Tyrannicide: Forging American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck (review)

Emily Blanck’s ambitious work traces how Massachusetts and South Carolina “embedded their separate and common experiences with slavery … into the foundations of American law” by focusing on the Tyrannicide affair and its aftermath (p. 8). This incident began in 1779 when a British privateer seized a Spanish ship and its cargo, including thirty-four slaves, from South Carolina. The American privateer ships Tyrannicide and Hazard later captured the British ship, taking it and its cargo to Boston. While most of the slaves were immediately returned to South Carolina, fourteen who were owned by brothers Percival and Anthony Pawley remained in legal limbo in Massachusetts until 1783. The majority of the book focuses on negotiations between the two states over these slaves.

Drawing largely on secondary works, Blanck also chronicles how slavery in South Carolina and Massachusetts differed. South Carolinians created a plantation economy and instituted a restrictive slave code beginning in the 1690s. In Massachusetts, family labor supported a diversified economy, and slavery, while present, was less common. Though little is new here, the comparison supports her contention that lived experience shaped different rhetoric about slavery and freedom in the two states. No one knew this better than the fourteen Pawley slaves, whose case adds a heartbreaking realness to differing legal practices. Blanck no doubt wished to explore the case of the Pawley slaves more fully. She deftly reconstructs their lives as far as the sources permit, relying on legal context to fill in the gaps.

Using law codes, cases, official correspondence, and diaries, Blanck also reconstructs the different legal environments experienced by slaves in both states. Still, Blanck makes it clear that Massachusetts law recognized the Pawley slaves as property. Despite growing distaste for slavery in Massachusetts, the state knew that emancipating the property of South Carolinians during the Revolution might “[challenge] the American alliance more deeply” (p. 103). When Massachusetts notified South Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress that “Massachusetts had their slave property,” Blanck posits, Massachusetts was signaling a willingness to compromise on slavery for the sake of national unity (p. 102).

But fortunately for the Pawley slaves, Massachusetts and South Carolina law “would drift deeply apart when the rights of citizens expanded” during the 1780s (p. 116). In Massachusetts, some slaves began launching successful freedom petitions in the courts, which culminated in the 1783 Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that effectively abolished slavery. A mere four months after that decision, an agent was sent to claim the fourteen Pawley slaves. Only eight were located, but they all refused to return to South Carolina. They were not forcibly returned, at least in part because Massachusetts refused to arrest them. Blanck located three former Pawley bondmen in the 1790 Massachusetts census listed as heads of their household, indicating that at least some were able to retain their freedom.

Blanck’s is not the first scholarly monograph to note that northern states valued “stability and union” over slavery’s end and black Americans’ freedom (p. 164). Like other authors, she reminds readers that constitutional “debates were not about the existence of slavery but about its magnitude” (p. 164). She seemingly concurs with David Waldstreicher in Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2010) that forging the U.S. government was, in large measure, about forging slave law. She reaches this conclusion with innovative sources and methodology. Instead of constitutional debates, she examines how lived experiences molded state laws and how specific events “forced both states to concretely debate the boundaries of slavery and freedom, especially as they become enshrined in national law” (p. 2).