan, WhiteoverBlack, 588; Higginbotham, Matterof Color, 78; Tomlins, FreedomBound, 417n59. Watsonarguesthat thecloseassociationbetweenlegal institutionsandrulesand the ethos of a society is peculiar to English colonial slavery. Slave Law, xii, 6465.67PROSC, 5: 2034. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 617significant that the colonys first census, in 1708, unlike later such reports, did notgive primacy to a racialized phenotype. Instead the population was divided alongtheaxesof age(child/adult), legal status(free/servant/slave), andphenotype(white/Negro/Indian), with adults also being divided according to their phenotyp-ic sex (men/women). This multiplicity of divisions betrayed the inchoate and rel-atively unstable status of white identity at this point.The Carolina Commons House first invoked the language of whitenessin the better ordering statute of 1691, borrowing from the Jamaican slave lawof 1684. This is consistent with Winthrop Jordans finding that such languagebecame fashionable in America after 1680.68Despite this relatively late turn toa language that cast most European settlers as a coherent white assemblage,many historians of colonial slavery have treated race as a material fact abouthumanbeingsrather thanacontingent andfluidsocial construct, andhavethereby reified race and presupposed its salience.69In contrast, I followRogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper in treating race as a category of prac-tice rather than a category of analysis, in the hope of explaining the pro-cesses andmechanisms thoughwhichwhat has beencalledthe politicalfiction of [race] can crystallize at certain moments, as a powerful, compel-ling reality.70Race, then, was (and still is) a practice by which phenotypicdifferences were made politically salient. This practice was not invented in theAmericas,71but it was there that race first came to structure an entire socialorder. Indeed, it would be a mistake to read the inclusion of phenotypic termi-nologyinthefirstcensusof1708asexemplifyinganalreadyexistingracialorder. Instead, censuses, and the wider practices of labor management in colo-nial America, were precisely the means by which the colonial state establishedandmaintainedaracial orderinthefirst instance, inpart bymakingraceappear tobeataken-for-grantedmarker of social, economic, andpoliticalstanding.InSouthCarolina, thesalienceof phenotypicdifferencebecameevermoreapparent aftertheYamaseeWar. Threereportsproducedin1720byGovernor Robert Johnson, theCommons House, andthecolonysLondonagentshighlighted the fact that the colonys slave population was nowalmost doublethat ofthewhiteinhabitants,whichwasthought tobeto68SSC, 7: 34347; Jordan, White over Black, 95; Rugemer, Mastery and Race, 450, 452.69Degler, Slavery; Jordan, White over Black, 58385; Morgan, American Slavery, 315.70Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, Beyond Identity, Theory and Society 29 (2000):147, 5. Historians of race and gender in colonial America are especially attuned to the intersectinghistories of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Brown, Good Wives, 4, 10916; Jennifer L. Morgan,LaboringWomen:ReproductionandGenderinNewWorldSlavery(Philadelphia:UniversityofPennsylvania Press, 2004), 56. Onintersectionality, see Kimberle Crenshaw, MappingtheMargins: Intersectionality, IdentityPolitics, andViolenceagainst Womenof Color,StanfordLaw Review 43 (1991): 124199; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con-sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 2000).71Morgan, Laboring Women, 1249; Jordan, White over Black, 343.618 D A R A G H G R A N Tthe great indangering of the Province.72Significantly, none of the reports ofthe 1720s mentionedthe numbers of European indentured servantsor Indianslavesinthecolony, suggestingthat acleavageinthecolonial labor forcehadcrystallizedaroundaphenotypicschemadefinedinterms of awhite/black binary.These omissions were not the result of a disappearance of Indian slaves orwhite servants. The number of European servants in Carolina was actually climb-ing through this period, and although the colony had begun to discourage the en-slavement ofIndiansaftertheYamaseeWar, referencestoindigenousslavespersist.73Instead, Indianslaves andthose of some combinationof Indian,African, or white ancestry appear to have been assimilated into the category ofnegroslaveor blacksfor thepurposeof demographiccalculations. Forexample, GovernorJamesMooresparish-by-parishcount of11,828slavesinthecolonyin1721isstrikinglysimilar tothefigureof twelvethousandNegroslavesorblacksrespectivelyofferedbytheCommonsHouseandtheLondonagents in 1720.74Theextent of this conflationwasmadeclearintax statutes of 1716 and 1719. Whilst acknowledging the persistence of Indianslavery, the colonial legislature declared that for preventing all doubts and scru-ples that may arise, what ought to be rated on mustees, mulattoes, &c., all andeverysuchslavewhoisnot entirelyIndian, shall beaccountedasnegro.75ThedisappearanceoftheIndianslavefrompopulationstatistics, then, andthe exceptional treatment of slaves who were entirely Indian, appear to havebeen effects of the progressive organization of labor according to a racializingschema that ran together the categories of slave and Negro.76The racial order that congealed in Carolina depended on the conflation ofblackness with unfreedom. Moreover, rather than being the unthinking deci-sion of settlers already convinced of their white supremacy, this racial orderand the plantation-colonial complex that rested on it had to be carefully72PROSC, 8: 6667. There were approximately twelve thousand slaves in the colony in 1720,with a white population of between 5,220 and 6,400. Ibid., 7: 23334, 265; 9: 23.73SSC, 3: 1420; Theo D. Jervey, The White Indentured Servants of South Carolina, SouthCarolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 12 (1911): 16371, 167; Ramsey, All and Singu-lar, 17380; Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 331. Upward of fifty-one thousand Indians were en-slavedintheCarolina tradebeforetheYamaseeWar, most beingexportedtoother Englishcolonies. Inthe1720s, SouthCarolinaimposedanimport dutyonIndianslavesbetweentwoandfivetimesthedutyappliedtoAfricanslaves.Gallay,IndianSlaveTrade,29499,33839;PROSC, 15: 92; 18: 19.74Ibid., 7: 265; 8: 6667; 9: 23.75SSC, 2: 671; 3: 77. Although colonists did not subdivide the category of slaves by ancestryor raceincensusreportsafter 1708, better orderingstatutesdidusetermslikemulatto,mustee, or mustizo to refer to slaves whose ancestors included some combination of Europeans,Africans, and Native Americans. Ibid., 7: 371.76For a similar interpretation, see Ramsey, All and Singular, 172. This conflation of pheno-type and material or status location was a pervasive feature of colonial societies. Frantz Fanon, TheWretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 5. