Overview

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.

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9781498507813

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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. -- Douglas Chambers, University of Southern Mississippi These advertisements from the Charleston Gazette tell rich stories about the humanity and inhumanity of human bondage in one of the most important cities in American during the 1790s, providing unmatched information about the lives of slaves and the economic, social, cultural, and political institutions which they resisted. It is a great addition to the documentary history on the South's peculiar institution. -- Loren Schweninger, University of North Carolina at Greensboro This collection of over one thousand advertisements of self-emancipated men and women constitutes a vivid record of resistance to slavery in post revolutionary Charleston South Carolina. The authors' lively, insightful introduction and their careful compilation of advertisements and indices uncover how self-emancipated people sustained the liberty of the American Revolution as South Carolina's masters and merchants energized a slave society that combined chattel bondage and capitalism across the new southwestern states. This volume holds large ramifications for understanding early national America. -- Graham Hodges, Colgate University

Author Information

Thomas Brown is professor of sociology and criminal justice at Virginia Wesleyan College. Leah Sims is an independent scholar of race and gender in American history.

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