In my December 2024 JAH article, I wrote about the history of “bad roads” in the time and space of American slavery. The article examined the making, repair, uses, meanings, and effects of ordinary public ways that ran throughout the South. These public roads were not big-name projects involving internal improvement companies and state financing—indeed, local records showed they often had no official designations, only common knowledge, directional, and landmark-based names. They were everyday earthen infrastructure (occasionally incorporating some stone and wood) created as part of expanding settlement practices and the plantation complex. My article was written to appear as a polished scholarly object, all smooth surfaces and momentum-carrying prose. This post, in keeping with the blog title, gives me the chance to put down a few thoughts on the process of writing with slave states’ public road records and on paths taken or not taken.

These minutes from a board meeting of road commissioners in South Carolina illustrate how allocating enslaved people’s labor was a central concern of such administrators when they convened. In the first full paragraph, enslaved residents of two plantations, “by consent of Parties,” were shifted to work on different roads than their previous assignments. In the second paragraph, an application to reassign enslaved residents was deferred for future consideration but “in the meantime the Board loaned said negroes to the lower division as they were weak handed.” The third paragraph documents a negotiation and resolution among commissioners over what group of enslaved people should work on a particular causeway “in very bad repair” and how that labor should be counted with respect to existing road labor obligations. St. Paul’s Parish Commissioners of the Roads Minute Book, 1789–1839, entry for Aug. 4, 1806 (South Carolina Department of History and Archives).

Three years ago, as I drove my car over paved southern roads to find documentation about nineteenth-century dirt roads, I wondered where these miles would lead. Would I be able to develop and share the entwined history of public ways and slavery that I had in mind, and convince readers to see common roads in the antebellum South as powerful and meaningful? Research time and dollars are precious, after all. Still, I took the long cut on several days, slowly peering at landscapes and how backroads, farms, and ex-agricultural tracts ran together. From my vantage point as a legal historian without civil engineering expertise, these views were contemporary and uncitable but relevant and helpful. Driving to archives in South Carolina and Virginia, I also thought about my relative freedom on the road, that I—not from these parts—could reasonably expect to travel safely down an unfamiliar route if I obeyed the speed limit and didn’t venture into private property. Eventually, I would park, call up boxes, and hurriedly photograph records of a road system that both sustained and was sustained by slavery in the plantation South.

My research into “bad roads” arose, in part, from self-critique. In a previous JAH article on “Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South,” I wrote primarily about how state governments mobilized enslaved people to labor on large-scale transportation programs such as railroads, steamboats, canals, and turnpikes to accelerate commerce.[1] At some point afterwards, however, I realized that I had overlooked the most routine yet most extensive form of road governance—what about diffuse local routes? How were public ways built and how did they fit into slave state governance? I had not looked at records on this subject, so I could not really say. Then, once I began pursuing the question and the kinds of materials that might yield answers, I also realized that this local stratum of infrastructure and governance must be approached with a different analytical paradigm than “economic development” or even “capitalism.” More useful would be overlapping dimensions about environments, mobility, policing, law, and custom that had quickly surfaced.

This routine slave patrol return by a company under Captain Moses Stratton documents time on the roads “pater rolling in the neighborhood of Jefferson” in Powhatan County, Virginia in 1829. Patrol return, Aug. 8, 1830, Slave Patrol Claims, 1830-1832, Powhatan County Records, Bonds, Commissions, Oaths (Library of Virginia).

Researching common roads became a priority within my ongoing project pursuing the history of the “slave state” and American slavery as a public institution. These roads, it seemed clear from an initial set of sources, were significant sites of public interest and vast labor extraction. And, just as material infrastructure helps historians see power, such roads also instantiated and demonstrated relationships that ordered slave states.[2] As I described in my article, a history of roads and slavery shows how private planter power was constructed through public power; how plantations were jurisdictions permeable to and buttressed by slave state authority; that roads, patrols, and customary surveillance operated together as a “carceral” spatial regime; and that roadwork expressed the civic inequality of slaveholders and non-slaveholders in a slave state. In short, a certain kind of road history might offer a map of significant features of slave state life for both enslaved communities and slaveholding publics.

To understand what public roads did and how they mattered, I tried to draw on sources conveying the multiple experiences and perspectives that people— especially enslaved individuals as pedestrians, workers, and fugitives—had on southern roads. Narratives by formerly enslaved residents, judicial decisions and statutes, engineering-related documents, planter papers, and commentary in newspapers and travel literature turned out to have much to say on the subject of common roads. At the center of this history, however, was the mass of documentation brought into being by systems of road creation, administration, and use: entry after entry in minute books, report after report filed by road overseers, annual assignments of road segments and apportionments of “hands” according to plantation or slaveholder, petitions to open or modify roads or to change enslaved labor assignments, and myriad decisions issued by courts, boards, and committees. In this bundle I would also include slave patrol appointments, their beat delineations, and patrol returns as documenting a contiguous form of road governance and roadwork. All these materials belonged to what I call the “local state.” This is the same stratum of governance that Laura Edwards and others have illuminated with great care. But while local complaints, prosecutions, and the work of justices of the peace foreground interpersonal conflict, these road records tend to show (though not without conflicts) something else: a legal regime that organized public power, mobilized tremendous human exertion, configured the plantation country landscape with infrastructure, and reinforced racial and civic hierarchies in the process. More succinctly, they show a slave state at work.

