Fugitive Slave Advertisements in The City Gazette
Charleston, South Carolina, 17871797
By (author) Thomas Brown, Leah Sims
Publication date:
08 October 2015Length of book:
406 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498507813
Fugitive Slave Advertisements in The City Gazette: Charleston, South Carolina, 1787-1797 is a collection of more than one thousand transcribed advertisements from Charleston’s daily newspaper. Each advertisement portrays, in miniature, a human drama of courage and resistance to unjust authority. The advertisements give insight not only into slave resistance, agency, and culture, but also into eighteenth century material life, economy, and racial ideology. The ads are also a rich source of data about the individual slaves themselves, their relationships, family connections, and life experiences. The book is accompanied by a website, fugitiveslaves.com. The website allows users to search the results of a comprehensive content analysis of the advertisements.
This comprehensive collection of over 1,000 fugitive slave advertisements (and a total of 1,266 individual runaway slaves, nearly 100 of whom ran away more than once) in early national South Carolina, ablely edited by Thomas Brown and Leah Sims, provides a wealth of information on the diversity of enslaved people in the Carolina Lowcountry in the 1780s and 1790s. Anyone interested in the study of slavery generally, and in the history and culture of the U.S. South, especially in South Carolina, will find this anthology of fugitive slave advertisements particularly useful.