Slaves, poor whites, and the underground economy of the rural Carolinas.

HISTORIANS HAVE PAID A GREAT DEAL OF ATTENTION OVER THE PAST TWO decades to the so-called slave, internal, or informal economy, studying slaves' independent activities as producers and consumers. In the rice-growing Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, where the task system predominated, slaves who rapidly completed their day's assigned labor had the opportunity to use their free time toward the end of the day as they saw fit, within certain constraints that their masters imposed. Many slaves diligently worked their own garden plots, raised and sold their own crops, and tended horses and livestock. As records of the Southern Claims Commission make clear, some slaves amassed impressive amounts of property. Outside the Lowcountry, various forces circumscribed slaves' ability to produce for themselves, market their goods, and accumulate wealth. Limited availability of land in the piedmont and in the upcountry precluded masters from supplying slaves with personal provision grounds. Moreover, slaveholders in those regions tended to organize their slave labor forces according to the gang system. Under the gang system, slaves labored under close supervision from sunup to sundown, leaving them time to work for themselves only at night and on Sundays. Across the South, however, internal economies proliferated. Slaves sometimes earned payments in money, perhaps for performing additional chores on the plantation or extra work in industry. Armed with the money and commodities they earned from or through the largesse of their masters, slaves were no strangers to the antebellum marketplace. (1)

Running parallel to slaves' economic activities sanctioned by the master were those that lacked such authorization. Several historians have recognized that an illicit, underground slave economy--rooted largely in theft and consequently anathema to slaveholders--flourished throughout the antebellum South. Slaves' surreptitious dealings often brought them into contact not only with other bondpeople and with free blacks but also with "unscrupulous" whites who ignored racial distinctions and eagerly traded with slaves without the masters' consent. (2) But while scholars acknowledge the existence of this interracial, underground trade, they have devoted surprisingly little energy to its study. Timothy J. Lockley has uncovered evidence of a thriving clandestine network of exchange between slaves and white shopkeepers in the city of Savannah, but the preponderance of southerners lived not in urban but in rural areas. (3) It must have been much more difficult for slaves to sustain systems of underground trade with whites in the countryside. In the rural South the white population was more isolated and scattered across a wide geographical area. Small, close-knit communities in which everyone knew one another and closely watched their neighbors supplanted the anonymity of the bustling city. Furthermore, the relatively few foreigners who settled in the South--and who were among the whites most likely to collaborate and trade clandestinely with slaves--tended to congregate in the region's urban centers. (4)

This study calls attention to the underground economy of the rural South through an investigation of slaves' unlawful trade with poor whites in the antebellum Carolinas. Lockley's work has examined the economic exchanges between slaves and a broad and diverse group of non-elite white shopkeepers, but the involvement of such merchants notwithstanding, there existed an inverse relationship between a white person's wealth and his or her likelihood of engaging in the unlawful trade with slaves. The whites with whom slaves traded most frequently were the poor-white farmers, laborers, and other marginal members of white society who composed between 30 and 50 percent of the southern white population, depending on the locality. (5) This study explores in depth the important place that these poor whites occupied within slaves' underground trading networks and argues that while anxious slaveholders found such economic cooperation inimical to a society stratified on the basis of race, the calculated, rational nature of slave-poor white exchange blunted its potentially subversive character.

Slaves and poor whites conducted a thriving illicit trade throughout the antebellum era. They were generally illiterate and left few records in voices of their own, but by analyzing court records, census returns, slave narratives, and other sources, historians can explore these unsanctioned economic interactions in the rural antebellum Carolinas and answer a series of basic but fundamental questions. What commodities did slaves and poor whites trade? Who were the poor whites willing to flout the law and conduct business with slaves, and who were the slaves who partnered with them? How did they safely establish their economic relationships, and how long did they last? Did these transactions involve cash or merely an exchange of goods? What benefits did each set of participants derive from the clandestine trade? How did masters detect unlawful trading and attempt to curb it? And perhaps most important, did poor whites' willingness to trade with slaves signal a repudiation of the southern social order?

Poor whites made likely trading partners for slaves in antebellum North and South Carolina. As Charles C. Bolton has explained, the Old South's poor whites constituted an economically dependent population that typically survived by working as farm tenants and laborers. Without the security and independence derived from landownership, these poor whites sometimes hunted or herded animals to make a living, but most belonged to a highly mobile labor force, offering a variety of marketable skills and frequently relocating to where they could find work. (6) Poor whites' standard of living often did not differ markedly from that of slaves. Single-room homes, monotonous diets, and home-spun clothing did not clearly distinguish one group from the other. Indeed, antebellum travelers and slaves themselves sometimes gave a slight advantage in material existence to the enslaved men and women. Struggling, impoverished, and dwelling at the social and economic margins of southern white society, poor whites made attractive potential economic allies for enterprising slaves in the region. (7)

Several factors--including the organization of slave labor, the sheer numbers of slaves and poor whites in a given area, individual masters' managerial styles, and the size of land holdings--helped determine the likelihood of illicit slave-poor white commerce. Take South Carolina, for example. In the Lowcountry the prevalence of the task system encouraged independent production by slaves. Ambitious bondpeople could complete their assigned task in an abbreviated workday and then turn to their own pursuits on a plot of land granted by the master. Their efforts produced commodities that they could theoretically have traded with local poor whites, but many Lowcountry masters purchased their slaves' goods themselves. Moreover, relatively few potential poor-white trading partners inhabited the areas near the coast. The pool of possible poor-white business associates was much greater in the upcountry. There, however, the greater prevalence of the gang-labor system combined with the generally smaller land holdings of the region to limit slaves' opportunities to produce for their own benefit. (8) These facts suggest that the slave-poor white economy of the upcountry would have been driven more by theft than that of the Lowcountry. On the other hand, the greater incidence of absentee landownership in the Lowcountry likely encouraged stealing. No master, in short, could claim complete immunity from the effects of the unlawful traffic between slaves and poor whites. Even those slaveholders who provided a market for their slaves' produce withheld alcohol and other goods their bondpeople desired. To obtain those items slaves needed to rely on their own initiative. Thus in most locations, but particularly outside the Lowcountry, the clandestine trade between slaves and poor whites likely outpaced slaves' licit commerce.

Although the degree and nature of the secretive traffic surely varied by locality, a geographically inequitable distribution of extant court records prohibits definitive judgments. Sources permitted the close examination of only nine of the thirty districts in South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War: Fairfield, Greenville, Lancaster, Laurens, Marlboro, Spartanburg, Union, Williamsburg, and York. Of these, only Williamsburg was located in the Lowcountry. The thirty North Carolina counties that can be closely considered were more evenly scattered across the state, though concentrated, like slaves themselves, in the eastern coastal plain and, somewhat less, in the piedmont. (9) As a result, this study is based primarily on those illicit slave-poor white transactions occurring in a broad swath stretching northeastward from upcountry South Carolina through the North Carolina piedmont and eastward to the Atlantic coast--a region that the historiography of the slave economy, with its emphasis on the rice-producing Lowcountry, has largely neglected. (10)

Slaves and poor whites conducted their transactions in any number of locations: at the humble cabin of the poor white, at a concealed, prearranged site, and especially at the local dramshop. James Battle Avirett, son of a planter in Onslow County, North Carolina, described "the constant temptation of the servants, coming from the hurtful influence of small stores, kept by the lower class of whites" as "the curse of the plantation." "These people were ready, by night," he reminisced bitterly, "to carry on a system of demoralizing barter, taking at their own price articles stolen by the servants, to wit, corn, poultry, pigs; in short, anything the negro might carry in his bag, in any sense marketable." In return, proprietors dispensed "mean whiskey or other articles at high prices to compensate for the great risk they took...." (11)

As in urban areas, the commodity that slaves in the countryside most commonly sought from their poor-white trading partners was liquor. Masters provided alcohol to slaves only on rare occasions, at Christmas holiday and perhaps as an incentive at harvest. Liquor temporarily bolstered slaves' spirits and offered them a momentary release from the severity of their condition, but it was also used medicinally, in cooking, and to share in fellowship with bondpeople back in the quarters. Moreover, barring a special agreement with the master, slaves lacked a secure depository for any money they might have earned through their own labor. They therefore usually geared their spending more toward immediate gratification, and the local grogshop served as a convenient repository for slaves' earnings. (12)

Slaves also traded with poor whites for clothing. In Gates County, North Carolina, Enoch Jones allegedly sold "one sun-shade," "one coat," and "one pair of pantaloons," respectively, to slaves Wilson, Jerry, and Jim. Nash County's John L. B. Woodard purportedly supplied "coats, vests & calico" to no fewer than six slaves in 1857. Other slaves traded for shoes, blankets, and rugs. All of these items served a vital role in protecting slaves from the elements, and in that sense the trade with poor whites may have compensated for a master's neglect. However, the articles also allowed for a modicum of self-expression. Even if they already owned garments and footwear supplied by the master, many slave men and women still enjoyed exercising their own independent judgment in selecting their outfits and acquiring apparel that was perhaps fancier than the cheap, drab raiment their masters provided. (13)

In contrast, slaves rarely traded with poor whites for food. Many poor whites probably did not have surplus victuals to exchange, and slaves were resourceful enough to procure most foods without bargaining across racial lines. In addition to the sometimes-scanty provisions allotted them by their masters, many slaves routinely supplemented inadequate diets with the produce from their own garden plots. They could also easily appropriate the masters' or the neighbors' foodstuffs, secretly killing a hog, picking apples or peaches from the orchard, or gathering vegetables from the garden. They generally consulted poor whites only to acquire nonessential luxury or specialty foodstuffs, particularly sugar and sweets, cakes, and candies. These items were not as readily obtained on the plantation, so slaves with a sweet tooth sought out other suppliers. Kannon Parham of Granville County, North Carolina, was one of these. A tenant farmer with only fifty dollars worth of personal property, Parham was indicted in 1858 for selling "one pound of candy" to a slave. (14)

Whereas slaves bought few comestibles from poor whites, foodstuffs were the commodities poor whites most often purchased from slaves. Poor whites represented a convenient market for surplus produce from slaves' garden plots or for the edibles stolen from their masters and from neighboring plantations. Many poor whites subsisted on meager and monotonous diets, and they eagerly accepted an increase in their caloric intake from any source. Furthermore, in most cases they could buy food from slaves more cheaply than elsewhere, making their decision to trade with slaves a rational choice. Slaves sometimes supplied poor whites with chickens, turkeys, beef, and fish, but none of these protein sources appear in court records as frequently as pork. Poor whites commonly purchased "one side of Bacon," "twenty pounds of pork," or "one dead hog" from their slave associates. (15) Poor whites also purchased various cereal crops from slaves, such as rice in the Lowcountry and wheat in the piedmont. But in both the Carolinas, corn was the grain most widely traded to poor whites. (16) Slaves kept poor whites stocked with other staples as well, including potatoes, butter, flour, and molasses. "[T]he poor whites were truly glad to buy the molasses caught in the hands of our mothers," wrote an ex-slave of Wilmington, North Carolina; "they ate it and asked no questions." (17)

Less frequently, poor whites purchased from slaves inedible agricultural commodities, including cotton, tobacco, flax, and wool. In 1852 the elderly John Ross, who two years earlier had been listed in the census as a pauper living in the poorhouse in Laurens District, South Carolina, was indicted for trading with slave Jack "for Two Bales of Cotton." (18) Just over the North Carolina border in Brunswick County, Virginia, "tobacco dealer" Benjamin W. Lynch purportedly received "three hundred pounds" of the leaf from Daniel Huff's slave Mack. (19) In these and many other cases, the poor-white buyers presumably planned to carry these goods to market to sell as their own. Other poor whites purchased feed for livestock from slaves. South Carolina's Nancy Blanton allegedly traded with a slave "for one Bushel of Oats," while Jackson Pittman of Wilson County, North Carolina, reportedly bought "two bundles of fodder" from Larry D. Farmer's slave Dick. (20) Poor whites sometimes purchased stolen iron or farm implements, such as hoes, probably for their own use. In the dense pine forests of North Carolina, they traded for turpentine, planks, and shingles. Poor whites, in short, bought a far greater variety of goods from their enslaved trading partners than slaves bought of them, a fact that underscores not only the economic deprivation of southern poor whites but also the resourcefulness of the slaves themselves.

