Runaways, Refugees, and Race in the Revolutionary Era

A recent wave of new scholarship investigates the intersection of slavery and law in early American history. Although the particular focus on slavery and law emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century has produced an embarrassment of rich new works tackling challenging questions in the field: Who makes law? Whose voices mattered to courts, legislators, and the wider legal community? A related set of inquiries asks how enslaved individuals interacted with and experienced the legal system. What kinds of legal cases involved people of African descent, and how did these cases shape broader legal doctrines? ¹A multitude of voices contributed to the development of a law of slavery throughout early America, and, as these two books attest, the efforts of enslaved and free people of African descent were essential to the story.

In addition to recognizing the importance of enslaved and free people of African descent to legal history, both of these books wrestle with the topic of comity—how courts in one jurisdiction chose to treat the laws of other jurisdictions. For example, how did slave and free states (or nations) handle legal conflict that arose in their courts? Emily Blanck's work traces how Massachusetts and South Carolina interacted in the years after the Tyrannicideaffair, a dispute over the status of thirty-four enslaved Africans from South Carolina who arrived in Massachusetts after their capture from a British ship, while Kenneth R. Aslakson's book discusses how the migration of refugees from Saint Domingue influenced the role of Louisiana's courts in making racial distinctions. In the era of the American Revolution and the first decades of the United States, concerns over how states and nations worked together and respected each other's laws were central to the larger project of nation building and lawmaking.

Blanck's Tyrannicideis a short, readable account of the conflict between South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of thirty-four enslaved Africans from the Waccamaw Peninsula of South Carolina. Some of these individuals might have fled their enslavement in late April/early May 1779 and others may have fallen victim to British privateers, but the group ended up on an unnamed British vessel. The details of their initial capture are unknown and, as Blanck argues, might be different for each of the enslaved individuals. The group eventually reached a British ship off the coast of South Carolina, and, after two attacks by privateers, the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicidebrought the enslaved prisoners to Boston Harbor on June 16, 1779. In Blanck's telling, Massachusetts officials "chose to reject the idea that they were property and recognized their humanity and the choices they made" (81) when the captives requested to be sent home to slavery in South Carolina. Blanck explains this decision by suggesting that the enslaved captives were "no doubt exhausted by the perils of life on a privateer" (81). Although twenty of the individuals left shortly after their arrival, the crux of the conflict between the two states concerned the fourteen enslaved people who stayed in Boston for a prolonged period after their owners were delayed in retrieving them. Once this group integrated into the local black community of Boston, they resisted efforts by their former owners to return them to slavery. The resulting conflict set off a flurry of letters between the states' governors and, as Blanck argues, contributed to broader debates over fugitive slaves in the era before the U.S. Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause.

Blanck argues that variations in the states' historical experiences with slavery—rather than fundamental ideological differences—are what caused Massachusetts and South Carolina to oppose each other during the constitutional debates. In four chronological chapters...