Felonious Transactions: Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787–1860

"I was born in South Carolina," begins John Andrew Jackson's 1862 narrative, The Experiences of a Slave in South Carolina.¹ Born on a cotton plantation in Sumter, South Carolina in 1825, Jackson made a daring escape from Sumter to Boston in 1846, but not before he experienced the horrors of antebellum plantation slavery in, arguably, the state most dedicated to preserving slavery as a social, economic, and legal institution. In his account, Jackson remarked that black slaves experienced physical and psychic abuse regularly on southern plantations at the hands of their enslavers. However, violence was not slaveholders' only tool to extract labor from bondspeople; they also used economic incentives. Jackson described how his first master established a store on his Sumter plantation, out of which he sold liquor to whites during the day and, to supplement his income, he traded with slaves during the night. According to Jackson, this slaveholder encouraged local enslaved people to bring him stolen cotton and in return, they received whiskey. The slaveholder's rate of exchange was 100 pounds of cotton for one gallon of whiskey. Jackson's master not only enticed enslaved people with the promise of the spirituous liquor but he also swindled them in the exchange. The slaveholder could sell 100 pounds of cotton for $14 in the local marketplace. At the same time, a gallon of whiskey was worth $1. Therefore, while enslaved people bartered for whiskey, not the monetary value of their cotton, the slaveholder made $13 for every 100 pounds of cotton brought to him by local slaves. Ultimately, the bondspeople failed to receive just compensation for their cotton as this slaveholder's wealth grew. Jackson even asserted that "the slaves did not know" the market rates of cotton or whiskey, so in the end, "they were cheated."² This planter's trade with slaves—buying cotton at a low price and selling for a much higher one—helped him gain the financial footing to expand his investments in both land and slaves. "This method of getting rich," Jackson disclosed, "is very common among the slaveholders of South Carolina."³

The type of economic exchange that Jackson described was neither an antebellum-era phenomenon nor was it the only form of commercial activity in which enslaved people in South Carolina engaged. Indeed, enslaved people participated in a variety of independent moneymaking pursuits. Yet, as Jackson states, not only was trade between enslaved people and slaveholders common in antebellum South Carolina but slaveholders often exploited enslaved peoples' interest in commodity exchange to augment their own wealth.

Felonious Transactions: Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787–1860 interrogates the relationship between South Carolina's economy of slavery, local regulation, and the slaves' economy between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Using an array of documentary evidence, including plantation account books, court records, and legislative petitions, this dissertation connects enslaved peoples' moneymaking strategies to the changing landscape of local legal regulation and economic life in South Carolina during a period of dramatic economic change. It argues that the slaves' economy persisted in South Carolina not only because enslaved people continued to invest time and energy in their own economic pursuits but also because planters, merchants, and non-slaveholding whites exploited, and ultimately profited off of, enslaved peoples' continued investment in local networks of trade.

Felonious Transactions asks the following questions: Did the slaves' economy change? More specifically, how did slaves adapt their trading activities to the mercurial nature of economic life in early national and antebellum South Carolina? This dissertation answers the aforementioned questions by analyzing how the slaves' economy evolved in one state: South Carolina. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slaveholders in South Carolina were among the most ardent defenders of slavery as a system that shaped legal, economic, and social relationships between enslaved black people, free people of color, slaveholding whites, and non-slaveholding whites. Indeed, during the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, South Carolina's delegates forcefully defended fellow planters' proslavery agendas and...