Joseph J. Thorndike, Subjugation With a Budget Line: How Tax Law Protected Slavery (reviewing Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh) The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America)):

In South Carolina’s Colonial era, executing an enslaved person created a problem. The colony’s slave code — the body of law that defined slavery, established slaveholders’ authority, and set the punishments for those it bound — relied on brutal sanctions to terrorize enslaved people into submission. But execution also destroyed what the law treated as property: a human being whose coerced labor carried economic value. That loss threatened to undermine slaveholder support for the code itself.

As Anthony Infanti explains in The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America, slaveholders had economic reasons to resist laws that might deprive them of valuable human property. Faced with that prospect, they might conceal offenses, sell the accused person outside the province, or otherwise undermine the system of punishment.

South Carolina solved that problem with taxes. As Infanti explains, the colony agreed to compensate slaveholders: When officials executed an enslaved person (or when someone was killed by private parties under the law’s sanction), the colony paid the slaveholder for the loss.

Lawmakers linked slaveholder compensation tightly to the colony’s property tax. Each year, the Colonial assembly would decide who to compensate, adding the awards to the list of other public debts. The legislature then set tax rates high enough to cover all the debts, listing the approved payments in a schedule appended to the tax act. This procedure socialized the cost: Rather than leaving slaveholders to absorb the loss, the colony spread it across the whole free community, on the theory that keeping the enslaved in subjection was a public good.

The killing of human beings became an ordinary expense of government — subjugation with a budget line.