Rather than indiscriminately delivering to poor whites whatever goods they could get their hands on, some slaves evinced sophisticated market behavior, carefully calculating which items were best suited for trade. "Tobacco was our favorite crop," wrote one successful runaway. "Its value, compared with its weight, was much greater than that of grain, and a man's shoulders could bear off, in one night, what would bring a sum sufficient for a week or two." (21) For the identical reasons of price and weight, cotton was also a popular item in the clandestine trade between slaves and poor whites in areas producing that staple. Slaves endowed with less business savvy could still participate successfully in the illegal trade with poor whites. Only a bondperson's imagination, combined with the resources available in a given locality, seemed to limit what poor whites proved willing to buy. As ex-slave Sallie Paul of South Carolina declared, "[D]e colored people sell dem things dey white folks never [even] want. Oh, dey take anything you carry dem." (22)

Most economic relationships between slaves and poor whites focused on trade, but poor whites also sometimes conducted business on slaves' behalf. As Chowan County, North Carolina, runaway Allen Parker recorded, "There was always some poor white who would ... sell [goods] for the benefit of the slaves--for a consideration." Less restricted than slaves in their access to public markets, some poor whites willingly functioned as intermediaries for bondpeople by selling, in return for a share of the profits, merchandise that slaves had either produced or stolen. Parker recalled one instance in which he pilfered a pig, dressed it, and "carried him on my shoulder about three miles, and turned him over to a 'poor white' who took him to a neighboring town the next day, and sold him for me." Surrendering the porker to a poor-white man to take to market insulated Parker from the dangers of commerce, sparing him the barrage of questions that would almost inevitably have accompanied a slave's arrival at market without a ticket from the master and with a dressed pig for sale. Whoever purchased the pig from Parker's white accomplice likely had no idea that a slave had stolen it. This arrangement, however, required a tremendous amount of trust on the slave's part. A slave could not find redress in the law or via the master for a deal gone sour. With only an unenforceable verbal agreement binding the poor white to the bondperson, the slave confronted a high likelihood of being swindled. Thus, like other slaves, Parker surely chose his poor-white agent carefully. As a result, he reported, "In due time the 'poor white' gave me my share of the money he got for the pig." (23)

Who, exactly, were the slaves and poor whites who traded with one another? Little can be determined from extant records about the slaves, although available evidence suggests that most of those who transacted business with poor whites lived on the medium-sized estates of ten to forty-nine slaves that formed roughly half of all southern holdings. (24) More than a hundred cases of illegal trading between slaves and poor whites appear in court records from North Carolina and South Carolina between 1845 and 1860 alone. Indictments for unlawful trading often listed the names of accused slaves' masters. By cross-referencing the names of these masters with their manuscript census entries, it is possible to gain a general sense of the size of the estates on which the accused slaves lived (see Table 1). While slaveholder mobility prevents many masters from being positively located in census records, twenty-eight of them, or roughly one-quarter of the total, can be traced back successfully to the free and slave population schedules of 1850 and/or 1860---a sample sufficiently large to hint that most slaves who traded with poor whites belonged to relatively prosperous masters. The sample of thirteen slaveholders in five South Carolina districts and fifteen slave owners scattered across nine counties in North Carolina shows that the average North Carolina master of a slave indicted for trading illicitly with poor whites owned approximately $5,600 in real estate--barely more than half the figure for South Carolina masters--but an identical twenty-six total slaves. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight masters in the sample owned more than ten slaves, and fifteen, or more than half, counted among the planter class (defined as owning at least twenty slaves).

Because a sizable majority of all bondpeople lived on holdings of ten or more slaves, these figures for both North and South Carolina come as little surprise. It is a statistical probability that the preponderance of those slaves who traded stolen goods with poor whites would have resided on larger holdings. But what factors prompted or invited these slaves to steal from their owners in the first place? Masters with few slaves tended to oversee their hands personally, perhaps limiting their bondpeople's opportunities to purloin the owners' goods. On larger holdings, where the owner was less likely to labor side by side with field workers, slaves perhaps felt less personal attachment to the masters and therefore had fewer scruples about robbing them and trading pilfered goods to local poor whites. Slaves on larger holdings also likely had access to a greater variety of commodities to carry away and exchange. The house servants of wealthy masters met with countless opportunities to smuggle foodstuffs out of the kitchen or storeroom. It may have been precisely because the slaves who traded with poor whites resided on larger holdings that bond servants tended to acquire nonessentials such as liquor in exchange for their plunder. Slaves belonging to more-prosperous masters were more likely to have an adequate food allowance and perhaps even a plot of land for raising their own crops.

Slave men conducted virtually all of the documented unlawful trade with poor whites. Male slaves were more likely than slave women to be hired out or sent on errands off the plantation, so they were the ones more likely to develop contacts with poor whites in the neighborhood. That the enslaved men most often went in search of liquor suggests that they desired a channel through which to counter the harsh realities of slave life. Yet many other economic exchanges, for clothing, carpets, and the like, may well have represented efforts on the part of slave men not to ameliorate their personal suffering but instead to provide for their families independently of the master. Stepping beyond the boundaries of the plantation to secure consumer goods for their families marked an autonomous bid by slave men to serve more effectively as husbands and fathers. (25)

Occasionally, rural slave women ventured into the masculine world of unlawful interracial commerce. Historians such as Betty Wood and Robert Olwell have shown female slaves playing a dominant role in the informal slave economy as vendors in the South's urban markets. (26) Possibly because their economic energies were focused on these legitimate marketing activities, slave women do not often appear in court records as active participants in the countryside's slave-poor white underground economy. But there were exceptions. In Robeson County, North Carolina, one poor-white man purchased "ten pounds of bacon" from William Thompson's slave woman Flora in 1850. A rare trade involving exclusively women took place in Union District, South Carolina, in December 1853. Two young, illiterate white women named Sarah and Jemima Woodward, presumably sisters, bought "a quantity of meat and flour of the value of one dollar" from a female slave named Bet. (27)

Court records, however, almost certainly obscure slave women's important place in the clandestine trade between slaves and poor whites. While sources suggest that female slaves only rarely participated in the direct, physical transaction of business with poor whites, slave women likely played a significant but elusive role in procuring the goods for slave men to trade. Compared to slave men, slave women who stopped by the kitchen or borrowed the keys to the storeroom raised less suspicion. Their work in food production and meal preparation provided them ample opportunity to steal goods that they could then deliver to husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons, who, in turn, could sell the items to local poor whites. Slave women's relative invisibility in court records also suggests that their underground exchanges with poor whites may have taken a different form. Whereas slave men swapped goods with local poor whites, slave women were probably more likely to trade their services, performing washing or sewing for poor-white neighbors. Their poor-white female counterparts sometimes completed these kinds of chores for slaves. North Carolina bondman Allen Parker, for instance, used the money he acquired from his pilfered pig to buy "some cloth, which a white woman made into a coat and a pair of pants for me." (28) By their very nature, these types of exchanges would have been incredibly difficult to detect or to prove in court. Perhaps masters did not find such traditionally feminine activities as washing or sewing sufficiently threatening to merit much attention anyway. As long as their stores of food remained safe, they may have tolerated some degree of unapproved interracial fraternization.

Such a wide variety of poor whites traded with slaves that they are not easily categorized. Age made little difference in determining the likelihood of a poor white to do business with a slave. Poor whites accused of unlawful trading included young laboring men in their twenties, not necessarily condemned to remain poor whites their entire lives. Landless, laboring men in their thirties and forties, likely among a more entrenched or permanent class of poor whites, also routinely traded illicitly with slaves. Less often, the elderly furtively conducted business with them. Poor whites struggling to support large families, as well as those trying to subsist alone, all found the illicit trade with slaves advantageous.

Court records show that poor-white women participated directly in the slave-poor white economy more than female slaves apparently did. Poor-white women heading their own households made up perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of all poor whites connected with the illicit trade. Most of these women were single, either abandoned by their husbands, widowed, or in rare cases, divorced. In other instances, their partner may have simply been away in search of work when the census taker passed through the neighborhood. In any event, poor-white mothers often traded with slaves, almost exclusively for food. In Wayne County, North Carolina, Sally Lee, a thirty-four-year-old, illiterate mother of four, allegedly obtained "a peck of corn" from William D. Cobb's slave Jim. Women, both slave and free, successfully penetrated the informal, illicit marketplace, but typically men of both races dominated the documented activities of the underground, slave-poor white economy. (29)

Slaves conducted most of their trade with poor whites personally, face-to-face, and at night. North Carolina ex-slave Allen Parker described the usual process. "The slave would eat his supper and take a nap," he explained. Then, after any patrols had already passed by or had turned in for the evening, the slave awoke, retrieved his stolen loot from its hiding place, put it in a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and "start[ed] for the house of the poor white." Most of these meetings must have been prearranged in order to save the slave the time and trouble of locating a buyer in the precious few hours before dawn. (30)

Occasionally, concerns over being detected militated against slaves and poor whites exchanging goods with one another directly. Some trading partners instead agreed upon a secluded location where they could deposit their goods for the other to retrieve. In this manner, North Carolina fugitive William Kinnegy traded a pig to "a poor white man with whom I accidentally became acquainted." Kinnegy left the hog "in a place designated" and returned later to pick up the gun that he had requested of the poor white. "I took the gun and he took the pig," Kinnegy noted, "of course without meeting each other." The slave later exchanged a cowhide for powder and shot in the same furtive manner. Of his poor-white associate, Kinnegy explained, "I saw him but rarely, as my acquaintance was too dangerous a thing for him." (31)

Slaves and poor whites rarely acted in concert to pilfer from a wealthy slaveholder; rather, slaves usually committed the theft and then delivered the stolen goods to a poor-white recipient. In one notable exception to this pattern, "laborer" Alford Hartly of Davidson County, North Carolina, collaborated with Madson Davis's slaves "to carry away two Chickens from the hen Ruste." Detected, Hartly was charged with "stealing Chickens and Conspiring with negro slaves." According to Davis, Hartly had propositioned Davis's slaves "to assist him ... steal som[e] pottry [poultry]." (32) But because southern courts did not permit the testimony of slaves against whites of any class, Hartly faced practically no danger in approaching Davis's slaves.

The limitations of southern law meant that even loyal, well-intentioned slaves accomplished nothing by intimating illicit plans to the master. At best, slaves who informed their masters of underground trading might provoke an extralegal response against a local poor white. Informing the master of poor whites engaged in the underground trade entailed a separate set of dangers for bondpeople themselves, however. If slaves who participated in such clandestine activity revealed it to the master, they incriminated themselves and provided the slaveholder a motive to whip them. As one former North Carolina bondman explained, the white buyer "knew that the slave could not complain of him without getting into trouble himself...." (33) Slaves who dared betray their poor-white trading partners also risked depriving themselves of desired contraband goods. (34) Moreover, if, in an effort to curry favor with the master, a slave tattled on a fellow bondperson engaged in the illicit trade, he or she invited social ostracism in the quarters.

Establishing a trading relationship between a slave and a poor white must have been a much riskier proposition for a slave to initiate. "A great audacious piece of presumption indeed," reflected North Carolina teacher and lawyer William Valentine, "if the negro had not cause or reason to believe the white man would buy of him." Slaves needed to exercise the utmost discretion when approaching poor whites with commodities for sale. Poor whites could easily report the transgressing slave to the master or take matters into their own hands by administering a whipping. (35)

Despite the dangers, slaves developed an astute sense of which whites could be trusted as business associates. In the early morning hours of February 10, 1819, slaves Morris, Moses, and Simon robbed William Dabney's store on the wharf in the coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina. Morris and Moses then went to the shop and residence of John Campbell and Polly Brown, roused them from sleep, and delivered to them the contraband goods. When authorities discovered the stolen merchandise at Campbell's shop, Campbell deposed that the two slaves

   knocked at the door. They asked me ... if I would buy a barrel of
   wine. I told them I will, and asked the prices. I then asked them
   where did you get this wine. They the negros answered it was none
   of my business where they got it. I might as well have a bargain as
   any other person. I then asked them the price particularly. Their
   answer was thirty dollars. I told them I will give twenty. They
   then brought in the wine, and I gave them the money.... They asked
   me also if I did not want to buy Coffee, that I should have a
   bargain. I told them I would give twenty cents ... They asked me do
   you want to buy cheese. I said I did not, but they answered you
   might as well have it as another. We will give you a bargain also in
   the cheese. They then brought [them] right into the shop, and left
   them. I again asked the negros where do [they] get these cheeses.
   They said it was none of my business, and then parted.