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 619cultivated by the Commons House of Assembly.77The large number of Barba-dian settlers who arrived in the colony did bring with them ideas about and in-stitutionsofAfricanslavery.YetthecolonyofSouthCarolinafaceditsownparticularchallenges, situatedasitwasonaremoteimperialperiphery, sur-roundedbyEuropeanrivalsandpowerful indigenousneighbors, andwithapopulationofunfreelaborersthatincludedanappreciablenumberofNativeAmericans.78Inthiscontext, theCommonsHousechosetoregulateunfreelaborinpartbyfosteringcleavageswithinthecolonyslaboringpopulation,consciously fashioning a racial order.Forexample, in1716thelegislaturebannedtheimportingofseditiouswhites such as criminals, native Irish, or Papists, who were thoughtlikelytoallywithBritainsimperial rivalsor withslavesintheevent of awar or revolt.79The following year, an act to discipline newly arrived servantspenalizedahost of relationships betweenwhites andeither freeblacks orslaves. It threatened any white servant convicted of fleeing the colony with aslave with execution.80Moreover, a penalty of seven years of service was tobeimposedonanywhitewoman, freeor servant, whoconceivedachildwith a negro or other slave or free negro. Similarly, if a free negro fathereda child with a white woman, or if a white man, whether free or servant, fathereda child with any negro woman, he too was to be sentenced to seven years ofservitude.81Here, the condition of servitude was to be heritable, albeit tempo-rarily,withthechildrenofsuchunnaturalandinordinatecopulationbeingboundasservantsuntiladulthood.82Throughthesemeasures,theCommonsHouse sought to instruct newly arrived servants in the racializing logic of theplantation-colonial complexinthehopeofcreatingawhitebulwarkagainstthe threat of slave insurrection.This statute prescribed no punishment for a negro woman who begot achild with a white man, and made no mention of the fate of the child of such arelationship. The colonial legislature most likely presumed black women wouldalready be slaves whose children automatically inherited their condition of en-slavement. Matrilineal slave status was not enshrined in statute in Carolina until77For the language of unthinking decision, see Jordan, White over Black, 4498.78Ramsey, All and Singular, 16667; Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 169.79SSC, 2: 647; Blackburn, New World Slavery, 31617; Jervey, Indentured Servants, 166.80SSC, 3: 17.81Ibid., 3: 20. An unmarried woman who had a child in South Carolina could be condemned tofour years of servitude if she refused to name the childs father and was unable to pay a fine. Nich-olas Trott, The Laws of the Province of South-Carolina, 2 vols. (Charles-Town, 1736), 1: 9798.Similar laws in Virginia were disproportionately applied to white servant women, revealing the gen-dered as well as the racial components of this legislation. Brown, Good Wives, 187211, esp. 199200; Rebecca A. Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 6185.82SSC, 3: 20.620 D A R A G H G R A N T1740, but it had long been the practice there.83This heritability of slavery throughthe status of the mother was a powerful factor in the solidification of racial slavery,inasmuch as it tethered slavery to the verifiable fact of some black (or Indian) an-cestry.84It alsoworkedtoredefinewhat it meant tobewhite,negro,ormulatto, as children with European ancestry came to be included in the categoryof negro slaves. This process replaced purely phenotypic distinctions with anincreasinglyracial order, but it didsoonlybecausethefigureof thefemalenegro slave had already been defined as eligible for enslavement.It is also revealing that the colonial legislature could not apply the samepenaltyforsexual fraternizationtoslaves, forwhomthethreat ofextendedservice was meaninglessboth slaves and servants could be corporeally pun-ished, but only servants or free persons could be condemned to furtherservice.85Thisdistinctionreflectedthedifferentlegalfoundationsofslaveryand indentured servitude. Specifically, servitude was predicated on thenotionthatjuridicalsubjects,alreadycivilizedandsubjecttoabodyoflaw,couldfreelycontract themselvesintotemporarybondage.86Inpractice, thissystemwas subject toconsiderable abuse, withservitude oftenbeingtheresult of kidnappingor press-ganging. However, servantswereempoweredto bring suit against their masters, and although they did so before courts dom-inated by the class of their oppressors, some servants do seem to have succeed-ed before the courts.87The lot of the slave was dire in comparison. As a captivein a supposedly just war whose execution was held in abeyance, the civicallydead slave was deprived of almost all legal rights. Slaves could not sue theirmasters, andalthoughthestatecouldinterveneinthemaster-slaverelation,as chattels slaves had no right to appeal for it to do so.88Moreover, as presump-tivelyuncivilizedpersons, slaveswerethought morallyincompetent togive83Ibid., 7: 397; Morgan, Laboring Women, 9394.84Ibid., 69106; Brown, Good Wives, 12835. Sexual relations between whites and free Indiansmay have been excluded from this act because of their importance to the Indian trade. AlexanderMoore, ed., Nairnes Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 6061.85See also SSC, 2: 2223.86Even Irish rebels served out penal contracts in the colonies. Blackburn, New World Slavery,317.87Ibid., 24041; Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: Uni-versity of South Carolina Press, 1961), 3840; Williams, Capitalism & Slavery, 1011; Higginbo-tham, Matter of Color, 21214.88Ibid., 89. Thatslaveswhowereallegedtohavebrokenthelawweresubjecttotrialsinspecial slavecourts suggests that someminimumof legal rights was affordedtoslaves. Forexample, the 1740 better ordering statute put the point clearly, noting, Natural justice forbidsthat anyperson, of whatever conditionsoever, shouldbecondemnedunheard.Nevertheless,this was hardly akin to a freemans justice, with matters brought before the slave courts being deter-mine[d] in the most summary and expeditious manner. SSC, 7: 4001, 400. For a study of thefunctioning of slave courts in colonial North Carolina, which were modeled on those of South Ca-rolina, see: Alan D. Watson, North Carolina Slave Courts, 17151785, North Carolina HistoricalReview, 60 (1983): 2436, esp. 26. