Fugitive slave ads abounded in American newspapers until the end of
the Civil War. These abhorrent descriptions – penned by slave-owners who
viewed people as property – still bear witness to the bravery and
unique characteristics of the people who escaped slavery, albeit
sometimes temporarily, and defied a massively powerful system allied
against them.
An important part of that system was the Fugitive Slave Act
passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, who owned
more than 100 slaves himself, in February 1793. The act made it a
federal crime to assist those who had escaped slavery or to interfere
with their capture. It allowed the pursuit of “persons escaping
from…their masters” everywhere in the United States, North and South.
Three
years later, in the spring of 1796, George and Martha Washington were
living in Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the young nation. The
president – then 64 and in his next to last year in office – and his
wife kept a number of slaves with them, rotating their captives back to
their Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia every few months so that they
would maintain their slave status under the laws of the day. One of
these enslaved people was Ona “Oney” Judge, a
slender young woman of about 20, who was a skilled seamstress and
served as Martha Washington’s “lady’s maid.” Judge was the property of
the Custis family from Martha Washington’s first husband.
When Judge learned that Martha Washington intended, upon her death,
to make a wedding present of her to the Washington granddaughter
Elizabeth Park Custis Law, she took matters into her own hands. On the
evening of May 21, 1796, she waited until the Washingtons sat down to
dinner, then walked out of the President’s House in Philadelphia. She
was gone.
Washington set out to recover his wife’s property. He had ads placed and rewards posted, leading to this remarkable sentence in The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser on May 24:
“Absconded from the household of the President of the United States,
ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes
and bushy black hair.” The First Family was caught completely off guard.
According to the ad: “there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no
provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone,
or fully, what her design is.” Shortly after, another Philadelphia
newspaper ran a similar ad.
We know where Judge went and the ways in which she was pursued
largely through newspaper interviews she gave in the 1840s, when she was
in her 70s and technically still a “runaway slave.” She had sailed to
Portsmouth, New Hampshire to escape. One of Washington’s aides found her
there and tried to convince her to return to Mount Vernon. After she
rejected his offers, the aide left, but eventually returned to bring her
and her infant daughter back by force. That attempt was thwarted,
however, and no further attempts followed. While George Washington made
provisions to free his slaves in his will,
this did not free those enslaved by the Custis family, including Judge.
She remained free through her own actions, living until 1848.
“She wanted to be free,” reported the Anti-Slavery Bugle in
1845, citing an interview with Judge herself. The story appears on the
same page as a review of Frederick Douglass’s memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
Quickly becoming a bestseller, the memoir is an early example of the
famous abolitionist’s eloquent and effective writing, in this case
documenting his time enslaved and his escape.
The vast majority of those who escaped or attempted to escape
enslavement in America were never well-known, though. The only record we
have for many are fugitive slave ads, some 200,000 of which were
published. Chronicling America provides this Topics Page and a window to finding thousands more ads.
One of the most detailed, humanizing and chilling runaway slave ads
that I found in a search of Chronicling America is for Peter (as was
common, no last name given). Humanizing in its favorable description of
Peter’s appearance and intelligence. Chilling in its reference to his
being “easily frightened by the whip.” Peter’s description also makes
reference to a scar, as do many of the descriptions in the ads.
The same ad ran in the Southern Telegraph, a newspaper in Rodney,
Miss. It ran from May 27 to September 27, 1836, sometimes twice within
an issue. It also ran in the Natchez Courier, according to the ad.
Another type of fugitive slave ad was for runaways who had been
captured and jailed. I cannot claim a thorough search, but I did not
find an ad for Peter “in Jail,” so we have some reason to hope that
Peter eluded capture and was able to remain free, although it is
possible he was returned directly to the owner. Tragically, many of
those who escaped were captured. If they were not claimed, they were
sold at auction.
On Sept. 18, 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, as amended and strengthened by Congress, was signed by President Millard Fillmore, as part of the controversial Compromise of 1850.
Runaway slave ads continued
to be published in newspapers during the Civil War, but they no longer
had the full power of the federal government behind them with the
passage of the Confiscation Acts and with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,
both applying only to those enslaved within the Confederacy. Slavery as
an institution in the United States finally ended with the ratification
of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865.
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