Day 9/28 — “Cannot Be Landed”: Jurisdiction as a Routing Variable (Laurens → Tench)
saloneamadu
Today’s receipt is a short operational instruction that exposes how the trade treated law as a logistics variable rather than a constraint.
In a letter from Charles Town to John Tench in Dominica, Henry Laurens writes:
“The Negroe which you have sent cannot possibly be landed in this Province… dispose of him for immediate Exportation to some Neighbouring Province.”
— Laurens to Tench, 22 Sept 1770 (Papers of Henry Laurens)
What’s striking is not merely the dehumanizing language, but the procedural logic it reveals: when a person could not be “landed” locally (for “several Reasons”), the solution is immediate jurisdictional redeployment—exportation to a neighboring province. The network routes around regulatory and market friction by shifting a human being into a different legal space.
Forensic question for review: when correspondence frames a person as “unlandable,” what mechanisms (customs, duties, non-importation agreements, enforcement risk, market conditions) are being implied—and where does the paperwork pick up again in the next jurisdiction?
The scanned page is preserved with the extended Day 9 entry on my Substack.