Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

Privateers plied the waters of the Atlantic world during the American Revolution. In privately owned vessels commissioned by the Continental Congress, these seafarers brought the war to the British in the early years of the war as the Continental Navy struggled to get off the docks. The court case of Cabot v. The Nuestra Senora de Merced sheds light on this oft-overlooked aspect of the American Revolution. While sailing the waters of the Atlantic, the privateer vessel Pilgrim captured the Nuestra Senora de Merced. The privateer sent its capture into port, but these mariners would only receive payment if the Admiralty Court judged the seized ship as a lawful prize and that is where the true struggle began. Privateers were effective combatants during the war, but the means by which they achieved their ends and their public struggles for prizes colored their legacy and left them forgotten and dismissed in the Revolution’s legacy.

What was the American Revolution? More importantly, what wasn’t it? In the years following the independence of the United States, Americans thought through these questions alongside contemporary events shaking the foundations of the global imperial order. As revolutions gripped Ireland, France, Saint-Domingue, Poland, and elsewhere in the late eighteenth century, Americans began to wonder whether their own revolution was one among many radical attacks on global tyranny or if it was an unusually orderly event that deviated from other revolutions’ drift toward anarchy and terror. By the end of the 1790s, white Americans largely recognized that the American Revolution was fundamentally unlike the Haitian or French Revolutions. Yet for many decades to come, Black Americans held on to a more radical, expansive vision of the American Revolution that tied it to the legacy of the radical revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

This chapter argues that slave courts, or courts that exclusively tried the crimes of enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shaped the rights that white authorities deemed necessary for a fair trial. The very same rights afforded in the 1787 American Constitution were those denied to defendants within slave courts. Slave courts were also fiscal institutions that compensated slaveowners for the execution of any enslaved person in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the courts of Maryland, the chapter assesses the legal justifications for compensation payments for executed slaves, the affording of differential criminal rights for enslavers and enslaved people, and the procedural operations of racialized sentencing mechanisms. Despite the oncoming American Revolution, these courts persisted through to the Civil War, across the American South. Slave courts were fundamental to regulating race and rights in the pre- and post-Revolutionary world and beyond.

The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the use of convicted labor to supplement overseas garrisons was commonplace across colonial frontiers. While this practice has been the subject of recent study in the French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish Empires, the British military deployment of convicts has been comparatively neglected. This matters for two reasons. A focus on civil transportation systems appears to have led to a considerable underestimation of overall transportation numbers. Second, while much has been written about the manner in which Britain redirected transportation from the Atlantic to its new Australian colonial possessions in the late eighteenth century, the military deployment of convict labor remained centered on the Atlantic. In fact, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many more convicts served in the African and Caribbean colonial garrisons than were ever shipped to the Antipodes. In this chapter, we use a range of different sources to piece together the military deployment of convicted labor in the British Atlantic World in the period 1780–1820, and to explore its complex relationships with the transatlantic slave trade.

The government and people of Great Britain played a significant role in the events of Latin American independence, but the admiration was mutual. British politicians, industrialists and abolitionists looked toward Iberian America as a place of opportunity and fortune, and as a place that was far enough away to carry out experiments with reformist ideas. In return, Latin American patriots looked toward Great Britain for the naval protection it could provide, to its armaments and woollen factories for material goods, and to its banks for development loans. People on both sides of the Atlantic assessed their public and private interests and sought results on their own terms. But it also was more than a military, diplomatic and commercial relationship. There were equally significant cultural exchanges in the form of scientific knowledge, legal structures, pedagogical theories, Masonic practices, incentives to abolish slavery, and the beginning of an active book trade. On an individual, human level, there were also hundreds of long-standing, fond personal friendships and family connections that spanned both language and geographical space. British involvement in Latin American independence was much broader than just the diplomatic and military spheres; it encompassed economic, material, intellectual, cultural and human exchanges as well.

The independence of Latin America was intrinsically connected to broader Atlantic processes and networks of the Atlantic World. Throughout the process that resulted in political autonomy and republicanism in most of Spanish America, strong networks of trade and nascent diplomatic relations with Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese empire and later Brazil, Haiti, St. Thomas, Curaçao, and the United States allowed revolutionaries to resist, escape, return, persist, and ultimately prevail. Rather than seeing foreign countries as outside the scope of the confrontations, this chapter integrates this international sphere into a broader geography of conflict. The commercial negotiations and diplomatic confrontations with foreign powers in the Caribbean, in the Atlantic, and in the Pacific oceans were crucial to determining the outcome than the military confrontations throughout Spanish America. The chapter focuses on the commercial networks and formal and informal diplomatic relations at play during the independence period; thus, decentering the state as the focus of analysis and paying closer attention to merchants, seafarers, envoys, and other border-crossing denizens of the Atlantic.