While recent trends in scholarly research as well as popular culture have brought the reality of southern Appalachian African American history to the mainstream, there has been very little research into the culture and communities of African descended people enslaved in western North Carolina. Regional geography and the local economy in Buncombe County did not allow for the development of a commodity driven, plantation model of slavery, the absence of which has led prior generations of historians to diminish the role and severity of slavery in the area. Rather than use the hallmarks of surveillance and control found in plantation economies and public slave markets to measure the character of captive labor systems in western North Carolina, this thesis interrogates the specific culture and economic practices of slaveholding elites in Buncombe County to recognize the mechanisms of social coercion and surveillance employed in local enslavement practices. The quotidian experiences and routine social and spatial geographies constructed by people enslaved in Buncombe County are more visible and better understood through interpreting the customs and methods used to hold people in bondage. Regional enslavement practices, in particular, the necessary mobility of many enslaved people, facilitated the development of a well-connected kinship and community network.