ABSTRACT
The practice of slave stealing spans the history of American slavery. From the moment that Africans were first enslaved in the American colonies and became a form of property, slave stealing began. Historians such as Eugene Genovese and James Oakes have pointed to the centrality of that conflict to destabilizing the peculiar institution, in particular in the antebellum era and the decades leading up to the Civil War. The struggle to define clearly the perimeters of the theft of a slave, for example in the frequent notion that the stolen slave was ‘enticed,’ rather than an agent in her or his own theft, is a stark indicator of the South’s inability to create a consistent legal framework. Slave stealers did not merely highlight the incongruities of the laws that dealt with human property, they also drew attention to the paradoxes that persistently plagued Southern society and fueled growing social discord in the antebellum and Civil War eras.