In this 16-page report submitted to the county court of Powhatan Co., Virginia, Commissioners recorded an overview of the diffuse road labor system when they made “the foregoing arrangement of hands on the different Roads in the county, and [] in some instances named new Surveyors and made some alterations in the roads.” Report of Road Commissioners for making a new arrangement of Hands, Sept. 16, 1818, box 1, Powhatan County Road and Bridge Records (Library of Virginia).

These “local state” road materials also belong to that family of ugly documents, like a slave ship manifest or plantation journal, which reflect enslaver (or slave state) purposes for slavery at impersonal scale. The road materials are—at least in my view—striking and even overwhelming in their iterative, horizontal sweep across space, their voluminous, decentralized nature, and the scale of effort and humanity they represent. But they are also “noisy” with irregular incidents, common frictions, and routine practices that tell of enslaved people’s choices and experiences.[4] With my article, I chose to write an analytical narrative that did not linger over time in one place. Other stories are surely possible. A heavily quantitative study of labor and perhaps labor’s monetary value? A recovery of individual stories that slip through the regular order of accounts and reports? A GIS-oriented project mapping roads and toil? A close study linking the social history of a place to the neighborhoods formed and confined by public ways that enslaved residents built? For me, these road records confirm an idea that is informing my approach to studying slave states: that, in practice, slavery’s archive in the United States is contingent on how researchers approach the identity of the institution. Where, when, and to the extent that slavery is a public institution, categories of government records that are not, on their face, about slavery, turn out to be an archive of the institution.

This annual report by Bedford County, Virginia Commissioners of Roads compiles data provided by individual road surveyors on the laborers, length, work days and expenditures associated with each road segment under the authority of the Commissioners. Annual report of the Commissioners of Roads in the 2nd Battalion 10th Regt. Bedford County, for May Term 1857, Road Reports, 1754–1907, Bedford County Road and Bridge Records (Library of Virginia).

I have one further note on process and method in working with these materials. The public road records of the plantation South show law in action, disclosing a system of statutory rules, judicial interpretations, expansive local policy discretion, and many people set in motion under very different degrees of compulsion. This record of governance does not tell a single, self-evident story. To make analytical and narrative sense of the material, I sought to work with legal history’s permeability and methodological openness. What I mean is that I borrowed multiple scholarly lenses to see and contextualize what the official record contained and suggested. In particular, attending to environmental conditions and materiality proved vital for understanding and explaining the “bad roads” produced through southern road governance. The Journal of Southern History hosted a workshop for manuscripts on “Southern History and the Environment” that discussed an early version of my essay; participants provided invaluable encouragement to proceed with the project and to communicate specific physicalities that both embodied and counterbalanced abstractions of power and authority. Another essential borrowing came through the convergence of two lines of scholarship: foundational work on slavery’s spatial history and the questions and concepts of carceral studies.[5] Together, they offered a framework for scrutinizing road space, for reconsidering plantation space, and for describing how basic transportation infrastructure could operate as a system of enclosure. In turn, I hope this account offers something back: a relational, spatial, and material throughline in the history of slavery and policing that—standing apart from a more discontinuous institutional history—spans the nineteenth century.

When I began looking into the history of common southern roads in the age of slavery, I had little sense of what sources were available and what they could show. In time and in Thavolia Glymph’s apt terms, I found a “boisterous and fruitful site of study.”[6] Now I would argue that slave states’ public road records are a significant archive of American slavery.

Aaron Hall is a legal historian at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focuses on constitutionalism, slavery, and governance in American history. He is finishing a book on the rise of the Founding in United States constitutional culture and writing another one on the history of American slavery as a public institution.

[1] Aaron Hall, “Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South,” Journal of American History, 106 (June 2019), 19–46.

[2] Ryan Quintana’s pathbreaking work on colonial and early national South Carolina pursues such an analysis. Ryan A. Quintana, Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (2018). Mary Bridges provides a sharp account of how historians may see with infrastructure. Mary Bridges, “The Infrastructural Turn in Historical Scholarship,” Modern American History, 6 (March 2023), 103–20.

[3]  Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). See, e.g., Forum on “Local Governance in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, 44 (Summer 2024), 217–83; and Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (2018).

[4] Thavolia Glymph, “Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery,” American Historical Review, 130 (March 2025), 3.

[5]  For example, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004); and Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” Annual Review of Criminology, 4 (2021). This convergence is implied in Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013).

[6] Glymph, “Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery.”