INTRODUCTION
In spite of the aspirations of Anthony Ashley-Cooper and John Locke, who framed the “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina” in 1669, the colony settled at Charles Town in 1670 was anything but a well-ordered polity.Footnote 1 During the first three decades of settlement, the Lords Proprietors charged the colonists with disorganization, idleness, piracy, and the illegal enslavement of indigenous peoples.Footnote 2 In 1708, Rev. Gideon Johnston, the commissary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the colony, complained that the English in Charles Town were “the Vilest race of Men upon the Earth” and “the most factious and Seditious people in the whole World.”Footnote 3 The colony seemed to fare no better after the colonists revolted against proprietary rule in favor of royal government in 1719. By 1724, the first royal governor of the province, Francis Nicholson, described a colony at risk of collapsing into a “Primative State of Nature.”Footnote 4 This prediction was almost borne out when a dispute over paper money caused the collapse of regular governance in 1728–1729.Footnote 5 Despite this upheaval, the South Carolina colonists established a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America after 1708. Before 1720, to be sure, many Carolina plantations were relatively small “frontier” operations, where masters worked and lived in close proximity to their slaves producing livestock, lumber, and crops. However, larger plantations became increasingly common, and by 1720 half of the colony's enslaved population lived on plantations with more than twenty slaves.Footnote 6 South Carolina's plantation-colonial complex would go on to fuel the most prosperous of the thirteen colonies by 1775.Footnote 7 This paper asks how the disorderly colonists of South Carolina, lacking in material strength, outnumbered by slaves, and surrounded by Indians, managed to establish such a prosperous colonial state.
Traditionally, scholars of slavery have highlighted the role played by “race” in reinforcing colonial governance. One historiographical tradition has argued that the institution of racial slavery provided both a solution to the problem of labor shortages and an avenue for co-opting poor whites to the political program of colonial elites.Footnote 8 Colonial states, in this view, established and maintained order by deploying racializing ideologies to separate “dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks,” as Edmund Morgan put it in his study of early Virginia.Footnote 9 However, as scholars have long noted, it is still necessary to account for why the “dangerous” freemen were overwhelming European while the “dangerous” slaves were exclusively African and Native American.Footnote 10 Certainly this pattern was significantly shaped by the existence of an infrastructure of slave trading in Africa that offered Europeans a source of relatively cheap labor, which colonists were able to augment by inaugurating a slave trade with indigenous Americans.Footnote 11 A second tradition has located the racial character of the slave trade in preexisting European conceptions of Africans as racially inferior.Footnote 12 Though I find more support for the view that racial slavery had its roots in the American colonial experience, neither of these historiographical traditions adequately explains why only Africans and Native Americans were enslaved in early America.
Here I will bridge these two historiographical traditions as I situate the rise of racial slavery, and the ideology of white supremacy that underpinned it, within the wider ideological logic of settler-colonialism. South Carolina's colonial state did not develop through the accumulation of material power in a centralized governing apparatus. Instead, it emerged as authoritative by rooting the twined processes of plantation slavery and colonization in a juridical distinction between savagery and civility.Footnote 13 The plantation-colonial complex that the state sought to secure functioned through the interactions of three archetypal figures: the savage, who was untamed by any law; the slave, whose savagery could only be governed through harsh repressive techniques; and the colonial freeman, who, as the juridical subject of a civilized polity, was supposedly ordered and endowed with rights by the law.Footnote 14 Chattel slaves and juridical subjects were denizens of a rising commercial society that they brought into being through their relations of production and exploitation.Footnote 15 While the juridical subject was endowed with the civic rights afforded by the law, and the savage allegedly existed in a “wilderness” beyond the law, the slave was at once bound by the law and deprived of those same civic rights by it, inhabiting a state of civic death.Footnote 16
The savage/civilized distinction was crucial to the establishment of a functioning state apparatus in the colony.Footnote 17 Lying beyond the reach of the repressive apparatus of the metropolitan state and intertwined with the emergence of the novel economic apparatus of plantation slavery, the colonial state emerged as an independent and specifically colonial locus of authority.Footnote 18 In South Carolina, this state was centered on the Commons House of Assembly, which gained a monopoly on legislating for the colony in 1693 and increasingly deployed an ideology of white supremacy that drew, in part, on parallel ideological developments across the Atlantic world.Footnote 19 Yet it is telling that when choosing to justify the racializing order that it was producing in the colony, the Commons House made explicit reference to the struggle between savagery and civility.Footnote 20
The authority claimed by the colonial state, then, was the authority of a “civilized,” law-bound polity supposedly constituted amidst a sea of lawless “savagery.” But, in contrast to European states that were formed in this same period through the centralization of material power in state institutions, the colonial state in South Carolina had little or no material capacity with which to enforce its authoritative claims.Footnote 21 The colony depended on Indian allies, slaves, and free militiamen to defend itself during Queen Anne's War (1702–1713) and the Yamasee War (1715–1717), and social disorder remained rife in the colony until around 1730. Although in this early period the colony did establish a watch, a colonial militia, and after 1704 a slave patrol, these forces depended on the willingness of freemen to serve, which was subject to shirking, and they were organized on a local level rather than centrally.Footnote 22 Far from monopolizing “legitimate” force, as in Max Weber's canonical formulation, the colonial state rested precariously on its claim to an exclusive authority to decide on the question of legitimacy itself, a claim that was secured only by co-opting the material force of colonizer and (putatively) colonized alike.Footnote 23 By asserting a prerogative over legislation while lacking the centralized means to enforce its laws, the colonial state extended relations of authority and obligation over a population that retained for itself the means of violence necessary to give the state's authoritative pronouncements the force of law.
By paying attention to the savage/civilized binary that underpinned both settler colonialism and slavery, it is possible to isolate an intermediary step between the establishment of plantation slavery and its solidification in a racial order. This step can account for why other marginalized and racialized populations—Jews, South Asians, Turks, or the Irish—were not generally subjected to enslavement in English colonies. By the turn of the eighteenth century, English colonists, slave-traders, and philosophers acknowledged, at least in theory, that only those captured in a “just war” could lose their freedom.Footnote 24 However, as I will show, where a juridical subject whose rights were guaranteed by a “civilized” body of law did not face enslavement if captured in such a war, those “savage” peoples who supposedly lived beyond the protection of laws could be freely enslaved. The savage/civilized division is thus indispensible for understanding why Africans and Native Americans were the only populations systematically enslaved in English North America.
