“Stop the Runaway,” Andrew Jackson urged in an ad placed in the Tennessee Gazette in October 1804. The future president gave a detailed description: A “Mulatto Man Slave, about thirty years old, six feet and an inch high, stout made and active, talks sensible, stoops in his walk, and has a remarkable large foot, broad across the root of the toes — will pass for a free man …”
Jackson, who would become the country’s seventh commander in chief in 1829, promised anyone who captured this “Mulatto Man Slave” a reward of $50, plus “reasonable” expenses paid.
Jackson added a line that some historians find particularly cruel.
It offered “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.”
The ad was signed, “ANDREW JACKSON, Near Nashville, State of Tennessee.”
Jackson, whose face is on the $20 bill and who President Trump paid homage to in March, owned about 150 enslaved people at The Hermitage, his estate near Nashville, when he died in 1845, according to records.
His ad is one of thousands being catalogued by the history department at Cornell University, which launched “The Freedom on the Move” project to digitize and preserve runaway slave ads and make them more accessible to the public.
“Our goal is to ultimately collect all the runaway ads that have survived,” said Edward E. Baptist, a Cornell history professor who is collaborating on the project with Joshua D. Rothman, at the University of Alabama, and Molly Mitchell, at the University of New Orleans.
Baptist said the ads provide rich insights into history.
“They are these little windows,” Baptist said. “I call them the tweets of the master class. The purpose is to alert the surveillance system that was the entire body of white people in the South to help this individual recover this human property.”
The ads often describe in detail the runaways: their skills, missing teeth, height, weight. They give insight into how enslaved people lived and carried themselves. The ads also provide a sense of resistance and defiance, along with harsh punishments. They describe recent beatings, scars and fingers cut off. In an ad dated June 5, 1788, that ran in the Virginia Herald and Fredericksburg Advertiser, a woman named Patty, who was about 18 years old and five feet high, is described this way: “Her back appears to have been used to the whip.”
Some ads included languages spoken beyond English: Dutch, French or African dialects. Others offered evidence that escaped slaves were literate and able to write passes.
Source: The Washington Post |
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