Abstract

"The Kings: How Freedom Became Coercion for the Family that Built the American South’s Bridges "

Ann Daly, University of South Florida, Tampa (ann_daly@alumni.brown.edu)

This paper uses the King family to examine the relationship between expert labor, slavery, and freedom in the antebellum US South. Born enslaved, Horace King, his mother, Susan, and siblings Washington and Clarissa designed and built bridges across every major river in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. As the cotton frontier continued to move west, enslavers wanted the government to build roads and bridges to help get cotton to market. States and municipalities responded by borrowing money to build infrastructure. Bridge building required significant expertise; Horace and Washington personally designed bridges, milled lumber, and supervised crews in remote areas—a set of abilities that few others possessed.

The particularities of slavery’s legal regimes combined with the political economy of bridge construction—the experience needed and the enormous amount of debt required—shaped how the King’s enslavers approached appropriating the family’s labor. On one hand, King’s enslaver’s legal ownership of King himself gave him the legal right to claim ownership of King’s expertise and build a business around the family. On the other hand, King’s legal commodification as fungible property meant that his enslaver could also lose control of King’s knowledge to his creditors. In 1846, the King family’s enslaver, John Goodwin, faced bankruptcy. Caught between legal institutions that allowed him to possess or lose King, he freed Horace but not the rest of the Kings, to keep him from creditors’ reach. The state had a vested interest in controlling King’s knowledge; government borrowers needed tolls from completed bridges to pay their bonds, and they risked defaulting if Goodwin lost access to King’s expertise. With the Alabama legislature’s assistance, Goodwin freed Horace and relied on his continued ownership of King’s mother and siblings to coerce King into continuing to build bridges. Commodifying knowledge by commodifying people could bolster or threaten enslavers’ businesses. When control of enslaved expertise came under threat, one enslaver subverted the line between slavery and freedom, turning manumission into a form of coercion.