In what follows, I trace the process by which the colonial state established its authority in South Carolina and through which the plantation system established its mechanisms of control over an unfree labor system increasingly dominated by slaves of African ancestry. I begin by exploring how the colonial state asserted its authority over the master-slave relationship, a relation that evolved between the founding of the colony in 1670 and the emergence of a slave majority before 1708. I then examine the response of the Commons House to this slave majority. I highlight the conscious efforts of the legislature to order unfree labor, and organize colonial life more broadly, through the conflation of legal statuses (slave/free) with racializing phenotypic descriptions (black/white). The paper's third section is motivated by instances where this conflation of phenotype and legal status broke down, and seeks to explain these anomalies by analyzing the ideological justification that the Commons House offered for slavery. I show that eligibility for enslavement was tightly bound to the idea of “savagery.” In contrast to “Negroes” and “Indians,” those who were deemed “civilized” were ineligible for perpetual slavery, even if they were captured in a just war and even if they were not recognized as “white” or “Christian.” Finally, I turn to how authority was transformed into effective power and consider the policing of slavery in South Carolina. I offer an account of how the state enforced its authority over the entire colonial population through diffuse and decentralized mechanisms of power and how this policing system reinforced the emergent racial order in the colony.
THE RISE OF THE PLANTATION-COLONIAL COMPLEX
Motivated, in part, by a desire to attract settlers from the Caribbean, and perhaps by their own financial stakes in the African slave trade, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina always envisaged the use of slave labor in the colony.Footnote 25 In the Fundamental Constitutions, however, they emphasized the use of English “leet-men” working on a system of lordly manors, suggesting that slaves would merely supplement a largely English workforce.Footnote 26 This neo-feudal vision was ultimately undone by the refusal of English settlers to part with the relative freedom they had become accustomed to under the Commonwealth, as well as by the proprietors' success in attracting Barbadian settlers who were already accustomed to the use of enslaved labor.Footnote 27
Although the constitutions themselves were a dead letter,Footnote 28 they did outline the initial legal status of the “Negroe slave” in the colony. Most likely reflecting the influence of the family of Sir John Colleton, a Barbadian planter and Lord Proprietor, the constitutions afforded the slave-owner an “absolute power and Authority over his Negroe slaves, of what opinion or Religion soever.”Footnote 29 Locke, then secretary to the Proprietors, had edited this provision to augment the initial right of “absolute Authority” with “absolute power.” While scholars have paid considerable attention to Locke's role in this addition, they have done little to explore why this augmentation was necessary.Footnote 30 Locke's other political writings offer one way of uncovering the addition's meaning.Footnote 31 In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke based the condition of slavery on an intersection of the dual authorities of just war theory and natural law. The slave was to occupy a status of suspended death, “which is nothing else but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive [in a just war],” while the master was afforded “an absolute power over the Lives of those, who by putting themselves in a State of War, have forfeited them.”Footnote 32 In theory, a slave was a justly captured combatant whose death was held in abeyance so that he might serve the will of his captor.
Given the divergences between Locke's theory of slavery in the Second Treatise and the practices of enslaving Indians and Africans in Carolina and the Atlantic world, I am less interested in his theory than in what his use of language might tell us about what he meant by “power” and “authority” in the Fundamental Constitutions.Footnote 33 Richard Tuck has argued that the power/authority binary in English political thought was an innovation of the Civil War era.Footnote 34 According to Tuck, Locke replaced the power/authority binary of his contemporaries with a distinction between force (might, or what his contemporaries called “power”) and power (the power of the law, or what his contemporaries called “authority”).Footnote 35 But it is noteworthy that in place of the power/authority binary of his contemporaries Locke spoke of “authority” alongside the terms “power” and “force.” Although he used the terms “authority” and “power” inconsistently across his writings, the meaning of his addition to the Fundamental Constitutions can be grasped in those moments when he used these three terms—force, power, and authority—together.
As Tuck notes, “force” referred to material capability, which is a function of might, and “power” connoted a use of force that was authorized under the law.Footnote 36 “Authority,” then, denoted a further, curious capacity, sometimes grounded in popular consent and sometimes in natural law, which transformed force into power.Footnote 37 For Locke, “authority” was not a synonym for “power” as distinct from “force,” but was instead a necessary condition for the exercise of power, viz., for the lawful use of force.Footnote 38 Claims to this kind of “authority” were to prove crucial to the project of colonial state formation. However, rather than merely deriving from the a priori assertions of colonial charters, these claims to authority also drew upon and developed alongside material and ideological innovations that were affecting the entire Atlantic World. They took their specific form in South Carolina from the collective material and ideological life of a self-constituting moral community of “civilized” settlers, a colonial moral community from which slaves were expressly debarred.Footnote 39
In the final formulation of the master's power and authority under the Fundamental Constitutions, then, the slave was placed under the total control of the Carolina slave-owner and deprived of any legal status in his or her own right. In a strong statement of slavery's patriarchal foundations, the master's relationship to the slave, whether brutal or tender, was a matter of private rather than public law—a question of private property—within which the master could authorize his own use of force against the slave.Footnote 40 As paterfamilias, Locke argued in the Second Treatise, the master could exercise a limited right to punish his wife, servants, and children, though over his slaves he possessed a “Despotical Power … an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take away his Life, whenever he pleases.”Footnote 41 In South Carolina, at least initially, the slave suffered a similar fate, existing in the “civil dominion his master has over him.”Footnote 42 Unless the actions of the slave breached the peace of the wider society, the legal power of the magistrate did not touch the relation between master and slave.