If Campbell's testimony may be believed, it proves quite instructive. The slaves deflected questions about the provenance of their goods and instead highlighted the great bargains they offered. Their willingness to deal correlated with the urgent need to dispose of the stolen goods before daybreak. Because it must have been difficult to find more than one or two buyers over the course of a single night, slaves sold what they stole below its actual value, rather than holding out for its market price. Other evidence, however, casts some doubt on the white shopkeeper's account of that night. Although Campbell's remarks predictably shifted blame from himself to implicate the bondmen as the instigators of the trade, the slave Moses claimed to have overheard Campbell conspiring with Morris before the night of the robbery, urging him to steal from Dabney's store. Indeed, it seems doubtful that the slaves picked Campbell's shop at random. Attempting to dispose of contraband wares by seeking out potential buyers haphazardly would have been an inefficient and risky method of conducting the underground trade. (36)

Slaves preferred dealing repeatedly with the same, familiar poor whites to branching out to others with unknown loyalties. William Kinnegy recalled that, as a runaway in the forests and swamps of eastern North Carolina, "I dared not permit myself to be seen by a white man for months, and then only by one or two of the very poorest, who traded with me in small things." Kinnegy and other slaves felt more at ease trading recurrently with particular poor whites who had proven themselves trustworthy. Poor whites who gained reputations as reliable economic allies invited further clandestine dealings, which in turn gave those poor-white accomplices continued access to the cheap goods or other monetary rewards obtained through their cooperation with slaves. As a matter of good policy, then, slave-poor white trading relationships sometimes spanned several years. (37)

Economic transactions between slaves and poor whites usually consisted of an exchange of goods, with slaves most often taking liquor in return for whatever they sold their poor-white trading partners. But a portion of the slave-poor white economy operated along a cash nexus. Former bondman Charles Ball remarked that, in the early nineteenth century, white shopkeepers welcomed slave customers, who, unlike most whites, purchased goods with cash rather than on credit. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, slaves did not often pay poor whites with money, a finding consistent with historian John Campbell's contention that cash became increasingly scarce among South Carolina upcountry slaves as the antebellum years wore on. In contrast, it was not at all unusual for a poor white in the 1840s and 1850s to pay a slave a small sum for the goods he or she received. In Marlboro District, South Carolina, one poor-white man paid a dollar to a slave for "Eight pounds of bacon." Another spent one dollar in exchange for "one fiddle, one pair of pantaloons, one vest and one cotton handkerchief." Poor white Mafia Davis used specie, reportedly giving a slave named Dave "twenty five cents in Silver" for "one peck of wheat." Slaves apparently welcomed the influx of cash and coin into their economy, but they proved cautious in their expenditure of currency. (38)

With so little money and property to their names, poor whites needed to make calculated economic decisions for their households, and they discovered that trading with slaves offered them opportunities to strike remarkable bargains. One former bondman wrote that poor whites made "enormous profits by their trade with slaves...." (39) An other remembered that slaves sold "their master's corn, hogs, chickens and many other things" to nearby "poor white folks" "for practically nothing." (40) After shopkeeper John Campbell bought coffee, wine, and cheese from Morris and Moses, Polly Brown deposed that "The money given in payment of this property appeared to me to be but a trifle." (41) Poor whites routinely paid the grossly discounted price of twenty-five or fifty cents for an entire hog worth between five and ten dollars, and they frequently exchanged goods of unequal value. (42) One poor white in South Carolina, for instance, traded a slave a ten-cent "quart of molasses" in return for "one half bushel of corn" worth "twenty five cents," earning himself a net profit of fifteen cents. (43) Certainly, had the underground trade not offered such bargains, poor whites would have had little incentive to engage in it. If forced to pay market price, they might as well have traded legitimately through more-conventional economic channels.

Perhaps more aware of market prices than some slaves, poor whites often did take advantage of their enslaved business associates, who needed to dispose of their contraband goods quickly and quietly. "There could always be found a market among the poor whites, for whatever a slave had to sell," explained ex-slave Allen Parker, "though the price paid was often very low, for the slave was in a measure at the mercy of the buyer." (44) On the other hand, trading with poor whites secured slaves access to products, such as alcohol, that their masters denied them. Contraband liquor, tobacco, and clothing all made slaves' lives materially more bearable. Moreover, if slaves had stolen the items they sold, they made a respectable profit no matter what price they received; all it cost them was the time and effort to pilfer and deliver their masters' goods to a poor-white buyer. (45)

If slaves and poor whites each derived material benefits from their trade with one another, they may have also earned psychological rewards as well. Poor whites largely set the terms of the negotiations, using their superior bargaining position over their enslaved business associates to acquire contraband goods for prices well below their actual value. Poor whites' underground trade with slaves perhaps also sometimes marked a form of "Snopesian" retaliation, allowing them to strike back in a subtle and indirect yet potent way against certain neighborhood slaveholders with whom they maintained some unresolved grievance. (46) For their part, slaves could enjoy a fleeting moment of empowerment as they transacted business with poor whites. The buying, selling, and bartering of consumer goods fostered among slaves feelings of independence and autonomy, and the exchanges signaled their fundamental humanity. The choices they made in the underground marketplace affected their own lives and inherently marked a denial of their enslaved condition. (47)

The mutual benefits of the illicit trade between slaves and poor whites made such transactions pervasive in many localities across the rural Carolinas. Wherever slaves and poor whites came into contact, especially in the South Carolina upcountry and in the coastal plain and piedmont regions of North Carolina, the possibility of interracial trade loomed. Although impossible to quantify, the magnitude of the slave-poor white economy dismayed and disturbed contemporary white observers, who frequently decried the epidemic proportions of the clandestine traffic. Petitioners in North Carolina described the unlawful trade with slaves in spiritous liquors alone as "alarming." In South Carolina one Barnwell District memorial asserted that "the illicit traffic with slaves ... pervades ... the whole State." And slaveholders were likely aware of only a small fraction of their slaves' underground dealings with poor whites. Explained one former slave, "as the parties to it are interested in keeping the secret, it is not often the masters find out how much they are robbed." (48)

Slaveholders typically blamed not their slaves but neighborhood poor whites for instigating the underground trade. A few slaves concurred, assigning direct responsibility for the illicit trade to their poor-white trading partners. According to one former bondman, "[W]hen these poor whites cannot obtain a living honestly, which they very seldom do, they get the slaves in their neighbourhood to steal corn, poultry, and such like, from their masters, and bring these things to them...." (49) Poor whites were always "encouraging slaves to steal from their owners, and sell to them, corn, wheat, sheep, chickens, or any thing of the kind which they can well conceal." (50)

State legislatures therefore passed a series of laws designed to quell the illicit trade, imposing a combination of fines and imprisonment for those convicted of trading with slaves illegally. An 1819 North Carolina law punished anyone who "shall deal, trade or traffic with any negro slave ... for any cotton, tobacco, flax, corn, wheat, rice, rye, oats, barley, bacon, pork, spiritous liquors or beef" without written permission of the master. If convicted, the offender faced a maximum fine of fifty dollars and a jail sentence of up to three months. An 1826 law replacing the one of 1819 added two dozen more articles to the list. The law continued to allow trade, however, if the slave had the master's written permission, but "in the day time only, Sundays excepted." (51) Despite the intent of such legislation, the ticket system permitted a few literate slaves and poor whites to circumvent the law by forging trading permits.

South Carolina's punishments for whites who traded with slaves easily outranked the North Carolina code in severity. In 1817 the state legislature passed an act prohibiting anyone from trading with slaves for "any ... article whatsoever" without the master's knowledge. Offenders were subject to a fine "not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding a term of twelve months, nor less than one month." In reality, most penalties were far more mild, probably adjusted to each individual's ability to pay. Setting the fine at a ridiculous $1,000--a sum very few southerners could have afforded--served primarily as a symbolic act, suggesting the seriousness with which lawmakers viewed the underground trade. An 1834 South Carolina law went a step further, banning all trade with slaves, whether or not they possessed a permit from the master. In effect, a slave could only trade legally with a white person while in the master's presence. (52) Many South Carolina slaveholders, however, considered this an undue inconvenience, dismissed the law, and continued to send trusted slaves on shopping errands. (53) Their disregard for a law intended to protect their interests revealed masters' ambivalence toward legislative remedies. Rather than prohibiting all trade between slaves and whites, slaveholders wanted to ban only the transactions that undermined their authority or threatened their property.

Despite tightening laws, the number of indictments for unlawful trading with slaves increased each decade from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Civil War. In many North Carolina counties and South Carolina districts, indictments mushroomed from one every several years during the 1820s and 1830s to two, three, four, or more per annum in the late 1840s and 1850s. The growth of the southern population, both white and black, over this time period accounts for some natural rise in the number of such cases from decade to decade. The stiffening laws designed to curtail the surreptitious trade also helps explain the increasing numbers of whites who landed in court, charged with trading with slaves; however, no sudden spike in the number of illicit trading cases followed the passage of new legislation. The most dramatic increase came instead in the 1840s and 1850s. Those decades saw far more white defendants in the courtroom than had the 1820s or 1830s.

Why, then, did the clandestine trade reach such unprecedented levels in the 1840s and especially in the 1850s? A number of factors contributed to the trend. First, growing tensions with northern abolitionists sensitized slaveholders to potentially disloyal behaviors of whites in their own midst. They therefore took the crime of trading with slaves more seriously than in the past and prosecuted violators more aggressively. Second, wealth in the Old South became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by the end of the antebellum era. The poor-white population swelled in the 1850s, and poor whites' increasing poverty likely made them more desperate for the goods that slaves had either produced or stolen. (54) Finally, the increase in unlawful trading in the 1840s and 1850s coincided with new restrictions masters imposed on slaves' independent market-related activities. As John Campbell and Joseph P. Reidy have argued, masters in upcountry South Carolina and Georgia cracked down on the slaves' economy during this period. By establishing credit accounts at reputable local stores and by disposing of slaves' crops on their behalf, slaveholders took steps to extricate bondpeople from the roles of buyer and seller in the antebellum marketplace. This effort to limit slaves' control over their lives and to increase their dependency upon the master had the unintended and paradoxical effect of fueling an escalation of the underground slave-poor white economy. (55)

The laws that southern legislatures enacted to end the clandestine trade with slaves did not lead to easy convictions. In South Carolina, conviction rates for all whites brought up on charges of trading with slaves varied by district, from 20 to 48 percent, distressingly low for masters who believed themselves "unmercifully robbed." At best, not even half of the whites alleged to have traded with slaves were found guilty. Likewise, in North Carolina a sample of twelve superior courts and twenty-seven county courts reveals that for the year 1839 thirty-seven prosecutions for trading with slaves yielded only nine convictions. (56) Surely not every white person accused of trading with slaves actually was guilty, but many who were probably did escape punishment due to the hassle, expense, and, ultimately, the perceived futility of pursuing the matter in court. "Three-fourths of the persons who are guilty, you can get no fine from," reported one newspaper, "and, if they have some property, all they have to do is to confess a judgment to a friend, go to jail, and swear out.... The State, or the party injured, has the cost of all these prosecutions and suits to pay, besides the trouble of attending Court...." (57) Traveler Frederick Law Olmsted further suggested that nonslaveholding jurors, themselves beneficiaries of the unlawful trade, refused to convict whites accused of underground dealing. (58)

