Thomas Jefferson and slavery: "Run away from the subscriber..." (Virginia Gazette, 1769)
Fugitive slave advertisements in the United Statesorrunaway slave ads, were paid classified advertisements describing a missing person and usually offering a monetary reward for the recovery of the valuable chattel. Fugitive slave ads were a unique vernacular genre of non-fiction specific to the antebellum United States. These ads often include detailed biographical information about individual enslaved Americans including "physical and distinctive features, literacy level, specialized skills,"[1] and "if they might have been headed for another plantation where they had family, or if they took their children with them when they ran."[2]
Runaway slave ads sometimes mentioned local slave traders who had sold the slave to their owner,[3] and were occasionally placed by slave traders who had suffered a jailbreak.[4] Some ads had implied or explicit threats against "slave stealers," be they altruistic abolitionists like the "nest of infernal Quakers"[5] in Pennsylvania, or criminal kidnappers.
Harriet Beecher Stowe devoted a chapter of A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin to examining fugitive slave ads, writing "Every one of these slaves has a history, a history of woe and crime, degradation, endurance, and wrong."[6] She noted that such ads typically include descriptions of color and complexion, perceived intelligence of the slave, and scars or a clause to the effect of "no scars recollected."[6] Stowe also observed the irony of these ads appearing in newspapers with mottos like Sic semper tyrannis and "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to god."[6]
American Baptist, Dec. 20, 1852: TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD FOR A PREACHER. The following paragraph, headed "Twenty Dollars Reward," appeared in a recent number of the New Orleans Picayune: "Runaway from the plantation of the undersigned the negro man Shedrick, a preacher, 5 feet 9 inches high, about 40 years old, but looking not over 23, stumped N. E. on the breast, and having both small toes cut of. He is of a very dark complexion, with eyes small but bright, and a look quite insolent. He dresses good, and was arrested as a runaway at Donaldsonville, some three years ago. The above reward will be paid for his arrest, by addressing Messrs. Armant Brothers, St. James parish, or A. Miltenberger & Co., 30 Carondelet street." Here is a preacher who is branded on the breast and has both toes cut off—and will look insolent yet! There's depravity for you!
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853
Ads describing self-emancipated slaves are a valuable primary source on the history of slavery in the United States and have been used to study the material life,[7] multilinguality,[8] and demographics of enslaved people.[9] Books by 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Weld had a "polemical effect" that was "achieved by his documentary style: a deceptively straightforward litany of fugitive slave advertisements, many of them gruesome in the details of physical abuse and mutilation."[10] Freedom on the Move is a crowdsourced archive of runaway slave ads published in the United States.[11] The North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices Project at the University of North Carolina Greensboro is a database of all known runaway slave ads published in North Carolina between 1750 and 1865.[12]
Three U.S. Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson are known to have placed runaway slave ads, seeking to recapture fugitives Oney Judge, Sandy,[13] and in the case of Jackson, both "a mulatto Man Slave" in 1804, and Gilbert in 1822.[14]