The Fundamental Constitutions offer crucial insight into how the project of settling Carolina was imagined. However, they were quickly replaced by the settlers' own visions for the new polity, which were substantially shaped by a powerful group of Barbadians that made up almost half of Carolina's European settlers in 1670.Footnote 43 These Barbadians aspired to an economy based on plantation agriculture, and they imported African slaves from the West Indies to the colony from the outset.Footnote 44 Yet Africans were not the only unfree laborers in the infant colony; Indian slaves were a growing demographic until the end of the Yamasee War in 1717, and the early years of the colony also saw the arrival of significant numbers of European indentured servants.Footnote 45 By the end of the seventeenth century, though, and coinciding with the adoption of rice as a staple crop, the colony turned more and more toward the use of slaves, primarily from Africa.Footnote 46
As slavery emerged as the colony's primary source of labor, the colonial legislature redefined the power of the master over the slave. Without a firm precedent in English law, the colonists looked to the Caribbean in their search for a definition of slavery.Footnote 47 In the colony's first “better ordering” statute, of 1691, the slave was defined as “freehold” property.Footnote 48 As freehold or real estate, slaves were attached to and inseparable from specific landed estates and could only be alienated in settlement of a debt.Footnote 49 By 1696, the Commons House again redefined the slave's status. This definition remained in force until 1740, and declared: “All Negroes, Mollatoes, and Indians which at any time heretofore have been bought and Sold or now are and taken to be or hereafter Shall be Bought and Sold are hereby made and declared they and their Children Slaves to all Intents and purposes.”Footnote 50 In resting on a vague “all Intents and purposes” 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 known to be a slave, with the specific understanding of this term being derived from the existing practice of slavery.Footnote 51 By the early decades of the eighteenth century, this practice took the form of chattel slavery throughout the colony, which allowed slaves to be freely alienated by their masters.Footnote 52
This transformation in the legal foundation of slavery took for granted the state's role in mediating the master-slave relationship.Footnote 53 By defining the slave's status in law, the colonial state was both acknowledging the peculiarity of an institution of property in human beings and making itself the arbiter of the condition of slavery. Even though the definition of the slave was to be a matter of custom, the authority of custom was itself rooted in positive law.Footnote 54 As such, the relationship between master and slave depended on the recognition of the state, which also took it upon itself to regulate that relationship. The master-slave relationship was replaced by the nexus slave-state-master at the heart of the plantation-colonial complex, with the colonial state taking responsibility for limiting the freedom and entitlements of labor and for policing the activities of laborers and masters alike. By asserting a right to legislate and adjudicate the master-slave relationship in the name of public order, the colonial state denied that this was a purely private relation.
Though it is impossible to determine with certainty what motivated the turn to policing the master-slave relationship, two persistent concerns in “better ordering” statutes—fraternization among unfree laborers on the Sabbath, and the laxity with which some slave-owners treated their slaves—suggest that the state's progressive arrogation of authority over this relation was motivated by the concern that a lack of discipline on some plantations could precipitate a widespread slave revolt.Footnote 55 Moreover, at least initially, this concern extended to the prospects of an alliance between indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans and Indians, which had well-known precedents in North Carolina, Virginia, and across the Caribbean.Footnote 56 The policing of slaves beyond the plantation also came under scrutiny toward the end of the seventeenth century, with the colonists establishing special criminal courts for trying slaves for petty and serious offenses in 1691.Footnote 57 The earliest such court, established in 1687, was designed to prosecute slaves and servants for trading away their masters’ possessions without permission.Footnote 58 Although the authority of the master to police petty offenses on his plantation remained the norm, this 1687 procedure marked an early institutional intrusion into the master-slave relationship.
However, even if the master retained the authority to punish petty offenses on the plantation, the state added two constraints on the use of force against slaves. First, masters were now required to punish slaves guilty of minor offenses, with any failure to do so incurring a fine.Footnote 59 The master became an agent of the state within the “jurisdiction” of the plantation; he possessed the legal power of a magistrate and he was strictly obliged to apply it over his slaves. His relationship to the slave was no longer the purely private relation of ownership, but was now saturated with a public obligation to ensure the orderliness of his slaves, often through the application of harsh and life-threatening punishments.Footnote 60 Second, the force that masters could legally use against their slaves was constrained to a set of carefully enumerated punishments. They could punish a slave only to the extent allowed by the law, and any excessive use of force was prohibited. For example, in 1691 any person (including the slave-owner) who killed a slave “out of wilfulness, wantoness, or bloody mindedness” was to be imprisoned and forced to pay £50 to the slave's owner. Over the next four decades, the Commons House reduced the punishment for the inhumane treatment of slaves to a fine, even as imperial authorities in London called for masters who willfully killed their slaves to be executed.Footnote 61 The colonial state, that is, claimed for itself the authority to judge a master's punishment of his slaves.
That the restrictions the Commons House placed on the master's power to punish did not mark a humanitarian concern for slaves was evidenced by the fact that legislators simultaneously required masters to mutilate disobedient slaves.Footnote 62 By 1701, for instance, slaves who repeatedly ran away faced escalating punishments from public whipping to mutilation, castration, and ultimately death. In an effort to overcome laxity in the punishment of slaves, the colony compensated slave-owners in the event that a slave died in the course of a mandated punishment, and threatened fines where punishments were not carried out.Footnote 63 While offering no comfort to the slave, then, limitations on the legal power of the master exemplified a shift in the legal foundation of the master-slave relationship away from a purely private relationship to one saturated with public authority. Moreover, the obligation to police slaves fell to the population of white freemen as a whole. Freemen were required by law to challenge slaves encountered outside of a plantation to produce a “ticket” of permission from their master, and after 1701 could be impressed into the service of the colony's slave patrols.Footnote 64 Thus to be free in Carolina was to bear a dual obligation to defend the property of the slave-owner and to secure the public interest of the colony.
We should bear in mind that slave codes do not tell us everything about the day-to-day practice of slavery, not least because they were often unevenly enforced.Footnote 65 But because South Carolina's slave codes were the result of a deliberative process in a popularly elected assembly, they reveal a great deal about the ideological ground on which the plantation-colonial complex was constructed.Footnote 66 Moreover, the failure of slave-owners to enforce the colony's “better ordering” statutes suggests that the colonial state was increasingly arrogating authority over the master-slave relationship against the interests of individual slave-owners. Rather than affording the master unfettered personal power and authority over his slaves, the state sought to place his localized power on the plantation in the service of public order.
RACIALIZING PHENOTYPIC DIFFERENCE
The “better ordering” statutes evolved, as I have noted, alongside the emergence of a non-European majority in the colony. By 1703, the colonial population was almost evenly divided between free and unfree persons, with all but two hundred of the 3,550 unfree laborers being non-European slaves. Within five years, the Carolina slave population had ballooned to 5,500, including 1,400 Indians. This compared with 120 “white” servants and 3,960 “free whites.”Footnote 67 It is significant that the colony's first census, in 1708, unlike later such reports, did not give primacy to a racialized phenotype. Instead the population was divided along the axes of age (child/adult), legal status (free/servant/slave), and phenotype (white/Negro/Indian), with adults also being divided according to their phenotypic sex (men/women). This multiplicity of divisions betrayed the inchoate and relatively unstable status of “white” identity at this point.