A lack of evidence represents a more important reason for the paucity of convictions. As the grand jury in Union District, South Carolina, explained, "The grate [sic] difficulty in suppressing this crime consists in obtaining proof of its having been committed." (59) Southern courts did not permit slaves to testify against whites, so the very individual who participated in the illegal transaction could offer no assistance in securing a conviction against a white trader. "The negro, not being competent to give testimony in court," rendered it "exceedingly difficult to convict his white accomplice in crime," acknowledged one southern editor. Olmsted, too, recognized the legal dilemma of southern prosecutors. "The law which prevents the reception of the evidence of a negro in courts," he wrote, "here strikes back, with a most annoying force, upon the dominant power itself." Paradoxically, the inadmissibility of slave testimony, designed to ensure white hegemony over blacks, prevented slaveholders from enforcing class supremacy over the poor of their own race. (60)

In lieu of slave testimony, slaveholders devised other means to substantiate claims of illicit trade between slaves and poor whites. For accusations of trading with slaves to hold up in court, slaveholders needed white witnesses. They therefore formulated various schemes to ferret out suspicious whites. Poor white Josiah Lassiter of Richmond County, North Carolina, fell victim to one of these plots in 1847. Eli Watkins, the overseer for slave owner William Covington Jr., suspected Lassiter of trading with Covington's slaves. One December night the overseer caught "the negro Jerry in the road" with "some corn in a basket ... going in the direction of Lassiters." He whipped the slave and then instructed him to try to sell the corn to Lassiter. Watkins followed, secretly watching as Lassiter ushered the slave inside a crib, where "the negro put the corn in a tub." Hidden just a few yards away--peering through a crack in the wall--the overseer overheard Lassiter tell the slave Jerry that "there was about half [a] bushel of corn" and "he ought not to give him more than a pint of Liquor" since the alcohol "cost him so much." Lassiter "filled one bottle" and one "tickler" full of liquor. He apparently recognized the latter container from previous dealings, remarking, "aheh! you got that again." The transaction completed, Jerry delivered the alcohol to his master as Watkins had directed, and Lassiter was subsequently ordered to appear before the Richmond County court in 1848, charged with trading "one pint of whiskey" for "one peck of indian corn." (61)

In their efforts to squelch the clandestine trade, slaveholders frequently marked goods that they anticipated would be stolen. Olmsted reported that one planter executed a "strategem" to uncover the slave who had been stealing cotton from him and, more importantly, "to discover for whom the thief worked." The planter prepared some cotton "by mixing hair with it, and put [it] in a tempting place. A negro was seen to take it, and was followed by scouts, to a grog-shop, several miles distant, where he sold it--its real value being nearly ten dollars--for ten cents, taking his pay in liquor." The adulterated cotton allowed the planter to prove the grogshop owner had received stolen goods, while white "scouts" were able to verify what transpired. Authorities arrested the white trader. (62) A similar ruse in York District, South Carolina, led to the apprehension in early 1848 of David Scates, a landless and illiterate poor-white laborer. Slaveholder Edward Bird sent his slave "Dick with a piece of marked pork to a certain barrel in which Scates was supposed to receive such wares as negroes might deposit." Dick placed his master's pork in the barrel next to Scates' smokehouse around 10:00 P.M. one January night, with his master's white accomplices hiding a short distance away behind a tree. The next morning, Scates went outside, peered into the barrel, "looked about and took the meat into his smoke house." Scates thus fell into the trap. Armed with a warrant, a magistrate found "the very piece of meat" in Scates's possession. A York District jury convicted Scates of buying "a certain shoulder of Pork" valued at "Ten Cents" from the slave Dick and sentenced Scates three months in jail and a $25 fine. (63) By luring suspected traders into their snares, slaveholders successfully cornered some poor whites guilty of transacting business with slaves. (64)

A coincidental crossing of paths sometimes substituted for these types of overt trickery, as vigilant whites kept their eyes open for unlawful traders. This was true in urban settings more often than rural areas, but the greater concentration of people in even the smallest of hamlets increased the likelihood that a white witness would spy a particularly bold or careless interracial trade in progress. In the town of Wilmington, North Carolina, Dianah Bohnstedt repeatedly observed storekeeper Charles Hamburg (probably a German immigrant but not listed in the New Hanover County census) openly trading with the slaves of Parker Quince. On a Saturday night in the early 1850s, Bohnstedt was buying groceries when she saw Quince's slave Peter trade "one bushel and a peck of whole rice" for "some silver money," with which he purchased a three-cent glass of liquor and a few other articles before parting. Probably that same evening, Bohnstedt watched as Parker Quince's Ned left Hamburg's shop with a pistol, powder, and shot, apparently without paying anything. On another Saturday she saw Ned collect "Ten Dollars"--nine in paper and one in silver--for "five bushels of whole & three bushels of half Rice" that she had seen delivered by "an old Negro man with a cart" earlier in the week. Dianah Bohnstedt seemingly spent an inordinate amount of time shopping at Hamburg's store, and Hamburg certainly exhibited gross indiscretion in dealing so openly with slaves. As a result, Bohnstedt's testimony formed the backbone of the case against the shopkeeper. (65)

Even by taking advantage of spying, entrapment, and the sheer carelessness of the transgressors, slaveholding society unearthed and brought to justice only a minority of those whites who traded with slaves. Slaves and poor whites, however, questioned the purity of slaveholders' motives for seeking them out. While slaveholders often emphasized the ubiquitous thefts from their plantations and the dangers to slaves' physical health associated with liquor, slaves and poor whites themselves felt certain that masters contrived allegations of slave-poor white trading relationships to evict pesky poor whites from the neighborhood. With no poor whites in the area, slaveholders reasoned, no one would "corrupt" their chattel, and they could appropriate the poor whites' abandoned acreage. According to one ex-slave from Wake County, North Carolina, "Some of the slave owners, when a poor-white man's land joined theirs and they wanted his place would have their Negroes steal things and carry them to the poor white man, and sell them to him. Then the slave owner, knowing where the stuff was,... would go and find his things at the poor white man's house." The ostensibly benevolent planter then pledged not to prosecute if the poor white would "sell out to him, and leave." "That's the way some of the slave owners got such large tracks [sic] of lands," the former slave explained. (66)

In 1838 slaveholder Charles Townsend may have hoped that a conviction for trading with slaves would force poor-white sisters Mary and Elizabeth Cumbo from his Robeson County, North Carolina, neighborhood. A feud had been simmering between Townsend and the Cumbo sisters for some years. Mary and Elizabeth Cumbo, in their late forties or fifties, shared a dwelling near Townsend's estate. They had complained in 1836 that Townsend's slave Ralph pilfered "a large Fat Hog" from their enclosure. The following year Townsend alleged that the Cumbos had purchased stolen corn from Ralph on numerous occasions. Elizabeth Cumbo, however, called Townsend's claims "false and Groundless" and maintained that the slaveholder "had continued to intrap" them "by sending his Negroes to deposit Corn at their house privately & without their knowledge for the purpose of laying a foundation for his warrant & claim." Townsend denied that he had any "agency in furnishing the Negroes with the corn or sending them for trade" with the Cumbos, but he undoubtedly did want to put an end to the illicit trade he suspected was going on. In 1838 Charles's relative William Townsend went in company with two others to monitor the sisters' dwelling. The three men secreted themselves near the house, and they saw Ralph "approach the front door with a Bag." Ralph "gave a whistle" to signal Elizabeth Cumbo, who then "came out of the house & entered into a conversation" with the slave. William Townsend overheard Ralph "inquire 'if the cloth was ready' 'That he must go into the house with his bag to the light' 'for he did not know but there was some rotten ears' 'for he had got it in a hurry.'" Elizabeth and Ralph then went around the house and entered the dwelling by the back door. Townsend soon heard a "sound ... like ears of corn poured out upon a naked floor." To gain a closer look, he was attempting to make his way nearer the house when Mary Cumbo, who had been outdoors, spotted him. She called out to her sister Elizabeth to "mind what you are about somebody is watching." With the warning, "Elizabeth ordered the slave Ralph out of the house & to clear himself or she would knock him down with the axe." Ralph quickly departed, at which point the three men in hiding "examined" him and "found him with a Bag, empty with the exception of some grains of corn." William, however, denied that Charles Townsend had ordered him to the Cumbos to spy on them. "I know of no plot to entrap or ensnare the defendants," William stated. Whether part of a slaveholder's conscious scheme to oust a pair of irritating poor whites from the neighborhood or not, Townsend did successfully detect the Cumbo sisters in the process of exchanging cloth they had woven for the slave Ralph's stolen corn. (67)

When slaveholders secured convictions against poor whites for trading with slaves, local citizens did not necessarily unite in support of the ruling. In a handful of cases, if a guilty party was unusually young or old, in bad health, or (prior to the conviction) a respectable member of society with no previous run-ins with the law, magnanimous neighborhood whites might petition for a pardon or a reduced sentence. (68) Poor whites, however, rarely benefited from neighborhood benevolence; instead, they became the subjects of controversy. In one instructive case, more than one hundred petitioners from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, begged for clemency on behalf of Samuel McCracken, a laboring Irish immigrant convicted on three counts of "unlawful trading with negroes." According to the memorial, McCracken "is a man extremely poor, in bad health, [and] has a wife and family to maintain." The signers, including many of the most prominent professional men of Charlotte, protested that there existed "no positive proof of any sale," suggesting the shakiness of the evidence upon which McCracken had been convicted. (69) Mecklenburg County solicitor S. Nye Hutchinson disagreed. In a letter to the governor, he described McCracken as "wholly unworthy [of] executive clemency. His house is [a] most perfect nuisance. Without license he retails liquor. In addition his house is the general rende[z]vous for negroes." It took "a long period of fruitless effort" before authorities successfully "detected & convicted" the man, so the solicitor wanted to uphold the convictions. Moreover, he added, "His wife is more degraded than himself and therefore no family consideration should move you." Wealthy Charlotte merchant H. B. Williams mailed his own letter to the governor, explaining that McCracken "is a miserable drun[k]en fellow [who] has done nothing for the last 18 months but drink and sell whisky to slaves at night [and on] Sunday and at all times keeps the most disprate [sic] house in the county." As Williams saw it, "his family are better without his services and if he could be kept in prison ... it would be a great relief to the community ... I hope he will remain in Gaol." (70)

Many white observers perceived that the laws against trading with slaves provided an insufficient deterrent to the crime. An editorial from "SEVERAL SUFFERERS" of Beaufort District, South Carolina, maintained that "the laws, as they now stand, are indeed impotent to suppress the traffic. Truly they may be said to encourage it, the punishment being so trifling in proportion to the magnitude of the offence, and the large profits which tempt to its commission." The Beaufort District correspondents claimed that when whites who received the maximum punishment under the law for trading with slaves were released from jail, they defiantly resumed their illicit traffic, "more openly than before conviction." (71)

Such blatant defiance of the law led many slaveholders to demand stricter measures against trading with slaves. A South Carolina act of 1817 required that anyone who traded with a slave must keep the slave's permit, for the burden of proof fell on the white person involved to show that a given transaction adhered to the law. The state's revised act of 1834 contained a presumptive-proof clause that dispensed with the need for direct proof of illicit trading. The North Carolina legislature had passed a similar law eight years earlier. By these statutes, to convict someone of trading unlawfully with a slave, one needed only to show that the slave entered the "shop, store, or house used for trading" with an article and left without it or that the bond servant departed with an article he or she did not take in. (72) In either case, the law presumed the white inside to have traded with the slave. These acts, in effect, held a white person guilty until proven innocent. No one actually saw Darlington District, South Carolina, shopkeeper William D. Rollins trade with a slave, but according to court records, "The proof was, that the slave went into [the] defendant's shop with five pounds of bacon and an empty bottle, and came out without the bacon and with a bottle of whiskey." (73) Similarly, the South Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of York District's David Scates because "circumstantial evidence is legally competent,... especially in cases of illicit trading and retailing of spirits, in which ingenious devices are so common." (74)

