Fugitive slave advertisements in the United States orrunaway slave ads, were paidclassified advertisements describing amissing 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 theantebellum 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 localslave 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 altruisticabolitionists like the "nest of infernal Quakers"[5] in Pennsylvania, orcriminal kidnappers. A "stock character" that appears in countless runaway slave ads is the "unscrupulous white man" who has "no doubt decoyed away" the missing slave; this trope grows out of widespread white southern beliefs about the "essential passivity of blacks."[6]
Harriet Beecher Stowe devoted a chapter ofA 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."[7] 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."[7] Stowe also observed the irony of these ads appearing in newspapers with mottos likeSic semper tyrannis and "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to god."[7]
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 valuableprimary source on the history ofslavery in the United States and have been used to study the material life,[8] multilinguality,[9] and demographics of enslaved people.[10] Books by 19th-century abolitionistTheodore 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."[11]Freedom on the Move is acrowdsourced archive of runaway slave ads published in the United States.[12] The North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices Project at theUniversity of North Carolina Greensboro is a database of all known runaway slave ads published in North Carolina between 1750 and 1865.[13]
Three U.S. Presidents,George Washington,Thomas Jefferson, andAndrew Jackson are known to have placed runaway slave ads, seeking to recapture fugitives "Sandy",[14]Oney Judge, and in the case of Jackson, both "a mulatto Man Slave" in 1804, andGilbert in 1822.[15]
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