The Carolina Commons House first invoked the language of “whiteness” in the “better ordering” statute of 1691, borrowing from the Jamaican slave law of 1684. This is consistent with Winthrop Jordan's finding that such language became fashionable in America after 1680.Footnote 68 Despite this relatively late turn to a language that cast most European settlers as a coherent “white” assemblage, many historians of colonial slavery have treated “race” as a material fact about human beings rather than a contingent and fluid social construct, and have thereby reified race and presupposed its salience.Footnote 69 In contrast, I follow Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper in treating race as a “category of practice” rather than a “category of analysis,” in the hope of explaining “the processes and mechanisms though which what has been called the ‘political fiction’ of [race] … can crystallize at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling reality.”Footnote 70 “Race,” then, was (and still is) a practice by which phenotypic differences were made politically salient. This practice was not invented in the Americas,Footnote 71 but it was there that “race” first came to structure an entire social order. Indeed, it would be a mistake to read the inclusion of phenotypic terminology in the first census of 1708 as exemplifying an already existing racial order. Instead, censuses, and the wider practices of labor management in colonial America, were precisely the means by which the colonial state established and maintained a racial order in the first instance, in part by making “race” appear to be a taken-for-granted marker of social, economic, and political standing.
In South Carolina, the salience of phenotypic difference became ever more apparent after the Yamasee War. Three reports produced in 1720—by Governor Robert Johnson, the Commons House, and the colony's London agents—highlighted the fact that the colony's slave population was now almost double that of the “white inhabitants,” which was thought to be “to the great indangering of the Province.”Footnote 72 Significantly, none of the reports of the 1720s mentioned the numbers of European indentured servants or Indian slaves in the colony, suggesting that a cleavage in the colonial labor force had crystallized around a phenotypic schema defined in terms of a white/black binary.
These omissions were not the result of a disappearance of Indian slaves or white servants. The number of European servants in Carolina was actually climbing through this period, and although the colony had begun to discourage the enslavement of Indians after the Yamasee War, references to indigenous slaves persist.Footnote 73 Instead, Indian slaves and those of some combination of Indian, African, or white ancestry appear to have been assimilated into the category of “negro slave” or “blacks” for the purpose of demographic calculations. For example, Governor James Moore's parish-by-parish count of 11,828 “slaves” in the colony in 1721 is strikingly similar to the figure of twelve thousand “Negro slaves” or “blacks” respectively offered by the Commons House and the London agents in 1720.Footnote 74 The extent of this conflation was made clear in tax statutes of 1716 and 1719. Whilst acknowledging the persistence of Indian slavery, the colonial legislature declared that “for preventing all doubts and scruples that may arise, what ought to be rated on mustees, mulattoes, &c., all and every such slave who is not entirely Indian, shall be accounted as negro.”Footnote 75 The “disappearance” of the Indian slave from population statistics, then, and the exceptional treatment of slaves who were “entirely Indian,” appear to have been effects of the progressive organization of labor according to a racializing schema that ran together the categories of “slave” and “Negro.”Footnote 76
The racial order that congealed in Carolina depended on the conflation of blackness with unfreedom. Moreover, rather than being the “unthinking decision” of settlers already convinced of their white supremacy, this racial order and the plantation-colonial complex that rested on it had to be carefully cultivated by the Commons House of Assembly.Footnote 77 The large number of Barbadian settlers who arrived in the colony did bring with them ideas about and institutions of African slavery. Yet the colony of South Carolina faced its own particular challenges, situated as it was on a remote imperial periphery, surrounded by European rivals and powerful indigenous neighbors, and with a population of unfree laborers that included an appreciable number of Native Americans.Footnote 78 In this context, the Commons House chose to regulate unfree labor in part by fostering cleavages within the colony's laboring population, consciously fashioning a racial order.
For example, in 1716 the legislature banned the importing of seditious whites such as criminals, “native Irish,” or “Papists,” who were thought likely to ally with Britain's imperial rivals or with slaves in the event of a war or revolt.Footnote 79 The following year, an act to discipline newly arrived servants penalized a host of relationships between whites and either free blacks or slaves. It threatened any white servant convicted of fleeing the colony with a slave with execution.Footnote 80 Moreover, a penalty of seven years of service was to be imposed on any white woman, free or servant, who conceived a child with a “negro or other slave or free negro.” Similarly, if a “free negro” fathered a child with a white woman, or if a white man, whether free or servant, fathered a child with “any negro woman,” he too was to be sentenced to seven years of servitude.Footnote 81 Here, the condition of servitude was to be heritable, albeit temporarily, with the “children of such unnatural and inordinate copulation” being bound as servants until adulthood.Footnote 82 Through these measures, the Commons House sought to instruct newly arrived servants in the racializing logic of the plantation-colonial complex in the hope of creating a white bulwark against the threat of slave insurrection.
This statute prescribed no punishment for a “negro woman” who begot a child with a white man, and made no mention of the fate of the child of such a relationship. The colonial legislature most likely presumed black women would already be slaves whose children automatically inherited their condition of enslavement. Matrilineal slave status was not enshrined in statute in Carolina until 1740, but it had long been the practice there.Footnote 83 This heritability of slavery through the 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) ancestry.Footnote 84 It also worked to redefine what it meant to be “white,” “negro,” or “mulatto,” as children with European ancestry came to be included in the category of “negro slaves.” This process replaced purely phenotypic distinctions with an increasingly racial order, but it did so only because the figure of the female “negro slave” had already been defined as eligible for enslavement.