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 621evidence, except in the case where they were incriminating themselves or otherslaves.89Tellingly, by 1740 this legal disability extended to any negro, Indian,mulattoormustizo, claiminghis, herortheirfreedom,whowasrequiredtoenlist the aid of a (presumably white) guardian to bring suit on his or her behalf.90That this legal disability attached to both free and enslaved people of colormirrorstheconceptual slippagenotedearlierbetweenthetermsslaveandnegro. In this case, it was freedom that was conflated with whiteness. Al-thoughpeopleofcolor couldhavetheir right tofreedomconfirmedbythecourts, they could only do so with the aid of a white person, whose freedomcouldsafelybepresumed.91Thisconflationoffreedomwithwhitenessandbondage with blackness was also evident in statutes in 1722 and 1735,which required slave-owners to finance the departure of any freed slave fromthe colony. If an erstwhile slave failed to depart within a year of being manu-mitted, he or she would lose the benefit of such manumission, and continue tobe a slave.92The concept of a free person of color in South Carolina was be-coming something of a contradiction in terms.Nevertheless, a small number of free people of color continued to live inthe province after 1722. For example, fifteen Free negroes and Indians werereported to be living in St. Georges parish in 1726.93Although being blackcame to be the primary marker of unfreedom in this period, that free people ofcolorlikethefamilyofGideonGibsoncouldliveinthecolony, sometimespassingfor white, suggests thecontinuedfluidityof racial categories aswell as the powerful force of the category of juridical subjecthood.94Formerslavesandtheirdescendantswereendowedwiththerightofself-ownershipthrough an act of legally recognized manumission, even though as people ofcolortheyoftenenjoyedfewerrightsthanwhitefreemen.95Aformerslave89Ibid., 2829. Before 1735, certain restrictions were placed on how the court might interprettheevidenceofslaves. Whiletheevidenceofasingleslavecouldbeusedtoconvict afellowslave of a petty crime where the court found that evidence convincing, a slave could only be con-victed of a capital crime by their own confession, by the oath of christian evidence, or by theplainandpositiveevidenceoftwonegroesorslaves,socircumstantiatedasthatthereshallnotbe sufficient reason to doubt the truth thereof. SSC, 7: 35657; cf. ibid., 7: 389.90Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 194; SSC, 7: 39798; H. M. Henry, The Police Control of theSlave in South Carolina (Emory: n.p., 1914), 815.91FortheconfirmationofanegropetitionersfreedombytheCommonsHouse, seeCH,17061707: 1415.92SSC, 7: 384, 396. Restrictions on manumission marked an obvious intrusion into the master-slave relationship by constraining the masters capacity to extinguish his claim to property over theslave. Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 47.93Frank Klingberg, An Appraisal of the Negro in Colonial South Carolina: A Study in Ameri-canization (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1941), 60.94On Gibson, see Jordan, White over Black, 17174.95The Commons House excluded non-white free men from the franchise in 1716, an act thatwas confirmed by the Crown in 1721. SSC, 2: 688, 691; 3: 34, 5055, 13540. For an accountofthe attenuation of free black womens rights relative to white women in Virginia, see Brown,Good Wives, 12028.622 D A R A G H G R A N Tmight be compelled to a period of unfree labor for violating the law, as mightany white person, but this would no longer be an unlimited bondage. A personrecognized by the law as bearing a right of self-ownership could not be trans-formed into a slave.96S AVA G E RY, C I V I L I T Y, A N DT H EO R I G I N S O F R A C I A LS L AV E RYThe possibility of a black juridical subject in the context of a progressive con-flationofslaveryandblacknessimpliesthattherewasamissingterminthelogicofracial slaverythat didtheworkofconnectingphenotypeandlegalstatus. Examining the colonial assemblys own justifications for its slavecodesoffersameansoftracingthislink. Attheheartofthesejustificationslaytheverybinaryofsavageryandcivilitythat underpinnedtheproject ofsettler colonialismit was not ones phenotype or race that made someoneeligible for enslavement, but rather his or her putative savagery.In1712,theCommonsHouse, borrowingfromtheBarbadosstatuteof1688, justified special ordinances for slaves with the following preamble:97Whereas, theplantationsandestatesofthisProvincecannotbewellandsufficientlymanagedandbrought intouse, without thelabor andserviceof negroesandotherslaves; and forasmuch as the said negroes and other slaves brought unto the people ofthisProvincefor that purposeareof barbarous, wild, savagenatures, andsuchasrendersthemwhollyunqualifiedtobegovernedbythelaws, customs, andpracticesof this Province; but that it is absolutely necessary, that such other constitutions, lawsand orders, should in this Province be made and enacted, for the good regulating andorderingof them, asmayrestrainthedisorders, rapinesandinhumanity, towhichthey are naturally prone and inclined.98Although earlier Carolina statutes had borrowed elements from the Barbadianbetter ordering law of 1661 (and from the Jamaican statute of 1684), they hadnot adopted its preamble, which described Africans in similar terms as an hea-thenishbrutishanduncertaindangerousprideofpeople.99Historianshaveoftenobservedthat charges of barbarism, savagery, andheathenismwereusedto justifytheenslavementofAfricans,alongwiththebiblicalauthority96On the coincidence of the rise of Atlantic slavery and of conceptions of self-ownership amongEuropeans, see Eltis, African Slavery, 1824, 5556, 80. In accounts of sixteenth-century Africa,Europeans depicted Negroes (as opposed to Moors) as lacking the capacity for self-ownership.Emily C. Bartels, Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa, Crit-icism 34 (1992): 51738, 530.97Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 44142.98SSC, 7: 352 (my emphasis). This preamble was modified in 1735 to describe slaves as gen-erally of a barbarous and savage nature. Reflecting the racial orders entrenchment, the 1740 slavecode replaced the preamble with the declaration that negroes, Indians, mulattoes and mustizoes,were absolute slaves who were to be reduced to due subjection and obedience by the law. Ibid.,7: 385, 397.99Barbados Slave Code, 1661, in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette,eds., Slavery(NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress, 2001), 105;Rugemer, MasteryandRace,45253; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 43944; cf. Sirmans, Legal Status, 466. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 623oftheCurseofHam.100Itisnoteworthythat Carolinaeschewedthereli-giouslyinflectedlanguageof heathenism,perhapsreflectingthefact thatthelawsofCarolinahadenvisagedthepossibilityofChristianslavesfromthe first settlement of the colony.101Instead, the 1712statute definedtheslave as barbarous, wild, and savage, in opposition to the colonys question-able self-image as a civilized, well-ordered polity. I am interested in drawingattention to the specifically juridical content of this savage/civilized binary.This was the first time that the colony provided a justification for its harshslave code. Partially echoing an earlier argument by a prominent Indian agent,Thomas Nairne, for civilizing intractable Indians through enslavement, thispreamble justified special measures to counter the slaves natural inclinationfor disorders, rapines, andinhumanity.102DavidBrionDavis notes thatslave-owning societies often envisaged enslavement as a means of civilizingforeign peoples, but the 1712 statute implied no such telos.103With the excep-tion of those instances where masters voluntarily manumitted their slaves, actsthat were subject to legal restrictions in the colony, the disciplining power of theslave code would not produce newly civilized persons. Instead, by entering aconditionof civicdeath, theslavewasthrownintoanebulous conceptualspace between savagery and civility. A slave might be trained in a craft or con-verted to Christianity, but he or she could not become a juridical subject withoutthe intervention of the master.The juridical binary of savagery and civility traced a line between slaveryand freedom that no longer coincided with religious differences. This marked arupture in prevailing prohibitions on the enslavement of fellow Christians.104Rebecca Goetz, writing about Virginia, argues that this unmooring offreedomfromChristianity redefined what it meant to be truly Christian,which came to be bound up with whiteness.105I would assert that it also re-flectedalonger-runchangeinunderstandings of freedomitself. Although100For contending views on the Curse of Ham, see Blackburn, New World Slavery, 6476;Benjamin Braude, The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identitiesin the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (1997): 10342; Davis, Slavery and Progress; Goetz, Baptism; Jordan, White over Black.101Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 98; SSC, 7: 34344, 36465; 1701 Act, 416.102Moore, Nairnes Journals, 7576.103Davis, Slavery and Progress, 2332.104Blackburn, NewWorldSlavery, 3839, 4244, 4950. Inthemid-sixteenthcentury, theSpanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria argued that any Christian soldiers captured in a just waragainst another Christian state would be captives, but not slaves. What marked the difference,hesuggested, wasthat they[Christians] areabletoappearinacourt ofjusticeanddootherthingsofthatsort,whichneverthelesscouldnotbepermittediftheywereslaves.Theactsofa[Christian]captivearevalid,andaChristiancouldnotsellhimatall.Wecanalreadydiscernthe outlines of juridical subjecthood here, albeit restricted to the Christian rather than the civilizedperson. FranciscodeVitoria, DeJureGentiumet Naturali,FrancisCraneMacken, trans., inJamesBrownScott, TheSpanishOriginof International Law: FranciscoDeVitoriaandHisLaw of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), cxiiicxiv.105Goetz, Baptism, 612, 86111.624 D A R A G H G R A N TEnglishmen may have thought that the decline of bonded labor in England wastethered to the rise of Christianity, by the time Carolina was founded it was nolonger ones faith but ones status as a rights-bearing subject that guaranteed aclaim to freedom.106Moreover, Englishmen had long seen Christianity as itselfdependent on the attainment of civility.107With the unmooring of freedom fromChristianity, therefore, came a simultaneous separation of Christianity from ci-vility, revealing the roots of formal freedom in that latter condition. An English-manwasprotectedfromenslavement because, asasubject of thecivilizedEnglish king, he was endowed with the Liberties and Properties of juridicalsubjecthood.108And yet the idea that Christianity, civility, and freedom wereinterrelated persisted among slave-owners and, more importantly, amongtheir slaves. Carolina slave-owners objected to conversion because theyfeared it would make their slaves intractable or would be used as a path to man-umission,and their slavesmaywellhave had preciselythat goalin mind.109But the conceptual ground of freedom had shifted behind the back of this strug-gle for freedom through Christian conversion, coming to rest on the rights af-forded by human laws.110That protection fromenslavement flowed fromjuridical subjecthoodrather than baptism is reflected in the English prohibition on the enslavementof certain non-Christian populations. In spite of the richness of the historiogra-phy of racial slavery, scholars have failed to offer an adequate account of whycolonies like South Carolina only utilized African and Native American slaves.As David Eltis has asked: If the elite could kill Irish, Huguenots, Jews, pris-oners of war, convicts, and many other marginalized groups, why could theynot enslave them?111Certainly, Eltis and others are correct that the predomi-nance of African and Native American slaves depended on existing indigenouspractices of enslavement in Africa and America, and on the relative costs of en-slaved, indentured, and