Feeling besieged, some South Carolinians wanted the law to go a step further. In 1860, fifty-two petitioners from Orangeburg District complained that current state laws rendered it "almost impossible" to secure a conviction for "negro trading." They wanted to amend the 1834 law so that "if a negro is seen to go into a shop, remain long enough to trade & comes out with an article kept for sale in such shops it will be prima facie evidence of trading & the trader must prove his innocence or be held guilty of negro trading." (75) To crack down on the ever-increasing clandestine trade, many South Carolinians felt no reservations about sacrificing the civil liberties of the state's white population. One contributor to the Charleston Mercury suggested the even-more-radical step of allowing slaves to testify in court against their white trading partners, provided that the master attested to the truth of the slave's remarks. (76)

A few South Carolina whites recommended that white men convicted of trading with slaves suffer complete disfranchisement. This idea reached a crescendo in the early 1850s. A Charleston District grand jury reasoned that "white men so degraded" as to sell liquor to slaves deserved nothing less than "a forfeiture forever, of the right of suffrage." The Darlington District grand jury concurred that men who traded with slaves sacrificed their privilege to vote. This proposed penalty did not affect white women, since they were denied the ballot. Nevertheless, the idea marked a significant change in thinking, turning away from the usual retributive punishments of fines and imprisonment to strike at one of the core privileges of white men's freedom: the franchise. The state legislature's Committee on Colored Population looked with favor upon the suggestion, although the proposal never made it into law. In 1857 the "SEVERAL SUFFERERS" of Beaufort District were still recommending disfranchisement as a possible solution to the epidemic of trading with slaves. (77)

More vocal, probably more numerous, and ultimately more successful were those who advocated that whites convicted of trading with slaves suffer the punishment of whipping. Like disfranchisement, whipping was fraught with symbolic significance. A punishment normally reserved exclusively for slaves, whipping humiliated the victim. For at least a brief moment, flogging degraded the white man, reducing him to the level of slaves and temporarily suspending his membership in white society. During the 1850s, as tensions over slavery heightened and the South rallied to defend its peculiar institution, many whites in both North and South Carolina concluded that trading with slaves warranted such a severe punishment. After some of his family's slaves received a flogging for attempting to sell a stolen hog to a neighborhood poor-white man, North Carolina's William D. Valentine reflected in his diary that it was actually "some white people" who "deserve all the whipping these poor slaves received last evening." (78) Acting on similar sentiments, James Graham petitioned the North Carolina state legislature. He asked that body to consider passing a law that would punish those convicted of trading with slaves with "one or more whippings on the bare back at the whipping post.... Those persons who live by corrupting and hiring negroes to steal for their benefit, deserve and ought to receive the most severe and exemplary punishment." (79)

The South Carolina legislature received many more such requests. As early as 1831 the grand jury of Spartanburg District recommended "that whipping should be superadded to the punishment of those convicted of trading with slaves." (80) In 1850, forty-one petitioners from Barnwell District requested the passage of a law "imposing corporal punishment for the second conviction for trafficking with slaves." (81) Even the governor chimed in that unlawful trading marked "perhaps one of the very few offenses deserving of corporal punishment." (82) The state legislature referred the matter to the Judiciary Committee, which ruled the proposal "inexpedient." The Committee on Colored Population explained "that the infliction of corporal punishment in a slave holding community and in the presence of slaves is calculated to create improper feelings & notions on that class of our population--to degrade the white man to a level with the negro would be bad policy in our state." (83) But petitions and grand-jury presentments continued to pour in, reaching a peak in 1857. With whites from Chesterfield, Darlington, Kershaw, Spartanburg, Union, and Williamsburg Districts all clamoring for action, the South Carolina legislature passed a law in December 1857 stating that anyone convicted of trading with slaves a second time "shall, for such second, or other subsequent offence, in addition to the penalties now prescribed by law, be whipped not exceeding thirty-nine lashes." This act excluded white women and may never have been invoked in the punishment of white men. It instead served primarily as a deterrent and demonstrated the gravity with which South Carolina whites viewed the unlawful traffic with slaves. Although also plagued with the problem of illicit trade, North Carolina was never as radically wedded to the institution of slavery as its southern neighbor, and the Old North State eschewed the whipping of whites for the offense. (84)

In this case, the South Carolina legislature acquiesced to public opinion, but in general, lawmakers dismissed pleas to enact new statutes strengthening the penalties against whites convicted of trading with slaves. They repeatedly insisted that current laws "afford[ed] ample & stringent remedies" and were "adequate to prevent the evil complained of." (85) The legislature was convinced that "further legislation would only accumulate threats of punishment, which the public by their indifference and inaction, would render as impotent as those which had been made before." Politicians thus blamed citizens' own inertia for allowing the clandestine trade to continue unchecked. Legislators held it the people's responsibility to report suspected violations to the authorities, and the lawmakers believed South Carolina's citizens had neglected their duty. If people just "shut their eyes" to the unlawful trade, reported one committee, laws cannot substitute for "what is deficient in the public spirit of the citizen." Rather than passing additional legislation, lawmakers endorsed community vigilance and activism. (86)

In its mildest form, community activism meant the expulsion of white men and women from local churches. Congregations took suspicions of trading with slaves seriously. Members of New Providence Baptist Church "withdrew our fellowship from Bro. Richard Jordan for trading with negroes." (87) Likewise, Barnwell Baptist Church "excommunicated" Nancy Barden "for her unchristian conduct in retailing spiritous liquors and trading with negroes." (88) A committee in Antioch Baptist Church charged a Brother Howle with immoral conduct because he "had procured a supply of spirit[s] and had disposed of it in too short a time to have used it temperately in his family and some circumstances occurred which gave suspicion that he had disposed of it clandestinely." Howle refused to confess to any sale, denied any wrongdoing, and was eventually "excluded by a majority of two votes." (89)

Community censure of poor whites and others must have acted as a potent deterrent against trading with slaves. Virtually no whites wished to be ostracized by their neighbors. So powerful was the desire to maintain one's reputation in the community that some whites accused of unlawful trading took their detractors to court. Even slaves found themselves on the defensive, suggesting that their word carried at least some influence locally. Although legally their testimony was inadmissible against a white defendant, slaves could still fuel a community's doubts and contribute to the erosion of a white person's standing. Thus in Union District, South Carolina, an injudicious remark landed slave Henry in court, accused of "saying that William Lawson and Spencer Lawson assisted in stealing cotton and received stolen cotton." (90)

If the community at large pressured poor whites to curb their unlawful trade with slaves, so did the proactive steps of individual slaveholders. The "SEVERAL SUFFERERS" from Beaufort District asserted that "inefficient" laws necessitated that the master "depend on his own private means, and not on the law, to suppress the traffic." (91) As one planter explained to Frederick Law Olmsted, "The law is entirely inadequate to protect us against these rascals; it rather protects them than us. They easily evade detection in breaking it; and we can never get them punished, except we go beyond or against the law ourselves." (92) Runaway slave Charles Ball recalled one instance in the first decade of the nineteenth century when a South Carolina overseer administered his own extralegal remedy. When two bags of cotton turned up missing from the plantation, the overseer immediately suspected that slaves had stolen the cotton "and sold [it] to a poor white man, who resided at the distance of three miles back in the pine woods...." Ball looked with pity upon the man and his wife: "The lowest poverty had, through life, been the companion of these poor people, of which their clayey complexions, haggard figures, and tattered garments, gave the strongest proof." Their very "state of destitution," Ball believed, "afforded very convincing evidence that they were not in possession of the proceeds of the stolen goods of any person." But the overseer knew "that black people often called at his house...." As Ball himself confessed, "I had often been at the cabin of this man, in my trapping expeditions...." To the overseer these facts offered "conclusive evidence" that the poor-white man conducted a "criminal intercourse" with slaves and had been "a receiver of their stolen goods, for many years." (93) Determined to locate the pilfered bags of cotton, the overseer commanded Ball to search both inside and outside the humble cabin, as the alarmed poor white family fled their dwelling. Upon finding nothing, the enraged overseer set their home ablaze. Ball's master later bragged that "he had routed one receiver of stolen goods out of the country, and that all others of his character ought to be dealt with in the same manner." (94)

At times frustrated planters joined forces to oust irksome poor whites from the community. Slaveholders and other "respectable" members of society often conferred with one another to devise wonderfully creative techniques to cleanse their neighborhoods of undesirable poor whites. In the mid-1820s, neighbors in Charleston District cooperated in an effort to evict the poor white Andrew S. Rhodes from his "small house ... near Monk's Corner." Rhodes had apparently been renting the dwelling, an insubstantial shack "of no great value," for eighteen months when his neighbors decided "to get rid of him, believing that he was dealing with their negroes and was a troublesome neighbor." Rhodes "was regarded as a nuisance in the parish, and a great vagabond, with whom no white man associated, and who cultivated no land, and owned no other property, than ... which were only fit for negro trading." According to court records, Rhodes "had been an inmate of the Charleston gaol for seven or eight years, the greater part of the time for perjury." Authorities in Charleston had also imprisoned him briefly for uttering incendiary comments during the Denmark Vesey unrest of 1822. Fearing the poor white's corrupting influence on their slaves, neighbors, including the owner of the house, entered the shack during Rhodes's absence. They "seized upon such articles as were in the house, which were very few and of little value, being such as were suitable only for the lowest retail grog shop, worth about $5 or $10," meticulously removed Rhodes's meager belongings, and, at the invitation of the owner, systematically dismantled the humble dwelling. Upon his return the stunned Rhodes sued his neighbors for trespassing. The defendants vindicated themselves by claiming that "The object in pulling down the house was to prevent ... Rhodes, [from] getting possession again, and to expel him thereby from the neighborhood; as he was trading illicitly with the negroes." Clearly siding with the vigilantes, the sympathetic judge awarded Rhodes one paltry cent in compensation. (95)

Slaveholders sometimes threatened those whites suspected of trading with slaves and physically punished them. Planters in Onslow County, North Carolina, "closely banded together" for protection, paying spies to ferret out their so-called "midnight enemies." When they identified a suspicious grogshop keeper, they tried to persuade him to abandon his establishment and relocate elsewhere. Several planters would pay a visit to the proprietor, offer "cash for his acres and storeroom," and insinuate that if he did not accept the offer within forty-eight hours, he would face "a coat of tar with a full ruffling of feathers." (96) One white man in South Carolina did suffer such a punishment for allegedly receiving "stolen goods from negroes" in 1838. According to a tantalizing fragment of a letter, "a lot of fellows ... strip[p]ed him to the pantaloons," coated him with the contents of a "barrel of Tar," and "daubed him" with cotton. The mob then "drove him through the most publick [streets?] applying the cowskin to the cotton every few minutes." A witness to the event considered the episode "the most disgraceful thing I ever saw don[e to a] white man; death to me before that." The mob undoubtedly hoped other whites shared this witness's sense of shame and would be dissuaded from participating in the unlawful traffic. (97)

Some frustrated slaveholders throughout South Carolina formed official vigilance associations with the express intent of curbing the illicit trade. Vigilance associations began as early as the mid-1840s, reaching their peak in 1859, probably by no coincidence the same year the northern abolitionist John Brown raided Harpers Ferry. (98) Observing "a visible change ... in the last few years in the conduct of our Slaves," James Henry Hammond and other planters in Barnwell and Edgefield Districts founded the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association in 1846 "for the purpose of preserving proper subordination among our slaves, and putting down unlawful traffick with them." By the 1850s committees also sprang up in Abbeville, Darlington, Kershaw, Lancaster, Orangeburg, Sumter, and other rural South Carolina districts. (99) The Abbeville vigilance committee organized in 1859 "for the purpose of taking measures to prevent illicit traffic between mean white men and the slaves," and the band hoped "to rid the neighborhood of these pests." Elsewhere, citizens in Cartersville confidently asserted that "these rascals can be conquered" and resolved to "boycott any attorney who would undertake to prosecute their society." (100) When one Darlington District shopkeeper ignored warnings in 1857 to cease trading with slaves, a mob of seventy--five burned down his store and exchanged gunfire with him, killing the man. (101)