It is also revealing that the colonial legislature could not apply the same penalty for sexual fraternization to slaves, for whom the threat of extended service was meaningless—both slaves and servants could be corporeally punished, but only servants or free persons could be condemned to further service.Footnote 85 This distinction reflected the different legal foundations of slavery and indentured servitude. Specifically, servitude was predicated on the notion that juridical subjects, already civilized and subject to a body of law, could freely contract themselves into temporary bondage.Footnote 86 In practice, this system was subject to considerable abuse, with servitude often being the result of kidnapping or press-ganging. However, servants were empowered to bring suit against their masters, and although they did so before courts dominated by the class of their oppressors, some servants do seem to have succeeded before the courts.Footnote 87 The lot of the slave was dire in comparison. As a captive in a supposedly “just” war whose execution was held in abeyance, the civically dead slave was deprived of almost all legal rights. Slaves could not sue their masters, and although the state could intervene in the master-slave relation, as chattels slaves had no right to appeal for it to do so.Footnote 88 Moreover, as presumptively uncivilized persons, slaves were thought morally incompetent to give evidence, except in the case where they were incriminating themselves or other slaves.Footnote 89 Tellingly, by 1740 this legal disability extended to any “negro, Indian, mulatto or mustizo, claiming his, her or their freedom,” who was required to enlist the aid of a (presumably white) guardian to bring suit on his or her behalf.Footnote 90
That this legal disability attached to both free and enslaved people of color mirrors the conceptual slippage noted earlier between the terms “slave” and “negro.” In this case, it was “freedom” that was conflated with “whiteness.” Although people of color could have their right to freedom confirmed by the courts, they could only do so with the aid of a white person, whose freedom could safely be presumed.Footnote 91 This conflation of freedom with whiteness and bondage with blackness was also evident in statutes in 1722 and 1735, which required slave-owners to finance the departure of any freed slave from the colony. If an erstwhile slave failed to depart within a year of being manumitted, he or she would “lose the benefit of such manumission, and continue to be a slave.”Footnote 92 The concept of a free person of color in South Carolina was becoming something of a contradiction in terms.
Nevertheless, a small number of free people of color continued to live in the province after 1722. For example, fifteen “Free negroes and Indians” were reported to be living in St. George's parish in 1726.Footnote 93 Although being “black” came to be the primary marker of unfreedom in this period, that free people of color like the family of Gideon Gibson could live in the colony, sometimes “passing” for white, suggests the continued fluidity of racial categories as well as the powerful force of the category of juridical subjecthood.Footnote 94 Former slaves and their descendants were endowed with the right of self-ownership through an act of legally recognized manumission, even though as people of color they often enjoyed fewer rights than white freemen.Footnote 95 A former slave might be compelled to a period of unfree labor for violating the law, as might any white person, but this would no longer be an unlimited bondage. A person recognized by the law as bearing a right of self-ownership could not be transformed into a slave.Footnote 96
SAVAGERY, CIVILITY, AND THE ORIGINS OF RACIAL SLAVERY
The possibility of a black “juridical subject” in the context of a progressive conflation of slavery and blackness implies that there was a missing term in the logic of racial slavery that did the work of connecting phenotype and legal status. Examining the colonial assembly's own justifications for its slave codes offers a means of tracing this link. At the heart of these justifications lay the very binary of savagery and civility that underpinned the project of settler colonialism—it was not one's phenotype or “race” that made someone eligible for enslavement, but rather his or her putative savagery.
In 1712, the Commons House, borrowing from the Barbados statute of 1688, justified special ordinances for slaves with the following preamble:Footnote 97
Whereas, the plantations and estates of this Province cannot be well and sufficiently managed and brought into use, without the labor and service of negroes and other slaves; and forasmuch as the said negroes and other slaves brought unto the people of this Province for that purpose are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws, customs, and practices of this Province; but that it is absolutely necessary, that such other constitutions, laws and orders, should in this Province be made and enacted, for the good regulating and ordering of them, as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined.Footnote 98
Although earlier Carolina statutes had borrowed elements from the Barbadian “better ordering” law of 1661 (and from the Jamaican statute of 1684), they had not adopted its preamble, which described Africans in similar terms as “an heathenish brutish and uncertain dangerous pride of people.”Footnote 99 Historians have often observed that charges of barbarism, savagery, and heathenism were used to justify the enslavement of Africans, along with the biblical authority of the “Curse of Ham.”Footnote 100 It is noteworthy that Carolina eschewed the religiously inflected language of “heathenism,” perhaps reflecting the fact that the laws of Carolina had envisaged the possibility of Christian slaves from the first settlement of the colony.Footnote 101 Instead, the 1712 statute defined the slave as “barbarous, wild, and savage,” in opposition to the colony's questionable self-image as a civilized, well-ordered polity. I am interested in drawing attention to the specifically juridical content of this savage/civilized binary.
This was the first time that the colony provided a justification for its harsh slave code. Partially echoing an earlier argument by a prominent Indian agent, Thomas Nairne, for “civilizing” intractable Indians through enslavement, this preamble justified special measures to counter the slave's “natural” inclination for “disorders, rapines, and inhumanity.”Footnote 102 David Brion Davis notes that slave-owning societies often envisaged enslavement as a means of “civilizing” foreign peoples, but the 1712 statute implied no such telos.Footnote 103 With the exception of those instances where masters voluntarily manumitted their slaves, acts that were subject to legal restrictions in the colony, the disciplining power of the slave code would not produce newly civilized persons. Instead, by entering a condition of civic death, the slave was thrown into a nebulous conceptual space between savagery and civility. A slave might be trained in a craft or converted to Christianity, but he or she could not become a juridical subject without the intervention of the master.
