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Studying Atlantic Slavery from Qatar

Escaping Bondage

Manuscript.pdf

Spalding - a slave- runs away 

records.pdf

Payment to capture runaway slave

Runaway-ad.pdf

Runaway ad for Isaac 

Georgetown College as an institution has had a long history of enslaving people. However, there have been episodes of enslaved people making multiple attempts to abscond or escape from the oppressive system of slavery. The documents testify the multiple attempts, sometimes failed attempts made by enslaved people to run away. An 1805 source tells us the story of Spalding – an enslaved person – running away presumably from Georgetown College. Another document from the same year records the payment made by the College to capture Spalding. The 1815 document is an exemplification of a typical advertisement for runaway slaves, and this especially being an advertisement about Isaac, a runaway slave.

The sources give us interesting insights into the entire process of functioning of the system of slavery and the challenges the slave-owners faced due to episodic flight of the enslaved people and the methods the owners implemented to re-capture them. One of the most important and effective of these methods was the written communication. Be it in the form of letters or public ads, the written word would travel far and in different directions.[1] Together with efficient modes of transport like horses and the steamboat, the messages about enslaved people who ran away spread rapidly. The letter Leonard Neale wrote to Francis Neale that mentioned that Spalding had run away illustrates a form of personal written communication that serves the purpose of spreading the message about an enslaved person who has run away. Written communication can also be seen as a method of control or an advantage over the enslaved people. Since the enslaved people were unable to read or write, they were used to deliver messages among slave-owners and the overseers. Ironically many times these enslaved people would carry the message of their own punishments or information about the fellow enslaved people or the runaway slaves.[2]

Often these written messages would overtake the enslaved person him/herself. A runaway slave John Brown recalled that while running away he once asked for directions, instead he was told by a “colored man” that the news of his running away was spread through notices “posted on walls all around the town.”[3] The advertisements were especially beneficial due to its reproducibility and its description of the enslaved person who ran away. The advertisements would provide the physical description of the enslaved person including details like what clothes he/she was wearing and even carrying.[4] The ads were also appealing due to the rewards over the enslaved people. People would capture the runaways for certain prize money and the slave-owner would pay to get back his “property”. It is evident that the enslaved people were considered a property and regardless the prize, many fellow slave-owners would look out for runaway slaves as a way of protecting the property of their neighbor. There was a mutual understanding among slave-owners to uphold the structure of slavery.[5] Having said that, enslaved people still would flee. Despite knowing that structured the system was and what risks the act of running away entailed, they chose to runaway. While the act of running away was agency on the part of the enslaved people, it also explains how limited the agency was and was resultant of the oppressive circumstances of the enslaved people.[6] This is evident from the document detailing about the capturing of Spalding. It describes the unfortunate yet frequent consequence of running away, which was that the enslaved people were recaptured and brought back to their enslavers. Therefore, while the act of running away of enslaved people can be considered a sign of the precariousness of the slavery system, the usual unfortunate outcome of this act suggests the power and dominance of slavery as an institution.

 

 

Maliha Khan

Freshman, GUQ’24

 

 

Bibliography:

  1. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams - Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

  1. Prude, Jonathan. “To Look upon the “Lower Sort”: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 1, 1991. https://doi.org/10.2307/2078091.

               

  1. Johnson, Walter. “On Agency.” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1, https://doi.org/http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790316

                

  1. Müller, Viola. “Early Undocumented Workers: Runaway Slaves and African Americans in the Urban South, c. 1830-1860.” Labor History 61, no. 2, August 9, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656x.2019.1649377.

 

 

 

Footnotes: 

[1] Walter Johnson, The Carceral Landscape. In River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.) 

[2] Ibid., 24

[3] Walter Johnson, The Carceral Landscape. In River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013) pp. 224

[4] Jonathan Prude, "To Look upon the "Lower Sort": Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800”. The Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (1991): 124-59. doi:10.2307/2078091      

[5] Walter Johnson, The Carceral Landscape. In River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.)

[6] Walter Johnson. "On Agency." Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113-24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790316