4 - Equity

Summary

In Chapter Four, I watch as South Carolina colonists adapted another, much older set of legal categories and procedures, transforming their local Chancery Court into a slave court. Analyzing unstudied manuscript litigation records reveals that colonists routinely asked Chancellors to recognize property interests in people and to facilitate the transfer of familial wealth in the form of slaves. In doing so, they relied upon procedures common to English equity courts, and they invoked familiar descriptions of equity as a concept. Whereas at common law complainants were constrained by traditional forms of action, Chancery procedures gave South Carolina colonists an opportunity to claim enslaved people when evidence had been destroyed, when relatives conspired to conceal slaves, or when witnesses could not be located. Using the relative openness of Chancery bill procedure to tell their complicated stories, they asked the Court to intervene and adjudicate the space between the customary and legal. In doing so, they lay bare the dense web of arrangements and assumptions involving human property that made their plantation economy work, and the Court’s role in perpetuating those arrangements. In a place where peopled were deemed objects at law, equity – a law rooted in notions of justice and fairness – ironically opened up space for litigants to articulate claims to human beings.