The juridical binary of savagery and civility traced a line between slavery and freedom that no longer coincided with religious differences. This marked a rupture in prevailing prohibitions on the enslavement of fellow Christians.Footnote 104 Rebecca Goetz, writing about Virginia, argues that this unmooring of freedom from Christianity redefined what it meant to be truly Christian, which came to be bound up with “whiteness.”Footnote 105 I would assert that it also reflected a longer-run change in understandings of freedom itself. Although Englishmen may have thought that the decline of bonded labor in England was tethered to the rise of Christianity, by the time Carolina was founded it was no longer one's faith but one's status as a rights-bearing subject that guaranteed a claim to freedom.Footnote 106 Moreover, Englishmen had long seen Christianity as itself dependent on the attainment of civility.Footnote 107 With the unmooring of freedom from Christianity, therefore, came a simultaneous separation of Christianity from civility, revealing the roots of formal freedom in that latter condition. An Englishman was protected from enslavement because, as a subject of the civilized English king, he was endowed with the “Liberties and Properties” of juridical subjecthood.Footnote 108 And yet the idea that Christianity, civility, and freedom were interrelated persisted among slave-owners and, more importantly, among their slaves. Carolina slave-owners objected to conversion because they feared it would make their slaves intractable or would be used as a path to manumission, and their slaves may well have had precisely that goal in mind.Footnote 109 But the conceptual ground of freedom had shifted behind the back of this struggle for freedom through Christian conversion, coming to rest on the rights afforded by human laws.Footnote 110
That protection from enslavement flowed from juridical subjecthood rather than baptism is reflected in the English prohibition on the enslavement of certain non-Christian populations. In spite of the richness of the historiography of racial slavery, scholars have failed to offer an adequate account of why colonies like South Carolina only utilized African and Native American slaves. As David Eltis has asked: “If the elite could kill Irish, Huguenots, Jews, prisoners of war, convicts, and many other marginalized groups, why could they not enslave them?”Footnote 111 Certainly, Eltis and others are correct that the predominance of African and Native American slaves depended on existing indigenous practices of enslavement in Africa and America, and on the relative costs of enslaved, indentured, and free wage labor.Footnote 112 However, the ready availability of African and Indian slaves cannot alone account for why no Jew or Irishman ever served as a slave in Anglo-America. Nor can it explain why specific non-Christian peoples were ineligible for enslavement. Eltis argues that the enslavement of Europeans had become inconceivable as a result of a salient division of the world by this point into Europe and its outside, with a prohibition on enslaving those “brought up as European.”Footnote 113 However, he offers little evidence of any shared “European” identity in the seventeenth century,Footnote 114 nor is it clear that peripheral populations such as the Irish would have been counted within such an assemblage, even if they were increasingly identified as “white” in the Americas. Moreover, in treating Europe as an aggregate, Eltis obscures variation in practices of enslavement across European states. The English, for example, shied away from the enslavement of certain non-European populations, not least the Turks and the Chinese, but also the inhabitants of South Asia and Southeast Asia, where the East India Company opted instead to import slaves from Madagascar and the Comoro Islands.Footnote 115 It is in these variations that the work of the savage/civilized binary comes most clearly to the fore.
As “infidels,” Jews and Turks were subject to forms of racial stereotyping similar to those applied to Africans, yet they were not enslaved in the English Atlantic. On the contrary, although formally banned from England until the mid-seventeenth century, Jews were among the first settlers of the English colony of Barbados in the 1630s and 1640s.Footnote 116 Moreover, in an act of 1682 that explicitly readmitted the possibility of Native American slavery in Virginia, the legislature banned the enslavement of servants who were “Turks and Moors whilest in amity with his majesty.” All others who could not prove they were Christians before their capture were condemned to be “adjudged, deemed, and taken to be slaves.”Footnote 117 This provision was clarified in 1705 to add a protection from enslavement for those who could prove they were “free in England, or any other christian country” before arriving in the colony.Footnote 118 Juridical subjecthood was not confined to Christians or Europeans.
As the figure who had supposedly escaped the state of nature and come to inhabit a recognized legal order, the juridical subject was imagined to possess legal rights irrespective of his or her faith or phenotype. This is not to suggest that the English thought all civilized societies were equal.Footnote 119 The proviso that this protection extended to Turks and Moors “in amity with his majesty” left open the possibility that a “just” war might allow for the enslavement of such persons. As subjects of non-Christian Princes, Turks were never considered to be the equals of Englishmen—or Christians for that matter, who could not be enslaved in a just war—but by the seventeenth century they were afforded protections that were not extended to Indians or Africans in amity with the Crown. Admittedly, traders in South Carolina were prohibited from knowingly purchasing any so-called “free Indian” from any “Nation that is in Amity and under the Protection of [the colonial] Government.”Footnote 120 Although the colony treated allied or subject Indians as “free,” and manumitted them where they were found as slaves within the colony, they did not order the purchase and manumission of such Indians who were offered in trade by indigenous slave-traders. In contrast to a Frenchman held as a slave among the Cherokee, who was purchased and freed by the colony, the “protection” offered to Indians allies was limited to preventing their enslavement within South Carolina.Footnote 121
Perhaps most anomalous is the treatment of the oft-maligned “pagan” and “savage” Irish. Their protection from enslavement was not a consequence of Irish “whiteness” or Christianity, which were often contested, but rather of their existing liege subjection to the King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, which afforded them the protection of juridical subjecthood.Footnote 122 Whilst jurists often questioned the extent of English jurisdiction over Ireland,Footnote 123 the Crown insisted that its native Irish subjects warranted legal protections. Queen Elizabeth, for example, insisted that the Irish were rightful subjects who were entitled to the protection of the Queen's law, allowing them to contest the seizure of lands in the Munster plantation in the courts.Footnote 124 Irish servants arriving in America without contracts of indenture, on the other hand, did often serve longer terms than their English counterparts, and native Irishmen were often likened to Native Americans.Footnote 125 Nonetheless, the Irish were spared the condition of perpetual bondage by their subjection to a body of “civilized” law.
Whilst living in a condition of savagery made a person's enslavement thinkable for Englishmen, it was not sufficient to condemn a person to enslavement. The requirement of capture in a “just” war remained central to English justifications of slavery. In practice, such justifications were rarely tested, but when 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 Massachusetts in 1645, two African slaves captured in Guinea were released from bondage after the General Court deemed them to have been “unlawfully taken.”Footnote 126 Similar manumissions occurred in Maryland in 1676 and in Barbados in 1702, and they were often seen in South Carolina's trade in Indian slaves.Footnote 127 The Massachusetts Court was clear that the primary issue in the trial of the accused slavers was the manner of the Africans' enslavement—“ye hainous & crying sinn of man stealing”—rather than the fact of slavery itself.Footnote 128 Massachusetts, for its part, had not shied away from enslaving Block Island or Pequot Indians in the colony's supposedly just war of 1637, and had passed a law in 1641 that limited lawful slavery to those captured in such just wars.Footnote 129 However, the failure of Europeans to enslave “civilized” captives of European wars suggests that capture in a just war was, by itself, an insufficient basis for slavery. Furthermore, there is something telling about the grounds on which Massachusetts claimed jurisdiction over this case of “man stealing” in Guinea, namely that these “acts and outrages” were committed by residents of the colony in a place “where there was noe civill government which might call them to accompt.”Footnote 130 The savage/civilized binary traced a distinction between two types of societies: “savage” communities, where just wars could make slaves of peoples who supposedly lacked any rights grounded in law, and civilized polities, which claimed from themselves the sole right to adjudicate the justice of any given war, and where even in the event of a just war subjects were protected from falling into enslavement. It was only when a just war was tethered to the savage/civilized binary that the conditions for lawful enslavement were met.