free wage labor.112However, the ready availability ofAfricanandIndianslavescannotaloneaccountforwhynoJeworIrishman106On the English connection between Christianity and freedom, see ibid., 1718; Jordan, Whiteover Black, 4950.107Documents concerning Reverend Samuel Thomas, 17021707, South Carolina Historicaland Genealogical Magazine 5 (1904): 2155, 37, 4344; Wilberforce Eames, ed., John Eliot andthe Indians, 16521657 (New York: Adam & Grace Press, 1915), 21; Nicholas P. Canny, The Ide-ology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 30(1973): 57598, 58586; Pearce, Savagism, 29.108A concern for these rights was central to the colonists revolt against the Proprietors in 1719.PROSC, 7: 273.109Klingberg, LeJau, 50, 5255, 60, 86, 97, 102, 121, 136; Goetz, Baptism, 98110; Olwell,Masters, 12629.110Some slave-owners saw limited slave baptisms as a means of controlling their slaves. Ibid.,11626; Parent, Foul Means, 24964.111Eltis, African Slavery, 84.112Ibid., 4954, 11492; Davis, Slavery andProgress, 6382; Snyder, Slavery inIndianCountry, 48, 4750; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 72125. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 625ever served as a slave in Anglo-America. Nor can it explain why specific non-Christian peoples were ineligible for enslavement. Eltis argues that the enslave-ment of Europeans had become inconceivable as a result of a salient division ofthe world by this point into Europe and its outside, with a prohibition on enslav-ing those brought up as European.113However, heoffers littleevidence ofanysharedEuropeanidentityintheseventeenthcentury,114norisit clearthat peripheral populations such as the Irish would have been counted withinsuchanassemblage, eveniftheywereincreasinglyidentifiedaswhiteinthe Americas. Moreover, in treating Europe as an aggregate, Eltis obscures var-iationinpracticesof enslavement acrossEuropeanstates. TheEnglish, forexample,shiedawayfromtheenslavementofcertainnon-Europeanpopula-tions, not leasttheTurksandtheChinese, butalsotheinhabitantsofSouthAsiaandSoutheast Asia, wheretheEast IndiaCompanyoptedinsteadtoimport slaves from Madagascar and the Comoro Islands.115It is in these vari-ationsthatthe workofthe savage/civilizedbinarycomesmost clearly tothefore.As infidels, Jews and Turks were subject to forms of racial stereotypingsimilar to those applied to Africans, yet they were not enslaved in the EnglishAtlantic. Onthecontrary, althoughformallybannedfromEnglanduntil themid-seventeenthcentury, Jewswereamongthefirst settlersof theEnglishcolonyofBarbadosinthe1630sand1640s.116Moreover,inanactof1682that explicitly readmitted the possibility of Native American slavery in Virgin-ia, thelegislaturebannedtheenslavementofservantswhowereTurksandMoorswhilest inamitywithhismajesty.All otherswhocouldnot provetheywereChristiansbeforetheircapturewerecondemnedtobeadjudged,deemed, andtakentobeslaves.117Thisprovisionwasclarifiedin1705toadda protectionfromenslavement for those whocouldprove theywerefree in England, or any other christian country before arriving in thecolony.118Juridical subjecthood was not confined to Christians or Europeans.113Eltis, African Slavery, 224, 6670, 7980.114See, for example, ibid., 23442.115FreniseA. Logan, TheBritishEast IndiaCompanyandAfricanSlaveryinBenkulen,Sumatra, 16871792, Journal of NegroHistory 41(1956): 33948; Blackburn, NewWorldSlavery, 65. Eltis and Davis note the long-standing exploitation of European, African, andMiddle Eastern slaves in Mediterranean Europe before the rise of Atlantic slavery. Eltis, AfricanSlavery, 60, 7172; Davis, Slavery and Progress, 5161.116Blackburn, NewWorldSlavery, 230; Davis, SlaveryandProgress, 1001; Eltis, AfricanSlavery, 23941.117William W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia,13 vols. (New York: RW&G Bartow, 18091823), 2: 49192. Native American slavery was pro-hibited in Virginia between 1670 and 1682. Ibid., 2: 283.118Ibid., 3:44748. Englishmenoften divided the Africanpopulationbetweencivilized,ifuntrustworthy, Moorsanduncivilized,ifoccasionallycivil,Negroes.Bartels,ImperialistBeginnings, 52531. Bruce Hall argues that this distinction between Moors and blacks wassalient inthesouthernSaharanregionbeforethelateseventeenthcentury. TheQuestionof626 D A R A G H G R A N TAs the figure who had supposedly escaped the state of nature and come toinhabit a recognized legal order, the juridical subject was imagined to possesslegal rights irrespective of his or her faith or phenotype. This is not to suggestthat the English thought all civilized societies were equal.119The proviso thatthis protection extended to Turks and Moors in amity with his majesty leftopenthepossibilitythat ajustwar might allowfor theenslavement ofsuch persons. As subjects of non-Christian Princes, Turks were never consid-eredtobe the equals of Englishmenor Christians for that matter, whocouldnot beenslavedinajust warbut bytheseventeenthcenturytheywereaffordedprotectionsthat werenot extendedtoIndiansor Africansinamity with the Crown. Admittedly, traders in South Carolina were prohibitedfromknowinglypurchasinganyso-calledfreeIndianfromanyNationthat is in Amity and under the Protection of [the colonial] Government.120Al-though the colony treated allied or subject Indians as free, and manumittedthemwheretheywerefoundasslaveswithinthecolony,theydidnotorderthe purchase and manumission of such Indians who were offered in trade byindigenousslave-traders. Incontrast toaFrenchmanheldasaslaveamongtheCherokee, whowaspurchasedandfreedbythecolony, theprotectionofferedtoIndiansallieswaslimitedtopreventingtheirenslavement withinSouth Carolina.121Perhaps most anomalous is the treatment of the oft-maligned pagan andsavageIrish. Theirprotectionfromenslavement wasnot aconsequenceofIrishwhiteness or Christianity, whichwereoftencontested, but rather oftheirexistingliegesubjectiontotheKingofEngland, Scotland, France, andIreland, which afforded them the protection of juridical subjecthood.122Whilstjuristsoftenquestionedtheextent ofEnglishjurisdictionoverIreland,123theRace in the Pre-Colonial Southern Sahara, Journal of North African Studies 10 (2005): 33967.On the prominence of Turkish and Moorish merchants, traders, and ambassadors in Elizabethan andStuart England, see Nabil I. Matar, Turks, Moors, andEnglishmeninthe Age of Discovery(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1942.119Bartels, Imperialist