This second chapter examines how the employment of local official and judicial venues became a common practice as enslaved African-Caribbeans sought to engage the new rights and resources provided to them. They faced an uphill battle, since the discourse of racial inferiority was programmed into the system. Nonetheless, their actions forced all of those involved to wrestle with the role of the state in regulating slavery, the balance between public order and individual rights, the use of coercion and violence within the new regulatory framework of ameliorated slavery, and competing concepts of morality and justice. These interactions shaped the character of the overseer-state in a multitude of ways, from altering the approaches of local officials to different aspects of plantation life to serving as leverage for antislavery activists in Parliament, and even to prompting internal conflicts over how justice was defined and to what extent, if at all, enslaved Africans were entitled to it.