Farbman, "Plantation Localism"

The Fordham Urban Law Journal has published "Plantation Localism," by Daniel Farbman (Boston College Law School). It is part of a symposium on "Local Government Structure through a Legal Lens: Conversations of Law and Local Governance." Here's the abstract:

Before the Civil War and emancipation, millions of human beings were
enslaved across the United States. Most of these people lived on farms
and plantations across the southern part of the nation. Scholars have
tended to think of slavery as a form of private despotism — oppression
undertaken under the color of the private law of property. Alongside
this despotic private sphere, ran a weak public sphere of county court
government dominated by the planter elite. These counties provided few
services, and authorized the planters who controlled them to act as they
pleased on their private plantations. The people that were enslaved
were thus outside of the scope of public governance — brutally excised
from the exclusively white and male political community. This Essay
asks: What if, instead of dividing antebellum government into a weak
public sphere protecting a despotic realm of private control by white
elites, we conceived of the project of government and domination as
unitary? What if we rejected the distinction between public and private
and looked instead at where power was being wielded and by whom? What if
we understood government not as a formal institution but rather as the
place where governance happened in day-to-day life? What if, in short,
we understood the plantation as a form of local government? Once we
understand the plantation as a form of local government that was
prevalent and, in some places, dominant across the South, a few things
become clear. First, that the idea of the antebellum South as a place of
little government and enlarged personal freedom is a fiction. The
despotic government of millions of humans on the plantation was
extremely intrusive on the lives and liberties of those who were
governed. More than this, county governments were not weak so much as
they were shells that both delegated power to planters and protected
those planters from public oversight and accountability as they governed
as despots. This reframing is primarily a historical intervention, but
it also raises questions about the nature of localism today. Many local
governments in the United States today appear weak but, in practice,
operate as “public” shells through which power is delegated to property
owners so that they may protect their “communities” from integration,
redistributive taxation, and collective regulation. Although the chains
of causation between past and present are attenuated, plantation
localism echoes through these structural resonances in ways that should
unsettle us. 

The full article is available for download here.

-- Karen Tani