Lynch mobs regularly called on the language of popular sovereignty in their efforts to authorize lynchings, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against persons they deemed beyond the protections of due process. Despite political theorists’ renewed interest in popular sovereignty, scholars have not accounted for this sordid history in their genealogies of modern democracy and popular constituent power. I remedy this omission, arguing that spectacle lynchings—ones that occurred in front of large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands—operated as public rituals of racialized people-making. In the wake of Reconstruction, when the boundaries of the polity were deeply contested, spectacle lynchings played a constitutive role in affirming and circulating the notion that the sovereign people were white, and that African Americans were their social subordinates.

This essay draws political theory into dialogue with recent work in economic history and the history of capitalism to develop an account of the unique injustice produced by capitalist slavery in the antebellum United States. Prevailing approaches to thinking about slavery in political theory tend to disembed it from its broader socioeconomic context, which has led theorists to overlook some of the distinctive horrors associated with capitalist slavery in particular. In response, I develop a theory of capitalist slavery as expropriation, conceived as violent domination harnessed to the imperatives of capital accumulation. Capitalist slavery-as-expropriation encompasses two analytically distinct moments: the moment of confiscation, in which human lives and capacities are enclosed via commodification, and the moment of conscription, in which enslaved labor is mobilized via routine violence. Though enslaved people were not market subjects, this framework reveals the extent to which they were nevertheless subject to the market.

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What role might the Declaration of Independence play in the struggle for racial justice in the United States? Dominant accounts suggest the Declaration’s principles have served as a wellspring for increasingly expanding rights claims, enabling progress in American history. However, critics allege that this redemptive view reinforces an exceptionalist national identity, disavows race’s constitutive role in ordering the polity, and circumscribes the scope of change. This article recovers an overlooked alternative through an analysis of David Walker’s 1829 pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Like many abolitionists, Walker called upon the Declaration to authorize opposition to racial tyranny. However, his engagement with it was distinctively revolutionary rather than reverent: he rejected American exceptionalism but found in the nation’s central icon a radical model for contesting its fundamental injustices.

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