Beginnings, 52930.120McDowell, Journal of the Commissioners, 86; CH, 1703: 7576.121McDowell, Journal of the Commissioners, 1617, 12527, 189.122Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995), 3459; Canny, Ide-ology of English Colonization, 58388. The definition ofa natural born subject of the King ofEnglandwassettledinthelandmarkcaseofthepost-natiin1608.EdwardCokesjudgmentinthecaseheldthatScotsbornaftertheaccessionofJamesVIandItotheEnglishthronewerenatural born subjects at English law, bound to the king by a relationship of ligenace and henceentitled to the same benefits or privileges as any Englishman. Coke also held that since the con-quest of Ireland by Henry II, any that was born in Ireland was no Alien to the Realm of Englandbut a natural born Subject[]. Calvin v. Smith (1608), 7 Coke Rep., 1a28b, quoted at 17b, 23a,26b. For an annotated copy of Cokes judgment in this case, see Steve Sheppard, ed., The SelectedWritings of Sir Edward Coke, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 2003), 1: 166232.123Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued,James P. Myers Jr., ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, [1612] 1988), C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 627Crown insisted that its native Irish subjects warranted legal protections. QueenElizabeth, for example, insisted that the Irish were rightful subjects who were en-titled to the protection of the Queens law, allowing them to contest the seizure oflands in the Munster plantation in the courts.124Irish servants arriving in Americawithout contracts of indenture, on the other hand, did often serve longer termsthantheir Englishcounterparts, andnative Irishmenwere oftenlikenedtoNative Americans.125Nonetheless, the Irish were spared the condition of perpet-ual bondage by their subjection to a body of civilized law.Whilst livinginaconditionof savagerymadeapersonsenslavementthinkable for Englishmen, it was not sufficient to condemn a person to enslave-ment. The requirement of capture in a just war remained central to Englishjustifications of slavery. In practice, such justifications were rarely tested, butwhen they were it was not beyond English colonial courts to find against slave-traders and to manumit slaves deemed to have been unjustly enslaved. In Mas-sachusetts in 1645, two African slaves captured in Guinea were released frombondage after the General Court deemedthemtohave been unlawfullytaken.126Similar manumissions occurred in Maryland in 1676 and in Barba-dosin1702, andtheywereoftenseeninSouthCarolinastradeinIndianslaves.127TheMassachusettsCourt wasclear that theprimaryissueinthetrial of the accusedslavers was the manner of the Africans enslavementyehainous &crying sinn of man stealingrather than the fact ofslavery itself.128Massachusetts, for its part, had not shied away from enslavingBlock Island or Pequot Indians in the colonys supposedly just war of 1637, andhad passed a law in 1641 that limited lawful slavery to those captured in suchjust wars.129However, the failure of Europeans to enslave civilized captivesof European wars suggests that capture in a just war was, by itself, an insuffi-cient basis for slavery. Furthermore, there is something telling about thegrounds on which Massachusetts claimedjurisdictionoverthis case ofmanstealinginGuinea, namelythat theseactsandoutrageswerecommittedby residents of the colony in a place where there was noe civill government7179; Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise ofCommon Law, 15091625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13637.124Ibid., 149.125Jordan, White over Black, 87; James Muldoon, The Indian as Irishman, Essex Institute His-torical Collections 111 (1975): 26789.126Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bayin New England, 5 vols. (Boston: W. White, 18531854), 2: 168.127Eltis, African Slavery, 180; Thornton, African and Africans, 147; McDowell, Journal of theCommissioners, 4, 26; CH, 17061707: 1314.128Shurtleff, Records, 3: 84.129Ibid., 1: 181; John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, 2 vols., JamesSavage, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1853), 1: 279; William H. Whitmore, ed., The ColonialLawsof MassachusettsReprintedfromtheEditionof 1672(Boston: Rockwell andChurchill,1890), 53.628 D A R A G H G R A N Twhich might call them to accompt.130The savage/civilized binary traced a dis-tinction between two types of societies: savage communities, where just warscould make slaves of peoples who supposedly lacked any rights grounded inlaw, and civilized polities, which claimed from themselves the sole right to ad-judicate the justice of any given war, and where even in the event of a just warsubjects were protected from falling into enslavement. It was only when a justwar was tethered to the savage/civilized binary that the conditions for lawfulenslavement were met.Inpractice,commercialinterestsplayedasignificantroleintracingtheboundarybetweensavageryandcivilityandindeterminingwhichAfricansandIndianswereprotectedfromenslavement.131EnglishdepictionsofAfri-cans, whether Moorsor Negroes,linkedcivilitywithapreferencefortrade and wildness with an inclination to oppose it; Negroes were generallyrepresentedasbeingmoreuncivilizedandlawlessthanMoors.132Despitetheserepresentations,Englishmendependedonthetradinginfrastructuresofindependent Africanpolitiestoacquirethevast majorityof Africanslaves.UnlikethesavagespacesdescribedbytheMassachusettsCourt, Englishtraders recognized the authority of these polities, which were sufficiently pow-erful tocommandequitable trade relations andresist colonization.133TheAfrican slave-trader, whether Moor or Negro, was recognized as a juridicalsubject and was not rendered eligible for enslavement by his appearance, eventhough he was likely cast as less civilized than the Englishman.This reflected the formalequality that was granted,as Robin Blackburnnotes, to those who had something to sell in an emergent capitalistorder.134In contrast, Africans (and Native Americans) who had little ofvalue totrade were depictedas uncivilizedpersons ripe for enslavement.This connection of commercialism, civility, and freedom on one hand, and sav-agery and bondage on the other, is well illustrated in the case of Ayuba Sulei-man Diallo of Bondu. Held as a slave in Maryland, Ayuba was purchased by agroupofEnglishmenwhosawinhisreputedhighbirth, hisabilitytowriteArabic,andhisaffablecarriagethemarksofnocommonslave.HewaseventuallyemancipatedwiththeaidoftheRoyal AfricanCompany, whichhoped to use him as a factor as it sought to expand its trade in his native Sen-egambia. Ayubas commercial usefulness and his civil ways underwrote his ju-ridical subjecthood.135130Winthrop, History, 2: 463.131Eltis, African Slavery, 180.132Bartels, Imperialist Beginnings, 523, 52531.133Eltis, AfricanSlavery, 14849; Thornton, AfricaandAfricans, 4371; Blackburn, NewWorld Slavery, 81.134Ibid., 16.135Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of theSlave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 1759, quote at 42. