To Look upon the "Lower Sort": Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800

Abstract

The mere Face-Painter, indeed, has little in common with the Poet; but, like the mete Historian, copies what he sees, and minutely ttaces every featute, and odd mark. . . . 'Tis othetwise with men of invention and design. -Lotd Shaftesbuiy, 1709Here is a young man on the run in the eighteenth century, an Irish servant lad named Patrick Flanley about 19 yeats old . . . by ttade a Leathet Bteeches Maket and Skinnet; Had on when he went away a gtey homespun cloth coat, almost new, lin'd with blue shalloon in the forepart, and with btown . . . cloth in the back, Mohaif Buttons, a Leather Fawn skin vest, . . . lined with scarlet shalloon, a worn oxenbrig shirt, a pair of purple sheepskin Breeches, . . . and a pair of old round toe'd Pumps.This notice appeared in the New-York Mercury in 1754, but similar advertisements were a commonplace of American journalism virtually from the moment news papers began regular publication in the early 1700s. The subjects of the ads were the fugitives of the era: the criminals who escaped from jail and the soldiers who ran from their officers; the occasional wives and youngsters who fled their house holds; but above all the substantial number of unfree (or "bound") apprentices, in dentured servants, convict laborers, and chattel slaves who up and left their masters.Similar to the occasional acknowledgments of missing residents scattered through seventeenth-century colonial sources, runaway ads focused upon these truants, and they appeared by the thousand, probably becoming especially numerous from the Jonathan Prude is associate professor of history at Emory University.

Runaway Slave Portraiture, Aesthetic Culture, and the Emergence of Racial Sense

“…Jonathan Prude reminds us that the ads were published in a culture with "a deep belief in knowing by seeing and an enriched depictional vocabulary." 8 Through the power of print, a vivid vocabulary of the visual merged with the social ordering of people and things in the new world. It was in the context of a co-emergent print and visual culture that the runaway ads were written, printed, and read.…”

Looking Flash: Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', 1870-1910

“…In this, they had similarities to many marginalized and/or poor people striving to 'put on style': whether runaway slaves in eighteenth-century America, or the shoppers at second-hand markets in Zambia today. 30 One can see the combination of unexpected items in the dress of Annie Lesberg, a woman who ran away from a Salvation Army Home in Melbourne in 1887. She wore a 'shabby blue short dress' teamed with a 'feather boa around her neck'.…”

A Discerning Eye

“…Ideal social legibility was, to paraphrase Nicholas Mirzoeff, a form of visuality, but it was not the only practice of looking at play in early modern culture. 4 When material culture is likened to language, material and visual culture is seen as an expression, a representation or a manifestation of an already existing social order -a social order that comes into being by other means. This form of reasoning, as implied above, puts the sources of power elsewhere, but it also obscures the generative possibilities of perception and cognition, as well as the ordering capacities of the practices of looking.…”