10 August 1764
Charlestown restricts enslaved hiring, independent trades and apprenticeship
Charlestown, colonial South Carolina
A South Carolina act limited each person to keeping two enslaved people to work out for hire in Charlestown. It required licenses and badges for hired enslaved laborers and porters, empowered commissioners to set their rates, and authorized whipping for refusing those rates. It prohibited enslavers from allowing independent slave-run trades and barred apprenticeship to another enslaved craft worker.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
The act allowed tradesmen to teach and employ their own enslaved workers if they constantly employed one white apprentice or journeyman for every two so trained and employed. It therefore did not ban all enslaved skilled work. These clauses concern enslaved status, not a general prohibition on free Black artisans. The statutory penalties and exception establish the law’s terms, not its enforcement rate.
Sources
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, chapter 3; supplied pp. 39–58 and bibliography pp. 690–691, edition/year unidentified
- David J. McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 9 (1841), act 927, pp. 697–705, especially XXI–XXIV, pp. 704–705; dated assent and exception checked in scan ↗