Many slaveholders had long suspected a link between illicit trade and slave unrest. More than two hundred petitioners from Mecklenburg, Iredell, and Cabarrus Counties in North Carolina attributed the "crime and insubordination" of their slaves "to the cupidity of evil-disposed persons located in our midst, who carry on an unlawful traffic with slaves." The Charleston District grand jury explained that selling liquor to slaves "is subversive of public safety by bringing the negro slave in such familiar contact with the white man, as to excite his contempt, or invite the assertion of equality, or draw from him exhibitions of presumption and insubordination." When slaves and poor whites colluded in criminal intercourse, they dissolved the racial barriers that ordered southern society. The bondpeople tied to the illicit trade thus became increasingly "refractory and ungovernable." If the clandestine traffic persisted unchecked, many southern whites feared, they would sacrifice all feelings of security, for it seemed only a short step from participation in the underground trade to participation in outright rebellion. (102)

Many southern whites complained that the illicit traffic not only bred slave discontent but also struck at the very institution of slavery. In North Carolina one petitioner informed the state legislature of the "numerous class of the worst sort of Abolitionists dwelling in our midst ... who clandestinely trade with slaves and receive stolen goods in payment for ardent spirits and other articles, thereby corrupting and destroying the value of servants. Many of these malefactors are insolvent persons." (103) As the "SEVERAL SUFFERERS" from Beaufort District saw it, "These are practical abolitionists, who are really destroying the value of our slave property." (104) Countless planters agreed with one South Carolina master who recorded that the "mean democratic white men" who kept slaves stocked in liquor "are no better than abolitionists," and the Savannah River Anti--Slave Traffick Association declared the dealer in stolen goods even "more potent than the abolitionist," encouraging "insurrection, burning and murder." (105) The "swarm" of whites who traded with slaves marked "an internal enemy" who sold liquor to "debase the slave, and in this manner our very slave system is being ... weakened." The clandestine traffic "strikes at the vitals of our domestic Institutions" through "base and nefarious means," and it "aim[s] an insidious but most effectual blow at the system itself." (106)

In the slave--poor white economy, slaveholders detected a grievous threat to southern society. As Alex Lichtenstein has argued, the interracial trade called into question masters' hegemony over race and class relations in the Old South. (107) When bondpeople systematically pilfered from gardens, smokehouses, and corncribs and then ventured off the plantation to trade in underground markets, they defied plantation discipline and exhibited independence inconsistent with their enslaved status. Likewise, by exchanging commodities with slaves, poor whites contested their subordination as lower-class members of white society. Through their clandestine traffic, both slaves and poor whites challenged planter pretensions of domination. As active participants in the slave--poor white economy, they disregarded elite constrictions on their behavior in order to improve their material standards of living. Moreover, these economic interactions bred what slaveholders considered a disconcerting intimacy between blacks and whites. The clandestine trade had the potential to awaken shared sympathies between slaves and poor whites and to forge among them a common identity as an impoverished, inferior, and biracial southern lower class. Such a reorientation along class lines could have menaced the existing social fabric. (108) In those scant few cases in which poor whites supplied guns to slaves--no insignificant purchase but one likely for slaves' own personal use in hunting--southern planters could not help but see the revolutionary implications of the interracial trade. Abolitionists' mounting attacks upon the institution of slavery in the late 1840s and 1850s only magnified planter fears. No wonder, then, that anxious slaveholders complained incessantly of the unlawful traffic, agitated for harsher penalties, and even took the law into their own hands to suppress it. Given the growing social and psychological tensions of the late antebellum period, slaveholders' reactions represented perfectly legitimate responses to a perceived threat upon their way of life.

Upon closer inspection, however, the slave--poor white economy does not appear as disruptive or subversive as southern planters feared. A detailed examination of the underground trade between slaves and poor whites shows that racial boundaries were maintained and even reinforced within the slave--poor white economy itself. Although slave--poor white economic exchanges probably did occasionally blossom into genuine friendship or produce feelings of camaraderie on both sides, the overwhelming majority of these contacts remained strictly business relationships--mutually beneficial exchanges of goods or cash. As one runaway recalled, "There were, in our vicinity, plenty of poor white folks, as we contemptuously called them, whom we cordially despised, but with whom we carried on a regular traffic at our master's expense." Another one-time fugitive added that "many persons will sell a slave any article that he can get the money to buy. Not that they sympathize with the slave, but merely because his testimony is not admitted in court against a free white person." (107) The unlawful trade between slaves and poor whites undoubtedly did erode racial barriers somewhat, but the mutual benefits to marginalized southerners, both black and white, muted its threat to the broader social structure. Through their exchanges in the underground economy, poor whites maintained a precarious superiority over slaves, frustrated and annoyed their own social betters, and found an avenue to secure cheap food and consumer goods. Though unequal partners in trade, slaves successfully used the underground economy to resist the terms and conditions of their enslavement and to improve the material standards of their day-to-day lives. Slaves and poor whites, in short, each engaged in the underground trade for their own rational motives. Poor whites' illicit commerce with slaves should not be construed as a sign either of solidarity with bondpeople or of animosity toward planters. On the contrary, the clandestine trade effectively channeled lower-class discontent within the established social framework and never seriously threatened to undermine the southern social order. But amid the growing abolitionist challenges and the increasingly tension--filled political atmosphere of the late 1840s and 1850s, planters viewed the underground slave--poor white economy as one part of a nefarious conspiracy against them.

TABLE 1
WEALTH OF MASTERS WHOSE SLAVES ENGAGED IN ILLICIT TRADE WITH
POOR WHITES

                     SOUTH CAROLINA

                     # of    Real     Date of
Slaveholder          Slaves  Estate   Crime    Census     District

Samuel W. Evans       109    $40,000  1860     1860       Marlboro
Joseph Leach           45     18,500  1857     1850/1860  York
Margaret Young         39     20,000  1855     1860       Union
Nathan B. Thomas       31      7,750  1848     1850       Marlboro
Daniel M. Crosland     24      6,000  1852     1850       Marlboro
Christopher Brandon    21      9,016  1857     1850/1860  Union
Jabish N. Townsend     15      5,720  1855     1850/1860  Marlboro
Henry B. Covington     14     10,413  1854     1850/1860  Marlboro
John W. Farrow         13      5,332  1854     1850/1860  Spartanburg
Micah Jenkins          12     13,600  1859     1860       York
George Spencer         11      3,900  1855     1850/1860  Union
Samuel W. Anderson      6      2,000  1857     1850       Laurens
Lewis Blanton           1      2,800  1857     1860       Spartanburg

Totals                341    145,031
Averages               26     11,156

                     NORTH CAROLINA

                     # of    Real     Date of
Slaveholder          Slaves  Estate   Crime    Census     County

George Costen          62    $10,000  1853     1850       Gates
Thomas Riddick         50      5,000  1847     1850       Gates
William D. Cobb        47      8,000  1850     1850       Wayne
Larry D. Farmer        34     11,220  1857     1860       Wilson
Perry Tyler            34      9,000  1850     1850       Bertie
Thomas J. A. Cooper    25      4,000  1857     1860       Nash
James Turner           23      8,000  1852     1850       Granville
Noah Roundtree         20      5,000  1851     1850       Gates
Samuel Simpson         20      3,000  1851     1850       Chowan
Parker Quince          18      3,500  1854     1850       New Hanover
Robert V. Eaton        17      2,800  1852     1850       Granville
William W. Barnes      13      6,000  1859     1860       Wayne
Elizabeth Giliam        9      3,000  1847     1850       Gates
Edward Wood             7      3,500  1847     1850       Chowan
Margaret McLauchlin     4      2,200  1848     1850       Robeson
                               (son)

Totals                383     84,220
Averages               26      5,615

NOTE: Six South Carolina masters--Brandon, Covington, Farrow, Leach,
Spencer, and Townsend--appear in both the 1850 and 1860 census records.
In calculating their assets, I have assumed a steady accumulation of
wealth in land and slaves over the course of the decade. Thus, rather
than using 1850 or 1860 figures, or an average of the two, I arrived at
a prorated figure based on the year in which the individual's slave
committed the trade with a poor white. For example, Joseph Leach owned
$23,000 in real estate in 1860

(1) On the Lowcountry see Philip D. Morgan, "Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (October 1982), 563-99; Philip D. Morgan, "The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country," Journal of Southern History, 49 (August 1983), 399-420; Betty Wood, "'White Society' and the 'Informal' Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia, c. 1763-1830," Slavery and Abolition, 11 (December 1990), 313-31; and Betty Wood, Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1995). For works dealing with areas outside the Lowcountry, see John Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'? Slaves' Market-Related Activities in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860," Slavery and Abolition, 12 (May 1991), 131-69; and John T. Schlotterbeck, "The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia," Slavery and Abolition, 12 (May 1991), 170-81. Other important works on the slave economy include Alex Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition To Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded': Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law," Journal of Social History, 21 (Spring 1988), 413-40; Lawrence T. McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master: Market Relations and the American Slave Community," in Winfred B. Moore Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler Jr., eds., Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (Westport, Conn., 1988), 31-44; Loren Schweninger, "The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi-Freedom in Virginia, 1780-1865," Slavery and Abolition, 12 (September 1991), 1-22; Loren Schweninger, "Slave Independence and Enterprise in South Carolina, 1780-1865," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 93 (April 1992), 101-25; Joseph P. Reidy, "Obligation and Right: Patterns of Labor, Subsistence, and Exchange in the Cotton Belt of Georgia, 1790-1860," in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993), 138-54; Larry E. Hudson Jr., "'All That Cash': Work and Status in the Slave Quarters," in Hudson, ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester, 1994), 77-94; and Larry E. Hudson Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ga., 1997), chap. 1. For a previous generation of scholarship that touches on a similar theme, see John Hope Franklin, "Slaves Virtually Free in Ante-Bellum North Carolina," Journal of Negro History, 28 (July 1943), 284-310; Clement Eaton, "Slave-Hiring in the Upper South: A Step toward Freedom," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 46 (March 1960), 663-78; and John Hebron Moore, "Simon Gray, Riverman: A Slave Who Was Almost Free," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (December 1962), 472-84. For their insightful comments and suggestions, I gratefully acknowledge Peter Kolchin, Christine Heyrman, Howard Johnson, Steven Hahn, Dan Dupre, Anne Boylan, Carole Haber, Victoria Bynum, Tim Lockley, and Kevin Hardwick. I am greatly indebted as well to the Journal of Southern History's anonymous reviewers for their penetrating critiques and to Earl Ijames of the North Carolina State Archives. Marilyn Schuster generously assisted me during the revision process. Thanks also to the graduate students at the University of Delaware and others who listened to and commented upon earlier drafts of this article presented to the University of Delaware history department and at the sixty-eighth annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2002.

(2) The best work on slave theft remains Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition To Theft."' For historians who acknowledge the presence of an underground slave economy, see many of the works listed in note 1, as well as Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 22; Eugene D. Genovese, "'Rather Be a Nigger Than a Poor White Man': Slave Perceptions of Southern Yeomen and Poor Whites," in Hans L. Trefousse, ed., Toward d New View of America: Essays in Honor of Arthur C. Cole (New York, 1977), 87-88; J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 56-61; Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 92-94; Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, 1994), 46-47, 107-8; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. (New York, 1995), 116-21; and Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo, "Poor Whites, Slaves, and Free Blacks in Tennessee, 1796-1861," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 55 (Spring 1996), 59-62.

(3) Timothy J. Lockley, "Trading Encounters between Non-Elite Whites and African Americans in Savannah, 1790-1860," Journal of Southern History, 66 (February 2000), 25-48; Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860 (Athens, Ga., 2001), chap. 3. See also Wood, Women's Work, Men's Work, chaps. 6-7; and Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964), 84-89, 149-60, 252-58.

(4) On foreigners in the South see Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, "Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South," American Historical Review, 88 (December 1983), 1175-1200; and Randall M. Miller, "The Enemy Within: Some Effects of Foreign Immigrants on Antebellum Southern Cities," Southern Studies, 24 (Spring 1985), 30-53. German and Irish immigrants in particular were either ignorant of or dismissive of southern racial etiquette.