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 629As the antithesis of the juridical subject, the slave was assumed to havehadnothingtobringtomarket except under thesovereigndirectionof themaster, dispossessedevenofownershipoverhisorherlaborpower.136Farfrom being an unspoken cultural norm, however, the justification for enslav-ingparticularnon-Europeanpopulationswascontestedandworkedout inadense thicket of discourse about savagery and civility.137P O L I C I N GU N F R E EL A B O RAfter savages had been enslaved and the colonial state had asserted its au-thority over the master-slave relationship, it still faced the problem of how totransform this authority into effective power. Doing so depended on mobilizingamaterial capacitybeyonditsimmediatecontrol. Whiteservants, freemen,allied Indians, and even slaves would be called upon to fight and die to preservethe plantation-colonial complex.Asnotedearlier, throughthesaturationofthemaster-slaverelationshipwith public obligation, unfree laborers were governed primarily on the planta-tion itself. Crucial to the evolution of this system of plantation governance, astheCommonsHousesawit,wastheincreasedimportationofEuropeanser-vants, whoweretocheckslaveresistance, andtheslowingof therateofslave imports.138The idea that white servants would provide a buffer againstblackinsurrectionpresupposedanaffinitybetweenwhitelaborersandtheirmasters. However, rather than resting on the presumption of white racial solid-arity, the Commons House sought to drive a wedge between these white ser-vantsandtheirfellowunfreelaborersandtherebyfractureopportunitiesforclasssolidarity. As I have said,one part of this policywas theimpositionofharsh penalties for sexual fraternization between whites and blacks and for ser-vants who fled their servitude in the company of slaves. Another was the man-dating of managerial hierarchies within the laboring class on the plantation. Byrequiring plantations to maintain a minimum ratio of whites to slaves, and byinsistingthat oneofthewhitemenemployedoneveryplantationbeeitherthe master or manager, the colonial government after 1701 aimed to divideblack and Indian laborers from white overseers.139136Inspiteoftheconnectionofcommercialismandjuridicalsubjecthood, slaveswereoftencommercial innovators in the colonies. Some Carolina slave-owners reduced the cost of maintain-ing their slaves by allowing them to work for themselves. These slaves occasionally acquired prop-erty in livestock or became traders in the Charles Town market, much to the chagrin of colonistswhocomplainedof slavesdrivinguptheprices. PROSC, 17: 304; SSC, 2: v, 2223, 7: 368,38283, 393, 40810; Olwell, Masters, 14180; Wood, Black Majority, 62, 13839, 20717.137Cf. Eltis, African Slavery, 114.138SSC, 2: 15356; 3: 272; 7: 367, 370; PROSC, 14: 177.1391701 Act, 416; SSC, 3: 272; 7: 68; CH, 1725: 7374; Henry, Police Control, 1821. Solid-arityamongslavesusuallyledmasterstorejecttheuseofslavesasoverseers.Blackburn,NewWorld Slavery, 34450; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 21825.630 D A R A G H G R A N TDespite the increased racialization of slavery, and in contrast to Morgansaccount of early Virginia, in eighteenth-century South Carolina class conflictpersistedbetweenpoor whitesand theplanterand merchantelites.140PoorerCaroliniansmayindeedhaveaspiredtotheelevatedsocial statusthat camewith slave-ownership, but colonial policies often made it difficult for these col-onists to purchase slaves.141As late as 1726, a quarter of households in the rel-ativelyaffluentparishofSt.Georgesownednoslaves,andoverhalfoftheremaininghouseholds ownedfewer thansevenslaves.142Slave-ownershipwasevenlesscommoninthepoorer parishesonthecolonial periphery.143Whilelowcountryplantationownersfocusedonthethreat ofslaverevolts,this was likely a less immediate concern for poorer settlers in the borderlandswho faced renewed attacks by the Yamasee in 1727.144This divergence of interests came to a head in 17281729 in a crisis overpaper money, which left the colony without a functioning legislature, judiciary,or system of tax collection. The details of the dispute are beyond the scope ofthis paper, but the solution to the crisis highlights the connections between theprojectofsettlercolonialismand thesolidificationofSouth Carolinas racialorder.145Itscenterpiecewasatownshipscheamforthesettlement ofthebackcountryproposedbyGovernor Robert Johnson. Theschemeproposedtennewtowns tobe settledbyEuropeanProtestants onthe lands of theCatawba and other Indians.146The towns would create a buffer between the ag-riculturally productive low country and the surrounding Indians and bolster thecolonys white minority. The scheme was to be financed in part by a 10 dutyon thepurchaseof eachslaveimportedto thecolony.147Theproposal,then,promised increased security for poor whites living in the borderlands even asit made it more difficult for them to acquire slaves. While preserving class dif-ferences, this solution also bolstered the racial order. After all, captive Africanswould provide the labor to make good the expulsion of the Indians, as Black-burn puts it, and duties on this human commodity would cover the cost of se-curing the colony against putatively hostile Indians and of shoring up the whitepopulation against the black slave majority.148140Morgan,American Slavery, 33889. Anthony Parent highlights persistentclassconflict ineighteenth-century Virginia. Foul Means, 17394.141On the aspiration to slave ownership, see Olwell, Masters, 4445. Despite these difficulties,there were fewer non-slaveholding whites in South Carolina than in Virginia. Morgan, Slave