5 - Res Publica

Summary

British newcomers to South Carolina saw no irreconcilable tension between English law and the ownership of slaves, and in Chapter Five I explore how administrative law in occupied Charlestown evolved to manage an increasingly mobile slave population. Rather than reforming colonial slave law, British administrators and military officers relied heavily upon colonial precedents as they balanced their need to maintain South Carolina’s plantation economy against their desire to employ the labor of slaves in British army departments. Individual British administrators also learned to buy, sell, and argue over slaves, adopting slavery’s legal language as they sought to supplement their incomes and build wealth. As they established their own plantations and confiscated the human property of people they called rebels, they, too, treated slaves as things on a daily basis, replicating local legal practices that did not appear from their perspective to be maladaptive. Consequently, the legal administration of occupied Charles Town tended to support rather than undermine slavery as an institution, despite growing antislavery sentiment in England.