(5) Bolton, Poor Whites, 5, 192n9; Rudolph M. Lapp, "The Ante Bellum Poor Whites of the South Atlantic States" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1956), 10-11, 13-14, 15, 16, 18, 20. William L. Barney offers a somewhat more conservative estimate of 20 to 30 percent. See William Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York, 1972), 42; and William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974), 39. Work on Georgia and Tennessee suggests higher percentages of poor whites in the southern population. See Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Gintner, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1986), 5; and Fred Arthur Bailey, Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill, 1987), 25, 171-72n15.

(6) Bolton, Poor Whites, ix, 4-5, 11, 8. For a fascinating, detailed look at one exceptional poor-white man's struggle to survive in a slaveholder's society, see Charles C. Bolton and Scott P. Culclasure, eds., The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South (Athens, Ga., 1998). In Poor Whites, Bolton defines poor whites as those southern whites who owned neither land nor slaves. I expand somewhat upon this strict economic definition by including whites who owned a few paltry acres of land or other form of wealth, such as a grogshop, as well as those individuals whom southerners themselves, whether masters or slaves, identified as poor whites in extant primary sources.

(7) Genovese, "'Rather Be a Nigger Than a Poor White Man,'" 90; Avery O. Craven, "Poor Whites and Negroes in the Ante-Bellum South," Journal of Negro History, 15 (January 1930), 16-17. For declarations of slaves' superior living conditions, see Bernard C. Steiner, ed., "The South Atlantic States in 1833, as Seen By a New Englander: Being a Narrative of a Tour Taken by Henry Barnard ...," Maryland Historical Magazine, 13 (December 1918), 338; George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. III: South Carolina Narratives, Pt. 3 (Westport, Conn., 1972), 51; and W. H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or Fifteen Years in Slavery (3rd ed.; Eau Claire, Wis., 1913), 22.

(8) Morgan, "Work and Culture"; Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" 132-33; Schlotterbeck, "Internal Economy of Slavery," 170; Hudson, To Have and to Hald, chap. 1.

(9) The preservation of indictments from the Court of General Sessions determined the South Carolina districts under close scrutiny here. Of the thirteen districts with extant indictments, I found no applicable records from either Anderson or Kershaw Districts. Indictments in Charleston and Pendleton Districts were not indexed and therefore were regrettably eliminated from this study. In North Carolina, I examined with greatest care the counties of Bertie, Carteret, Chowan, Craven, Edgecombe, Gates, Nash, New Hanover, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Pitt, Richmond, Robeson, Wayne, and Wilson in the east; Caldwell, Chatham, Cleveland, Davidson, Granville, Guilford, Iredell, Orange, Randolph, Rockingham, Stanly, and Stokes in the piedmont; and Haywood and McDowell in the mountains. These thirty counties represent all of the counties in North Carolina for which the North Carolina State Archives has extant slave records.

(10) Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" (on upcountry South Carolina) and Schlotterbeck, "Internal Economy of Slavery," and Schweninger, "Underside of Slavery" (both on Virginia) are among the few historical works on the slave economy that have dealt at length with areas outside the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. A number of other works discuss South Carolina without clearly differentiating regions within the state. By contrast, North Carolina has been almost entirely ignored.

(11) James Battle Avirett, The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin before the War (New York, 1901), 118.

(12) Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 209; Schlotterbeck, "Internal Economy of Slavery," 177. On the illicit liquor trade in Savannah, see Lockley, "Trading Encounters."

(13) Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves, n.d., 1803-1861, Folder for 1847, Slave Records, 1783-1867, Gates County, North Carolina State Archives (North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh), hereinafter cited as NCSA (first three quotations); Civil Action Records and Criminal Action Records, 1796-1863, Folder for 1857, Slave Records, Nash County, NCSA (fourth quotation). Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Chowan County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, National Archives Microfilm Series (hereinafter cited as NAMS) M-432, roll 625, frame 105, lists Jones as a thirty-two-year-old merchant from Virginia with no real estate. Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Nash County, North Carolina, Schedule 1. Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 638, frame 298, lists Woodard as a house carpenter with no real estate. See also Wood, Women's Work, Men's Work, 58-61; Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, 1998), 5-7, 9-10, 13, 31; and Stephanie H. M. Camp, "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861," Journal of Southern History, 68 (August 2002), 534, 544, 558-66.

(14) Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1857-1863, Folder for 1858, Granville County, NCSA (quotation). Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Granville County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-653, roll 898, frame 524, provides information on Kenan Parham. Slaves also purchased sweets from whites in Rockingham and Nash Counties.

(15) Slave Records, n.d., 1842-1866, Folder for 1847, Caldwell County, NCSA (first quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Caldwell County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 623, frame 50; Slave Records, 1830-1867, Folder for 1850-1859, Northampton County, NCSA (second and third quotations); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Northampton County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 639, frame 19.

(16) See, for example, Indictments, File 3034, Court of General Sessions, Union District, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (Columbia; hereinafter cited as SCDAH); Indictments, File 2966, Court of General Sessions, Union District, SCDAH; Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Union District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 859, frame 33.

(17) Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, 12 (quotations); Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1848-1856, Folder for 1853, Granville County, NCSA; Indictments, Spring 1854, File 10, Court of General Sessions, Spartanburg District, SCDAH; Indictments, Spring 1857, File 14, Court of General Sessions, Spartanburg District, SCDAH.

(18) Indictments, File 897A, Court of General Sessions, Laurens District, SCDAH (quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Laurens District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 855, frame 299.

(19) Extradition request of Governor Henry A. Wise to Governor John W. Ellis, May 1859 Folder, Box 1, Governor's Papers, John W. Ellis, NCSA (second quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Mecklenburg County, Virginia, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 960, frame 105 (first quotation).

(20) Indictments, Fall 1857, File 23, Court of General Sessions, Spartanburg District, SCDAH (first quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Spartanburg District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 858, frame 238; Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Spartanburg District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-653, roll 1226, frame 299; Buying from Slave 1857 Folder, Slave Records, 1855-1864, Wilson County, NCSA (second quotation). Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-653, roll 896, frame 391, lists Pittman as twenty-eight, with no occupation, no real estate, and no personal estate. The census taker also labeled him a "Lunatic."

(21) Ralph Roberts, "A Slave's Story," Putnam's Monthly, 9 (June 1857), 617.

(22) Rawick, ed., American Slave, III, pt. 3, p. 234.

(23) Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worcester, Mass., 1895), 58 (first quotation), 76 (second quotation), 77 (third quotation).

(24) Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993), 101, 243. but only $8,000 in 1850. When his slave traded with a poor white in 1857, I am assuming that he owned approximately $18,500 worth of land (23,000 - 8,000 = 15,000/10 = 1,500; 1,500 x 7 = 10,500; 10,500 + 8,000 = 18,500). Similarly, his slave family increased from thirty-seven in 1850 to forty-nine in 1860, so I have calculated that he owned forty-five slaves in 1857 (49 - 37 = 12; 12/10 = 1.2; 1.2 x 7 = 8.4, which rounds down to 8; 8 + 37 = 45). These exceptions notwithstanding, the figures cited for both South Carolina and North Carolina do not account for fluctuations in wealth in land or slaves that occurred between the time of the alleged crime and the arrival of the census taker.

(25) On slavery's tendency to emasculate slave men by stripping them of power and authority and slave men's efforts to protect and provide for their families, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 482-94; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (rev. ed.; New York, 1979), 172-73, 178-9; and Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976), esp. 306-7.

(26) Wood, "'White Society' and the 'Informal' Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia," 321; Wood, Women's Work, Men's Work, 81; Robert Olwell, "'Loose, Idle and Disorderly': Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace," in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, 1996), 98, 99, 101, 103.

(27) Records Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1848-1855, Folder for 1850, Robeson County, NCSA; Indictments, File 2645, Court of General Sessions, Union District, SCDAH.

(28) Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 77. See also the case, discussed below, of poor-white sisters Mary and Elizabeth Cumbo and the slave Ralph.

(29) Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, n.d., 1783-1869, State vs. Sally Lee Folder, 1850, Wayne County, NCSA (quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Johnston County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 635, frame 25. For comparison see also Indictments, File 2264, Court of General Sessions, Greenville District, SCDAH; Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Greenville District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 853, frame 355; and Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Greenville District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-653, roll 1220, frame 453.

(30) Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 58.

(31) Vincent Colyer, Brief Report of the Services Rendered by the Freed People to the United States Army in North Carolina, in the Spring of 1862, after the Battle of Newbern (New York, 1864), 20.

(32) Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, n.d., 1826-1896, Folder for 1840, 1843, and 1844, Davidson County, NCSA (quotations). Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Davidson County, Noah Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-704, roll 359, frame 242, lists an Alfred Hartly as an illiterate nonslaveholder in his twenties; Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Davidson County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 628, frame 302, lists Alfred Hartley as a thirty-eight-year-old laborer with no real estate. For an example from Georgia see Timothy J. Lockley, "Partners in Crime: African Americans and Non-Slaveholding Whites in Antebellum Georgia," in Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York, 1997), 57-58, 61-63.

(33) Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 16.

(34) D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860; rpt., New York, 1973), 230.

(35) Entry for January 1, 1851, Folder 11, William D. Valentine Diary #2148 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 601; and Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 74. Valentine recalled that during his boyhood "a few mean and occassionaly [sic] scoundrally families did for a long time keep a familiarity and traffic with our black portion of the family." Quoted in Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 93.

(36) Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1781-1839, n.d., Folder for 1820-1822, Craven County, NCSA. Campbell was found guilty of receiving stolen goods and sentenced "to stand in pillary two hours." Morris was also found guilty of larceny and sentenced to thirty-nine lashes. See April term 1819, State Docket, 1815-1829, Superior Court, Craven County, NCSA. Campbell's punishment was subsequently reduced to one hour in the pillory. See April term 1819, Minutes, 1801-1820, Superior Court, Craven County, NCSA.

(37) Colyer, Brief Report of the Services Rendered, 19. See also Roberts, "Slave's Story," 617.

(38) Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains (1837; rpt., New York, 1970), 191; Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" 132; Indictments, Item 572, Court of General Sessions, Marlboro District, SCDAH (first quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Marlboro District, South Carolina, Schedule l, Free Population (hereinafter cited as 1860 U.S. Census, Marlboro District, S.C., Free Pop.), NAMS M-653, roll 1223, frame 157; Indictments, Item 629, Court of General Sessions, Marlboro District, SCDAH (second quotation); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Marlboro District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population (hereinafter cited as 1850 U.S. Census, Marlboro District, S.C., Free Pop.), NAMS M-432, roll 856, frame 128; 1860 U.S. Census, Marlboro District, S.C., Free Pop., NAMS M-653, roll 1223, frame 169; Indictments, Item 571, Court of General Sessions, Marlboro District, SCDAH (third and fourth quotations). The 1850 U.S. Census, Marlboro District, S.C., Free Pop., NAMS M-432, roll 856, frame 159, lists Davis as fifty years old, illiterate, and with no occupation and no real estate. Hudson, "'All That Cash,'" stresses the importance of cash to slaves.

(39) Roberts, "Slave's Story," 617.

(40) George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. VII: Oklahoma and Mississippi Narratives (Westport, Conn., 1972), 112.

(41) Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1781-1839, n.d., Folder for 1820-1822, Craven County, NCSA.

(42) Slave Records, 1830-1867, Folder for 1850--1859, Northampton County, NCSA; Indictments, Item 694, Court of General Sessions, Marlboro District, SCDAH; Hundley, Social Relations, 229.

(43) Indictments, Item 494, Court of General Sessions, Marlboro District, SCDAH; 1850 U.S. Census, Marlboro District, S.C., Free Pop., NAMS M-432, roll 856, frame 159.

(44) Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 15. See also Wood, "'White Society' and the 'Informal' Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia," 316.

(45) Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" 138-39; Lockley, "Trading Encounters," 39.

(46) Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime: Local Justice in the Old South," in Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath Jr., eds., Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Westport, Conn., 1982), 173-206.

