"Resource and Regulation: Enslaved Expertise in the Everyday Law of Slavery"

Enslaved expertise was both a human resource and regulatory problem for southern states and southern publics in the age of American slavery. My paper will examine this dual relationship, presenting research on the public mobilization and regulation of enslaved people’s skills and knowledge. Lean county, state and municipal governments, along with state-interested mixed enterprises, relied on enslaved laborers’ capacities to carry out material governance—building and maintaining infrastructure and providing key services. In a variety of ways, governments accessed the proficiencies of enslaved men and women who often remained the property of southern citizens. At the same time, these very governments recognized enslaved expertise as a subject of regulation, a domain where police power should channel enslaved people’s proficiencies and occupations. This premise flowed both from concerns about collective security and assessments of the appropriate scope of enslaved labor in a society committed to sustaining the institution with an enfranchised non-slaveholding white public. Under the general paradigm of private property rights in persons, the skills and knowledge that enslaved people gained simultaneously accrued to slaveholders as human capital. Further, under that paradigm, slaveholders would seem to have the right to invest in and exploit such human capital in whatever ways they deemed profitable. But that was not the case. American slavery was embedded in a world of public law and political processes that created and delimited slaveholders’ powers and duties. In focusing on state reliance on and regulation of enslaved expertise, my account begins to surface elements of the political economy of slavery that are inadvertently submerged in scholarship emphasizing private slaveholder power. Both facets of state involvement with enslaved expertise—mobilizing and regulating—can be understood as constructing a public institution of slavery in which collective private slaveholder interests were simultaneously advanced and restricted (and advanced through restriction) by the government.