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<\/p>\nBy this 1846 order, Samual Coleman, Surveyor of the Road for a segment running from the plantation \u201cFancy farm Mills\u201d to \u201cthe Gum Spring on the Jenningses Gap road,\u201d is alloted new \u201chands\u201d under the names of resident slaveholders to supplement \u201cthose now on the list.\u201d Order, May 20, 1846, Road Lists and Reports, 1757-1884, Road Hand Records, box 1, Bedford County Road Hand Records (Library of Virginia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In my December 2024 JAH<\/em> article, I wrote about the history of \u201cbad roads\u201d in the time and space of American slavery. The article examined the making, repair, uses, meanings, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran throughout the South. These public roads were not big-name projects involving internal improvement companies and state financing\u2014indeed, local records showed they often had no official designations, only common knowledge, directional, and landmark-based names. They were everyday earthen infrastructure (occasionally incorporating some stone and wood) created as part of expanding settlement practices and the plantation complex. My article was written to appear as a polished scholarly object, all smooth surfaces and momentum-carrying prose. This post, in keeping with the blog title, gives me the chance to put down a few thoughts on the process of writing with slave states\u2019 public road records and on paths taken or not taken.<\/p>\n These minutes from a board meeting of road commissioners in South Carolina illustrate how allocating enslaved people\u2019s labor was a central concern of such administrators when they convened. In the first full paragraph, enslaved residents of two plantations, \u201cby consent of Parties,\u201d were shifted to work on different roads than their previous assignments. In the second paragraph, an application to reassign enslaved residents was deferred for future consideration but \u201cin the meantime the Board loaned said negroes to the lower division as they were weak handed.\u201d The third paragraph documents a negotiation and resolution among commissioners over what group of enslaved people should work on a particular causeway \u201cin very bad repair\u201d and how that labor should be counted with respect to existing road labor obligations. St. Paul\u2019s Parish Commissioners of the Roads Minute Book, 1789\u20131839, entry for Aug. 4, 1806 (South Carolina Department of History and Archives).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Three years ago, as I drove my car over paved southern roads to find documentation about nineteenth-century dirt roads, I wondered where these miles would lead. Would I be able to develop and share the entwined history of public ways and slavery that I had in mind, and convince readers to see common roads in the antebellum South as powerful and meaningful? Research time and dollars are precious, after all. Still, I took the long cut on several days, slowly peering at landscapes and how backroads, farms, and ex-agricultural tracts ran together. From my vantage point as a legal historian without civil engineering expertise, these views were contemporary and uncitable but relevant and helpful. Driving to archives in South Carolina and Virginia, I also thought about my relative freedom on the road, that I\u2014not from these parts\u2014could reasonably expect to travel safely down an unfamiliar route if I obeyed the speed limit and didn\u2019t venture into private property. Eventually, I would park, call up boxes, and hurriedly photograph records of a road system that both sustained and was sustained by slavery in the plantation South.<\/p>\n My research into \u201cbad roads\u201d arose, in part, from self-critique. In a previous JAH<\/em> article on \u201cInfrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South,\u201d I wrote primarily about how state governments mobilized enslaved people to labor on large-scale transportation programs such as railroads, steamboats, canals, and turnpikes to accelerate commerce.[1]<\/a> At some point afterwards, however, I realized that I had overlooked the most routine yet most extensive form of road governance\u2014what about diffuse local routes? How were public ways built and how did they fit into slave state governance? I had not looked at records on this subject, so I could not really say. Then, once I began pursuing the question and the kinds of materials that might yield answers, I also realized that this local stratum of infrastructure and governance must be approached with a different analytical paradigm than \u201ceconomic development\u201d or even \u201ccapitalism.\u201d More useful would be overlapping dimensions about environments, mobility, policing, law, and custom that had quickly surfaced.<\/p>\n This routine slave patrol return by a company under Captain Moses Stratton documents time on the roads \u201cpater rolling in the neighborhood of Jefferson\u201d in Powhatan County, Virginia in 1829. Patrol return, Aug. 8, 1830, Slave Patrol Claims, 1830-1832, Powhatan County Records, Bonds, Commissions, Oaths (Library of Virginia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Researching common roads became a priority within my ongoing project pursuing the history of the \u201cslave state\u201d and American slavery as a public institution. These roads, it seemed clear from an initial set of sources, were significant sites of public interest and vast labor extraction. And, just as material infrastructure helps historians see power, such roads also instantiated and demonstrated relationships that ordered slave states.[2]<\/a> As I described in my article, a history of roads and slavery shows how private planter power was constructed through public power; how plantations were jurisdictions permeable to and buttressed by slave state authority; that roads, patrols, and customary surveillance operated together as a \u201ccarceral\u201d spatial regime; and that roadwork expressed the civic inequality of slaveholders and non-slaveholders in a slave state. In short, a certain kind of road history might offer a map of significant features of slave state life for both enslaved communities and slaveholding publics.<\/p>\n To understand what public roads did and how they mattered, I tried to draw on sources conveying the multiple experiences and perspectives that people\u2014 especially enslaved individuals as pedestrians, workers, and fugitives\u2014had on southern roads. Narratives by formerly enslaved residents, judicial decisions and statutes, engineering-related documents, planter papers, and commentary in newspapers and travel literature turned out to have much to say on the subject of common roads. At the center of this history, however, was the mass of documentation brought into being by systems of road creation, administration, and use: entry after entry in minute books, report after report filed by road overseers, annual assignments of road segments and apportionments of \u201chands\u201d according to plantation or slaveholder, petitions to open or modify roads or to change enslaved labor assignments, and myriad decisions issued by courts, boards, and committees. In this bundle I would also include slave patrol appointments, their beat delineations, and patrol returns as documenting a contiguous form of road governance and roadwork. All these materials belonged to what I call the \u201clocal state.