States of Insurrection: Race, Resistance, and the Laws of Slavery

Abstract

This project tracks how resistance to enslavement durably altered the making of law and race in Barbados and South Carolina between 1650 – 1899. It explores four critical junctures: Interracial resistance during the 1650s, the Stono Uprising in 1739, the Denmark Vesey Uprising in 1822, and the construction of the South Carolina Penitentiary in 1867. I demonstrate how resistance to enslavement yielded new laws and legal institutions designed to suppress that resistance, as well as new ideas of race to underwrite and support those institutions. This process furnished the foundations of two institutional developments: the construction of separate-but-interrelated legal orders to govern blacks and whites and the expansion of racial capitalism, as well as two ideological developments: the consolidation of whiteness and institutionalization of white ignorance, and the stigmatization and criminalization of blackness.