Coun-terpoint, 17.142Klingberg, Appraisal, 5860.143Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 5960, 145, 22629.144Ibid., 15657.145On the paper money crisis, see ibid., 14477; Richard M. Jellison, Paper Currency in Co-lonial South Carolina: A Reappraisal, South Carolina Historical Magazine 62 (1961): 13447.146James H. Merrell, The Indians New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from EuropeanContact through the Era of Removal (London: Norton, 1991), 136.147PROSC, 14: 5860, 7174; 15: 13536; 16: 199201; CH, 17341735: 64, 139.148Blackburn, New World Slavery, 311. C I V I L I Z I N G T H E C O L O N I A L S U B J E C T 631The linkage of threats posed by Indians and slaves ran throughout the co-lonial regime of labor policing. In the materially weak colonial state, the polic-ing of unfree laborwhether black, white, or Indiandepended on theassistanceoftheindigenouspopulationsthatthetownshipschemewassup-posed to defend against. In the early years of settlement, the Lords Proprietorshad encouraged the colonists to maintain good relations with their neighboringIndianswhomightprovehelpfulinreturningrunawayslaves, mirroringtherolethat slavepatrolswouldplaywithinthecolony.149In1701, 1707, and1721temporarylawswerepassedauthorizingIndians touseforceagainstanypersonleavingthecolonywhowasunabletoproduceatickettfromthesecretaryof theprovincepermittingtheir departure. Theycouldbeat,maime or assault any [runaway], and as long as there was a white man accom-panyingtheIndianstheywereentitledtokill therunawayif necessary.150Whether white, black, or Indian, andwhether freeor unfree, thosefleeingthe colony were made legally subject to the neighboring Indians in their capac-ity as agents of the colonial state.At the same time that Indians were policing the bounds of the colony forrunaways, unfreelaborerswerebeingenlistedtodefendit against externalthreats, not least from surrounding Indian communities.151Although difficulttofathomgiventhecolonistspersistent concernsabout slaveinsurrections,between Queen Annes War and the Yamasee War the government of South Ca-rolina armed slaves to defend the colony against enemy incursions, with halfthemilitiabeingcomposedofblackslavesin1708.152Onlytrustyslaveswere to be enlisted and trained for service in the militia, and in the event thatthey killed or captured an enemy they were to be rewarded with theirfreedom.153Slaves maywell haveserveddiligentlyout of the reasonablefearthat theirownliveswereput at riskbyIndianattacks, thoughtherole149LordsProprietorstotheGovernor andCouncil,5June1692, Colonial OfficeSeries,UnitedKingdomNationalArchives(Kew), CO5/286, 195;CH, 1693: 27;Gallay, IndianSlaveTrade, 94; Henry, Police Control, 2836.150SSC, 2: 18081, 299; 3: 12021. It is unclear how largely illiterate Indian populations as-sessed the authenticity of tickets. They may have been assisted by Englishmen who accompaniedsome Indian patrols, or they may have been familiar with colonial seals from treaty documents. Foran early colonial passport, see Passport Issued by Governor Merchant of Albemarle County, Ca-rolina to John Hastings, 18 Aug. 1690, Sloane Series, British Library (London), Sloane 2717, 28.On Indian illiteracy, see Patricia Causey Nichols, Voices of Our Ancestors: Language Contact inEarly South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 8586.151CH, 17341735: 233.152PROSC, 5: 204. Following the Yamasee War, the militia dispensed with enslaved militiamenand merged with the slave patrol to become the primary force for policing unfree labor within thecolony. Hadden, Slave Patrols, 21; Wood, Black Majority, 12728, 27476.153SSC, 7:34751;GeorgeChicken, Journal to the Cherokee 171516,in LangdonCheves, ed., Yearbook of the City of Charleston (Charleston: Walker, Erono, & Cogswell, 1894),323.632 D A R A G H G R A N Tplayed by Indians in capturing runaway slaves also meant that strong surround-ing Indian polities worked against the interests of the slave.The colonial government also found other means to foreclose cooperationbetween neighboring Indians, slaves, and free blacks and Indians living in thecolony.After1701,theCommonsHousesoughttolimittheinvolvementofslavesandservantsintheIndiantrade, andin1731thelegislatureenactedheavy penalties for the employment of free or enslavedIndiansor negroesinthetrade.154In1725, Commissioner for IndianAffairsGeorgeChickenarguedthatslavesemployedinthe IndiantrademightforgeanalliancewithneighboringIndiansagainst thecolony.155Hehadgoodreasontobecon-cerned; a decade earlier, when Chicken attempted to drawthe CherokeeIndians to the colonys side in the Yamasee War, his efforts were stymied bytwo black runaways who told the Cherokee a parcell of Lies which hindredtheir coming down.156Theeffect of IndianfamiliaritywithAfricanslaves was alsoevidentduringthe TuscaroraWar of 1712. While attempting, among other things, torecovertwenty-fourrunawayblackslavesbeingharboredbytheTuscarora,the colonial forces encountered and were unable to breach an advancedIndian fortification, which had been constructed under the tutelage of arunawayslave.157AnalliancebetweenIndiansandslavescouldaffordthelatter a refuge from their bondage, and the skills of slaves trained as craftsmenor militia soldiers, or of those who brought military expertise with them fromAfrica, could pose a significant threat to the colonial settlements.158Exempli-fying this potential for alliance, Indians continued to offer an avenue of escapeto slaves during and after the Yamasee War.159The possibility of cooperation between slaves and Indians indicates boththe relative weaknessofcleavagesseparatingthe unfreelaborersofCarolinafrom the surrounding Indian communities and the incompleteness of the colo-nial governmentscontrol over populationsinandaroundthecolony. Still,momentsofresistancethatbroughtblacksandIndiansintocoalitionagainstthe colonial state are more remarkable for their rarity than for their frequency.As the Yamasee, in league with the Spanish at St. Augustine, were seeking toliberate African slaves, South Carolina was enlisting Creek Indians to recover154CH, August 1701: 89; SSC, 3: 332; William S. Willis, Divide and Rule: Red, White, andBlack in the Southeast, Journal of Negro History 48 (1963): 15776, 16263; Wood, Black Ma-jority, 11417.155George Chicken, Journal to the Cherokees, 1725, in Newtown Mereness, ed., Travels inthe American