\u201d This is the same stratum of governance that Laura Edwards and others have illuminated with great care. But while local complaints, prosecutions, and the work of justices of the peace foreground interpersonal conflict, these road records tend to show (though not without conflicts) something else: a legal regime that organized public power, mobilized tremendous human exertion, configured the plantation country landscape with infrastructure, and reinforced racial and civic hierarchies in the process. More succinctly, they show a slave state at work.<\/p>\n In this 16-page report submitted to the county court of Powhatan Co., Virginia, Commissioners recorded an overview of the diffuse road labor system when they made \u201cthe foregoing arrangement of hands on the different Roads in the county, and [] in some instances named new Surveyors and made some alterations in the roads.\u201d Report of Road Commissioners for making a new arrangement of Hands, Sept. 16, 1818, box 1, Powhatan County Road and Bridge Records (Library of Virginia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These \u201clocal state\u201d road materials also belong to that family of ugly documents, like a slave ship manifest or plantation journal, which reflect enslaver (or slave state) purposes for slavery at impersonal scale. The road materials are\u2014at least in my view\u2014striking and even overwhelming in their iterative, horizontal sweep across space, their voluminous, decentralized nature, and the scale of effort and humanity they represent. But they are also \u201cnoisy\u201d with irregular incidents, common frictions, and routine practices that tell of enslaved people\u2019s choices and experiences.[4]<\/a> With my article, I chose to write an analytical narrative that did not linger over time in one place. Other stories are surely possible. A heavily quantitative study of labor and perhaps labor\u2019s monetary value? A recovery of individual stories that slip through the regular order of accounts and reports? A GIS-oriented project mapping roads and toil? A close study linking the social history of a place to the neighborhoods formed and confined by public ways that enslaved residents built? For me, these road records confirm an idea that is informing my approach to studying slave states: that, in practice, slavery\u2019s archive in the United States is contingent on how researchers approach the identity of the institution. Where, when, and to the extent that slavery is a public institution, categories of government records that are not, on their face, about slavery, turn out to be an archive of the institution.<\/p>\n This annual report by Bedford County, Virginia Commissioners of Roads compiles data provided by individual road surveyors on the laborers, length, work days and expenditures associated with each road segment under the authority of the Commissioners. Annual report of the Commissioners of Roads in the 2nd Battalion 10th Regt. Bedford County, for May Term 1857, Road Reports, 1754\u20131907, Bedford County Road and Bridge Records (Library of Virginia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I have one further note on process and method in working with these materials. The public road records of the plantation South show law in action, disclosing a system of statutory rules, judicial interpretations, expansive local policy discretion, and many people set in motion under very different degrees of compulsion. This record of governance does not tell a single, self-evident story. To make analytical and narrative sense of the material, I sought to work with legal history\u2019s permeability and methodological openness. What I mean is that I borrowed multiple scholarly lenses to see and contextualize what the official record contained and suggested. In particular, attending to environmental conditions and materiality proved vital for understanding and explaining the \u201cbad roads\u201d produced through southern road governance. The Journal of Southern History<\/em> hosted a workshop for manuscripts on \u201cSouthern History and the Environment\u201d that discussed an early version of my essay; participants provided invaluable encouragement to proceed with the project and to communicate specific physicalities that both embodied and counterbalanced abstractions of power and authority. Another essential borrowing came through the convergence of two lines of scholarship: foundational work on slavery\u2019s spatial history and the questions and concepts of carceral studies.[5]<\/a> Together, they offered a framework for scrutinizing road space, for reconsidering plantation space, and for describing how basic transportation infrastructure could operate as a system of enclosure. In turn, I hope this account offers something back: a relational, spatial, and material throughline in the history of slavery and policing that\u2014standing apart from a more discontinuous institutional history\u2014spans the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n When I began looking into the history of common southern roads in the age of slavery, I had little sense of what sources were available and what they could show. In time and in Thavolia Glymph\u2019s apt terms, I found a \u201cboisterous and fruitful site of study.\u201d[6]<\/a> Now I would argue that slave states\u2019 public road records are a significant archive of American slavery.<\/p>\n Aaron Hall is a legal historian at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focuses on constitutionalism, slavery, and governance in American history. He is finishing a book on the rise of the Founding in United States constitutional culture and writing another one on the history of American slavery as a public institution.<\/em><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Aaron Hall, \u201cSlaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South,\u201d\u00a0Journal of American History<\/em>, 106 (June 2019), 19\u201346.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ryan Quintana\u2019s pathbreaking work on colonial and early national South Carolina pursues such an analysis. Ryan A. Quintana,\u00a0Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina<\/em>\u00a0(2018). Mary Bridges provides a sharp account of how historians may see with infrastructure. Mary Bridges, \u201cThe Infrastructural Turn in Historical Scholarship,\u201d\u00a0Modern American History<\/em>, 6 (March 2023), 103\u201320.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> \u00a0Laura F. Edwards,\u00a0The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South<\/em>\u00a0(2009). See, e.g., Forum on \u201cLocal Governance in the Early Republic,\u201d Journal of the Early Republic<\/em>, 44 (Summer 2024), 217\u201383; and Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South<\/em> (2018).<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Thavolia Glymph, \u201cPaper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery,\u201d\u00a0American Historical Review,<\/em> 130 (March 2025), 3.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.processhistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/St.-Pauls-Parish-Commissioners-of-the-Roads-Minute-Book-1789-1839-Aug-4-1806-scaled.jpg?resize=702%2C936\")
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