(47) McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master," 31-32, 34-35; Olwell, "'Loose, Idle and Disorderly,"' 103. See also Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1992), 4; Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" 136; and Hudson, "'All That Cash,'" 81.

(48) Session Records, 1854-1855, Petitions (2) Folder, General Assembly, NCSA; Petitions, Item 27, Legislative Papers, 1850, SCDAH; L. A. Chamerovzow, ed., Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London, 1855), 54.

(49) Ibid., 53.

(50) Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York, 1969), 69. See also William Parker, "The Freedman's Story," Pt. 1, Atlantic Monthly, 17 (February 1866), 158.

(51) Laws of the State of North-Carolina, Enacted in the Year 1819 ... (Raleigh, 1820), 23-24; Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, At Its Session, Commencing on the 25th of December, 1826 (Raleigh, 1827), 7.

(52) David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina. Vol. VII (Columbia, 1840), 454 (quotations); David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina. Vol. VI (Columbia, 1839), 516.

(53) "Traffic with Slaves," Richmond Enquirer, August 17, 1849, p. 4.

(54) Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 88-90; Lawrence T. McDonnell, "Work, Culture, and Society in the Slave South, 1790-1861," in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South (Jackson, Miss., 1993), 126-27, 130-37; Ralph Mann, "Mountains, Land, and Kin Networks: Burkes Garden, Virginia, in the 1840s and 1850s," Journal of Southern History, 58 (August 1992), 411-34; Randolph B. Campbell, "Planters and Plain Folk: Harrison County, Texas, as a Test Case, 1850-1860," Journal of Southern History, 40 (August 1974), 369-98; Gavin Wright, "'Economic Democracy' and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth in the Cotton South, 1850-1860," Agricultural History, 44 (January 1970), 63-93; James C. Bonner, "Profile of a Late Ante-Bellum Community," American Historical Review, 49 (July 1944), 667, 679.

(55) Campbell, "As 'A Kind of Freeman'?" 143-47; Reidy, "Obligation and Right," 154; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856), 442-43.

(56) H. M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (1914; rpt., New York, 1968), 86-88; Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History. (Chapel Hill, 1937), 670; Roberts, "Slave's Story," 617 (quotation). Conviction rates for trading with slaves conform to a broad pattern of low conviction rates for crimes in the South. See Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 89-97.

(57) Henry, Police Control of the Slave, 88; Charleston Standard, November 23, 1854, quoted in Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 441.

(58) Lockley, Lines in the Sand, 80.

(59) Henry, Police Control, 88; Union District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1831, Item 25, SCDAH.

(60) "Lax Discipline of Slaves," Raleigh Register (weekly), November 30, 1859, p. 1 : Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 441.

(61) Criminal Action Papers Concerning Slaves, 1848, Folder for 1840-1848, Slave Records, 1778-1866, Richmond County, NCSA. Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Randolph County, North Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-704, roll 369, frame 72, lists Lassiter as a nonslaveholder in his thirties, employed in agriculture.

(62) Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 440.

(63) State v. Scates, 3 Strobhart 106 (1848), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXXIV; York District, Clerk of Court of General Sessions, General Sessions Papers, case 688(585), reel C2658, SCDAH (all quotations). Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, York District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 860, frame 284, lists David Skates as a forty-six-year-old laborer, illiterate, and with no real estate; Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, York District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-653, roll 1228, frame 483, lists Skates as sixty years old and a "hired laborer," with no real estate and a personal estate valued at seventy-five dollars. For more instances of the entrapment of whites who traded with slaves in South Carolina, see State v. Sonnerkalb, 2 Nott & McCord 280 (1820), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XI; State v. Fife, 1 Bailey 1 (1828), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XVII; State v. Berhman and Peters, Riley 92 (1836), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXII; State v. Lefronty, Riley 155 (1836), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXII; State v. Turner, 2 McMullan 399 (1842), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXVII; and State v. Anderson, 1 Strobhart 455 (1847), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXXII. See also State v. Schroder, 3 Hill 61 (1836), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXI; and State v. Hardy and Brunson, Dudley 236 (1838), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXIII.

(64) For other instances of entrapment see McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 118, 119n47; and Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition To Theft,"' 432.

(65) Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1786-1888, New Hanover County, NCSA.

(66) George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. XV: North Carolina Narratives, Pt. 2 (Westport, Conn., 1972), 317, 319 (quotation). See also Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (1860; rpt., New York, 1970), 75; and James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (New York. 1988), 208.

(67) Records Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1814-1839, Folder for 1838, Robeson County, NCSA. Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Robeson County, North Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-704, roll 370, frame 215, lists both women as illiterate and in their fifties.

(68) For petitions on behalf of whites convicted of trading with slaves, see Governor's Papers, John M. Morehead, G.P. 104, May 1843 Folder, NCSA; Governor's Papers, John M. Morehead, G.P. 108, Undated Folder, NCSA; Governor's Papers, William A. Graham, G.P. 119, December 1847 Folder, NCSA; and Governor's Papers, Thomas Bragg, G.P. 144, April 1858 Folder, NCSA.

(69) Governor's Papers, Charles Manly, G.P. 123, May-August 1849 Folder, NCSA. Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 637, frames 96-97, list Samuel McCracken as fifty-three years old and an Irish-born "labourer." His wife also hailed from Ireland, but their oldest daughter was born in New York, suggesting that they had lived there before moving to the South. Most of the signers appear in frames 93-101 of the census.

(70) S. Nye Hutchison to Manly, August 23, 1849; H. B. Williams to Manly, August 18, 1849; both in Governor's Papers, Charles Manly, G.P. 123, May-August 1849 Folder, NCSA. What happened to McCracken is not clear. In another unusual case, almost one hundred citizens of Lincoln and Mecklenburg Counties signed a petition for the release from jail of Peter Cansler, a white man who chronically traded with slaves, because Cansler promised to leave the state if freed. Governor's Papers, William A. Graham, G.P. 111, September 1845 Folder, NCSA.

(71) "Illicit Traffic with Slaves," Charleston Daily Courier, November 4, 1857, p. 1.

(72) McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VII, 454, 469 (quotation); Acts Passed By the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, At Its Session, Commencing on the 25th of December, 1826, pp. 7-8.

(73) State v. Rollins, 12 Richardson 297 (1859), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XLVI. Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Darlington District, South Carolina, Schedule 1, Free Population, NAMS M-432, roll 851, frame 326, lists Rollins as thirty-one years old, with no occupation and no real estate.

(74) State v. Scates, 3 Strobhart 106 (1848), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XXXIV.

(75) Petitions, Item 24, Legislative Papers, 1860, SCDAH.

(76) Charleston Mercury, December 5, 1859, quoted in Henry, Police Control, 88.

(77) Charleston District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1851, Item 20, SCDAH; Darlington District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers. 1852, Item 9, SCDAH; Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, 1852, Item 36, SCDAH; "Illicit Traffic with Slaves," Charleston Daily Courier, November 4, 1857, p. 1.

(78) Entry for January 1, 1851, Valentine Diary. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 601.

(79) Session Records, 1850-1851, Petitions (5) Folder, General Assembly, NCSA.

(80) Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, 1831, Item 51, SCDAH. The Judiciary Committee found the idea "inexpedient" in a report dated December 5, 1831. See also Spartanburg District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1831, Item 35, SCDAH.

(81) Petitions, Legislative Papers, 1850, Item 27, SCDAH.

(82) Quoted in Henry, Police Control, 90.

(83) Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, 1850, Items 39, 48, SCDAH.

(84) Chesterfield District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1855, Item 7, SCDAH; Kershaw District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1857, Item 10, SCDAH; Henry, Police Control, 90; Acts of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, Passed in December, 1850 (Columbia, 1850), 615 (quotation). An earlier act of 1829 stated that any person who bought or received stolen goods, "knowing the same to have been stolen," was guilty of a misdemeanor and "shall be punished by imprisonment and whipping." See McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VI, 393.

(85) Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, n.d., Item 1218, SCDAH (first quotation); Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, 1860, Item 31, SCDAH (second quotation).

(86) Committee Reports, Legislative Papers, 1856, Item 25, SCDAH.

(87) Minutes of New Providence Baptist Church, Hartsville, South Carolina [1808-1922], May 25, 1833, SCDAH, microfilm. Manuscript Census Returns, Fifth Census of the United States, 1830, Darlington District, South Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-19, roll 173, frame 218, lists a Richard Jordon Sr. as a nonslaveholder.

(88) Minutes of Barnwell Baptist Church, Barnwell, South Carolina [1812-1912], December 5, 1840, 129, SCDAH, microfilm. Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Edgefield District, South Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-704, roll 511, frame 110, lists five Barden households consecutively. Of the twenty-two total individuals in these households, only one was a slave.

(89) Minutes of Antioch Baptist Church, Society Hill, South Carolina [1830-1895], 1842, SCDAH, microfilm.

(90) Indictments, Item 1927, Court of General Sessions, Union District, SCDAH. Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Union District, South Carolina, Population Schedule, NAMS M-704, roll 516, frame 198, lists two William Lawsons, as well as a man named Scum Lawson. In December 1842 the case went before the Magistrates and Freeholders Court, which acquitted Henry of the charge of "slandering white men." See also State v. Jim and Dick (1849), Trial Papers, Court of Magistrates and Freeholders, Anderson District, microfilm reel 2918, case #215, SCDAH.

(91) "Illicit Traffic with Slaves," Charleston Daily, Courier, November 4, 1857, p. 1.

(92) Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavely in the American Slave States..., edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York, 1953), 258.

(93) Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 307-8.

(94) Ibid., 312.

(95) Rhodes v. Bunch, 3 McCord 66 (1825), South Carolina Law Reports, Vol. XIV (quotations); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 796n25; Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, Charged with an Attempt To Raise an Insurrection in the State of South-Carolina: Preceded by an Introduction and Narrative; and in an Appendix, a Report of the Trials of Four White Persons, on Indictments for Attempting to Excite the Slaves To Insurrection (Charleston, 1822), appendix, pp. vii-viii.

(96) Avirett, Old Plantation, 118-19.

(97) William M. Leary to Daniel O. Leary, August 26, 1838, Henry Calvin Conner Papers (Manuscripts Division, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; hereinafter SCL). See also McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master," 43n21.

(98) Henry, Police Control, 88.

(99) Preamble and Regulations of the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association. Adopted November 21st, 1846 (n.p., [1846]), 2, copy in SCL (quotations); Henry, Police Control, 159-60; McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master," 36; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 117-18. See also Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982), 98.

(100) Henry, Police Control, 89 (first, second, and third quotations quoted by Henry from primary sources).

(101) McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master," 36.

(102) Session Records, November 1860 to February 1861, Petitions Folder, General Assembly, NCSA (first and second quotations); Charleston District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1851, Item 20, SCDAH (third quotation); "Slaves, and Their Insubordination," Richmond Enquirer, September 14, 1852, p. 1 (fourth quotation).

(103) Session Records, 1850-1851, Petitions (5) Folder, General Assembly, NCSA.

(104) "Illicit Traffic with Slaves," Charleston Daily Courier, November 4, 1857. p. 1.

(105) Quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 642 (first two quotations); Preamble and Regulations of the Savannah River Anti--Slave Traffick Association, 5-6 (third and fourth quotations).

(106) Petitions, Legislative Papers, 1850, Item 27, SCDAH (first through fifth quotations); Charleston District, Grand Jury Presentments, Legislative Papers, 1851, Item 20, SCDAH (sixth quotation). Much the same could be said of clandestine activity in antebellum southern cities. "[B]y deteriorating our negros morally and physically," asserted Charleston mayor William Porcher Miles, "the base, demoralizing and illicit traffic with slaves ... is doing more daily to undermine the institution ... than all the insane rant of the Garrisons, Parkers, and other fanatical abolitionists of the North." See "Proceedings of Council," Charleston Daily Courier, December 27, 1856, p. 4.

(107) Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition To Theft,'" 415-17, 426-27.

(108) Hundley, Social Relations, 230.

(109) Roberts, "Slave's Story," 617 (first quotation); William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives (Washington, D.C., 1999), 421 (second quotation).

MR. FORRET is a visiting assistant professor of history at James Madison University.