Criminalizing free Black migrants in antebellum North Carolina: State law, the planter class, and lived experience

This article examines an 1826 North Carolina Act that criminalized the migration of free Black people into the state, using forced labor and confinement as punitive mechanisms. Through archival and legal analysis, I show how the Act functioned as a tool of racialized mobility control, reinforcing white planter power. The study situates state-level migration law within the broader history of migration law, highlighting its role in racial subordination through legal frameworks, private capital-state entanglements, and economic incentives tied to confinement and forced labor. Further, I analyze ways that free Black people navigated and contested these restrictions, exposing the limits of legal enforcement and the agency of those subject to it. Attending to these dynamics expands epistemologies of migration by foregrounding state-level regimes of migration control of the antebellum United States and contributes to centering Black mobility within migration narratives.