In practice, commercial interests played a significant role in tracing the boundary between savagery and civility and in determining which Africans and Indians were protected from enslavement.Footnote 131 English depictions of Africans, whether “Moors” or “Negroes,” linked civility with a preference for trade and wildness with an inclination to oppose it; “Negroes” were generally represented as being more uncivilized and lawless than “Moors.”Footnote 132 Despite these representations, Englishmen depended on the trading infrastructures of independent African polities to acquire the vast majority of African slaves. Unlike the “savage” spaces described by the Massachusetts Court, English traders recognized the authority of these polities, which were sufficiently powerful to command equitable trade relations and resist colonization.Footnote 133 The African slave-trader, whether “Moor” or “Negro,” was recognized as a juridical subject and was not rendered eligible for enslavement by his appearance, even though he was likely cast as less “civilized” than the Englishman.
This reflected the formal equality that was granted, as Robin Blackburn notes, to those who had “something to sell” in an emergent capitalist order.Footnote 134 In contrast, Africans (and Native Americans) who had little of value to trade were depicted as uncivilized persons ripe for enslavement. This connection of commercialism, civility, and freedom on one hand, and savagery and bondage on the other, is well illustrated in the case of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu. Held as a slave in Maryland, Ayuba was purchased by a group of Englishmen who saw in his reputed high birth, his ability to write Arabic, and his “affable carriage” the marks of “no common slave.” He was eventually emancipated with the aid of the Royal African Company, which hoped to use him as a factor as it sought to expand its trade in his native Senegambia. Ayuba's commercial usefulness and his civil ways underwrote his juridical subjecthood.Footnote 135
As the antithesis of the juridical subject, the slave was assumed to have had nothing to bring to market except under the sovereign direction of the master, dispossessed even of ownership over his or her labor power.Footnote 136 Far from being an unspoken “cultural norm,” however, the justification for enslaving particular non-European populations was contested and worked out in a dense thicket of discourse about savagery and civility.Footnote 137
POLICING UNFREE LABOR
After “savages” had been enslaved and the colonial state had asserted its authority over the master-slave relationship, it still faced the problem of how to transform this authority into effective power. Doing so depended on mobilizing a material capacity beyond its immediate control. White servants, freemen, allied Indians, and even slaves would be called upon to fight and die to preserve the plantation-colonial complex.
As noted earlier, through the saturation of the master-slave relationship with public obligation, unfree laborers were governed primarily on the plantation itself. Crucial to the evolution of this system of plantation governance, as the Commons House saw it, was the increased importation of European servants, who were to check slave resistance, and the slowing of the rate of slave imports.Footnote 138 The idea that white servants would provide a buffer against black insurrection presupposed an affinity between white laborers and their masters. However, rather than resting on the presumption of white racial solidarity, the Commons House sought to drive a wedge between these white servants and their fellow unfree laborers and thereby fracture opportunities for class solidarity. As I have said, one part of this policy was the imposition of harsh penalties for sexual fraternization between whites and blacks and for servants who fled their servitude in the company of slaves. Another was the mandating of managerial hierarchies within the laboring class on the plantation. By requiring plantations to maintain a minimum ratio of whites to slaves, and by insisting that one of the white men employed on every plantation be either the “master or manager,” the colonial government after 1701 aimed to divide black and Indian laborers from white overseers.Footnote 139
Despite the increased racialization of slavery, and in contrast to Morgan's account of early Virginia, in eighteenth-century South Carolina class conflict persisted between poor whites and the planter and merchant elites.Footnote 140 Poorer Carolinians may indeed have aspired to the elevated social status that came with slave-ownership, but colonial policies often made it difficult for these colonists to purchase slaves.Footnote 141 As late as 1726, a quarter of households in the relatively affluent parish of St. George's owned no slaves, and over half of the remaining households owned fewer than seven slaves.Footnote 142 Slave-ownership was even less common in the poorer parishes on the colonial periphery.Footnote 143 While low country plantation owners focused on the threat of slave revolts, this was likely a less immediate concern for poorer settlers in the borderlands who faced renewed attacks by the Yamasee in 1727.Footnote 144
This divergence of interests came to a head in 1728–1729 in a crisis over paper money, which left the colony without a functioning legislature, judiciary, or system of tax collection. The details of the dispute are beyond the scope of this paper, but the solution to the crisis highlights the connections between the project of settler colonialism and the solidification of South Carolina's racial order.Footnote 145 Its centerpiece was a “township scheam” for the settlement of the backcountry proposed by Governor Robert Johnson. The scheme proposed ten new towns to be settled by European Protestants on the lands of the Catawba and other Indians.Footnote 146 The towns would create a buffer between the agriculturally productive low country and the surrounding Indians and bolster the colony's white minority. The scheme was to be financed in part by a £10 duty on the purchase of each slave imported to the colony.Footnote 147 The proposal, then, promised increased security for poor whites living in the borderlands even as it made it more difficult for them to acquire slaves. While preserving class differences, this solution also bolstered the racial order. After all, captive Africans would provide the labor to “make good the expulsion of the Indians,” as Blackburn puts it, and duties on this human commodity would cover the cost of securing the colony against putatively hostile Indians and of shoring up the white population against the black slave majority.Footnote 148
The linkage of threats posed by Indians and slaves ran throughout the colonial regime of labor policing. In the materially weak colonial state, the policing of unfree labor—whether black, white, or Indian—depended on the assistance of the indigenous populations that the township scheme was supposed to defend against. In the early years of settlement, the Lords Proprietors had encouraged the colonists to maintain good relations with their neighboring Indians who might prove helpful in returning runaway slaves, mirroring the role that slave patrols would play within the colony.Footnote 149 In 1701, 1707, and 1721 temporary laws were passed authorizing Indians to use force against any person leaving the colony who was unable to produce a “tickett” from the secretary of the province permitting their departure. They could “beat, maime or assault any [runaway],” and as long as there was a white man accompanying the Indians they were entitled to kill the runaway if necessary.Footnote 150 Whether white, black, or Indian, and whether free or unfree, those fleeing the colony were made legally subject to the neighboring Indians in their capacity as agents of the colonial state.
