Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

by Ryan A Quintana

How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals.

Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.

Genres: History

238 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2018

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is dense and written in a very academic style. Dare I say, it's repetitive. But I did learn some things about early American governance history (in South Carolina), plus history in general. For example, I did not know that after the American Revolution, the South Carolina government confiscated enslaved people (as well as land and other property) from Loyalists, and gave the enslaved to others or used them for state purposes (and more often that note, those people ran away and returned to their prior homes & owners. I also was not aware that enslaved people had more freedom of movement than I understood... in order to perform their assigned work, such as taking goods to markets, buying supplies and etc. I also did not know that plantation owners were required/asked to "donate" their enslaved laborers work to the state to build roads, levees, canals, forts, military works, etc. And, I did not know how much the white owners were absent from their plantations. This is not to say that there were positive aspects to chattel slavery, and the author does a very good job of making that clear - there were no positive aspects whatsoever; it was utterly immoral. Overall, if you want to understand more about the detailed workings, this book might interest you. Lots of good sources.