At the same time that Indians were policing the bounds of the colony for runaways, unfree laborers were being enlisted to defend it against external threats, not least from surrounding Indian communities.Footnote 151 Although difficult to fathom given the colonists' persistent concerns about slave insurrections, between Queen Anne's War and the Yamasee War the government of South Carolina armed slaves to defend the colony against enemy incursions, with half the militia being composed of black slaves in 1708.Footnote 152 Only “trusty” slaves were to be enlisted and trained for service in the militia, and in the event that they killed or captured an enemy they were to be rewarded with their freedom.Footnote 153 Slaves may well have served diligently out of the reasonable fear that their own lives were put at risk by Indian attacks, though the role played by Indians in capturing runaway slaves also meant that strong surrounding Indian polities worked against the interests of the slave.
The colonial government also found other means to foreclose cooperation between neighboring Indians, slaves, and free blacks and Indians living in the colony. After 1701, the Commons House sought to limit the involvement of slaves and servants in the Indian trade, and in 1731 the legislature enacted heavy penalties for the employment of free or enslaved “Indians or negroes” in the trade.Footnote 154 In 1725, Commissioner for Indian Affairs George Chicken argued that slaves employed in the Indian trade might forge an alliance with neighboring Indians against the colony.Footnote 155 He had good reason to be concerned; a decade earlier, when Chicken attempted to draw the Cherokee Indians to the colony's side in the Yamasee War, his efforts were stymied by two black runaways who told the Cherokee “a parcell of Lies which hindred their coming down.”Footnote 156
The effect of Indian familiarity with African slaves was also evident during the Tuscarora War of 1712. While attempting, among other things, to recover twenty-four runaway black slaves being harbored by the Tuscarora, the colonial forces encountered and were unable to breach an advanced Indian fortification, which had been constructed under the tutelage of a runaway slave.Footnote 157 An alliance between Indians and slaves could afford the latter a refuge from their bondage, and the skills of slaves trained as craftsmen or militia soldiers, or of those who brought military expertise with them from Africa, could pose a significant threat to the colonial settlements.Footnote 158 Exemplifying this potential for alliance, Indians continued to offer an avenue of escape to slaves during and after the Yamasee War.Footnote 159
The possibility of cooperation between slaves and Indians indicates both the relative weakness of cleavages separating the unfree laborers of Carolina from the surrounding Indian communities and the incompleteness of the colonial government's control over populations in and around the colony. Still, moments of resistance that brought blacks and Indians into coalition against the 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 to liberate African slaves, South Carolina was enlisting Creek Indians to recover those same runaways.Footnote 160 Moreover, just as the colony could count on black militiamen at the height of the Yamasee War, so too did it plan to enlist the aid of allied Indians, this time the Chickasaw and the Catawba, in response to the Stono Rebellion of 1739.Footnote 161 Although slaves and surrounding Indian communities often found creative ways to manipulate the colonial state to their own ends, the colonial order also benefited from tensions among Indian communities and between the interests of slaves and free Indians. The choices made by slaves and neighboring Indians, whether in resistance or in pursuit of their own interests, all too often reinforced, perhaps unwittingly, the colonial state's authority.
CONCLUSION
In presenting the management of unfree labor in colonial South Carolina as an instance of state formation, I have focused on how the displacement of the authority to adjudicate the master-slave relationship from the master to the colonial government entailed obligations for a range of actors. Masters compelled to enforce state-mandated punishments against slaves, “white” indentured servants appointed to oversee their fellow unfree laborers, and Indians employed to return runaways were all drawn into relations of obligation to preserve the plantation-colonial complex. At the same time, “trusty” slaves were enlisted to defend the colony against threats from without. Each of these sets of actors worked, often unwittingly, to reinforce the savage/civilized binary in which the authority of the colonial state and the racialization of colonial life were grounded. However, colonial freemen also fell under regimes for policing unfree labor, however, whether they were merchants who trafficked in slaves or planters who owned them. I want to conclude by briefly suggesting that these freemen must have been aware of the material weakness of the colonial state and that this may have contributed to the deepening of the savage/civilized divide and its eventual subsumption into an ideology of white supremacy.
Again, in 1701 the Commons House passed a temporary law restricting the departure from the colony of any person—whether free or unfree, rich or poor, white, black, or Indian—without express permission from the secretary of the province. This statute, revived in 1707 and again in 1721, was designed to prevent settlers from deserting the colony for “Virginia and other Governments,” and amounted to an extension over the entire colonial population of the “ticketing” system originally designed to police slaves found off their plantations.Footnote 162 Those found outside the notional spatial boundaries of the colonial state—“the northward of Sante River or … the southward of Savana River”—could be challenged for their ticket and returned to the judgment of the colony, violently if necessary.Footnote 163 Under this statute, the freemen of the colony, in an admittedly narrow sense, found themselves subject to the same regimes of control as those applied to unfree laborers.
Perhaps most striking is how this statute revealed the colonial state's tenuous foundations. When the Commons House empowered allied Indians to intercept those departing the colony, the rights-bearing juridical subject came to be policed by the allegedly “wild” and “savage” Indian polities that ruled over the colonial borderlands. In authorizing Indians to act as agents of the state beyond the reach of the colony's own power, the Commons House effectively co-opted the material force of autonomous Indian communities through a precarious claim to extra-jurisdictional authority. In doing so, it underscored both the spatial and material limits of the colonial state, and the conceptual and practical dependence of its putatively “civilized” order on the “savage” exterior that lay beyond the colonial settlements.
As the freeman passed beyond the settlements, then, he cannot have been unaware of the liminality of the borderlands—a space over which colonial and imperial claims to authority were articulated, but within which the colonial state lacked the material capacity necessary to effect legal power. This liminality may have suggested to the freeman the highly contingent nature of his social, economic, and political privileges, which were products of an infrastructure of domination that bled, at its limit, into the very savagery that he imagined himself to have been raised above. Moreover, the realization that the settlements were surrounded not by a disorderly wilderness, but instead by communities of well-ordered and materially powerful Indians challenged the very self-conception of the “civilized” colonial settler. Faced with the fiction of the savage/civilized binary, and constrained by their material weakness, those colonists intent on perpetuating their privilege had little option but to deepen their ideological commitment to a claimed supremacy that was increasingly cast in racial terms.
