slavery’s peculiar ocularity by further enlisting White viewers into skewed visual dynamics. Although these materials targeted property-owning Whites, the cultivation of Whiteness as a viewing position cut across designations of free, indentured servants and property owners. At the level of interpellation, slaving media “hailed” White viewers, asking them to understand that print materials were speaking to them, directly.39 Print media called upon Whites to imagine themselves as the intended audience for the mediation of slavery and to participate in slavery’s culture of surveillance. Slavers readily enlisted print to help control the “slave population” by cultivating “a network of interested onlookers” to protect Whites from property loss.40 Slavery advertisements functioned as perceptual documents, as materials that taught Whites how to see Blackness, but also encouraged Whites to believe that Blackness was a thing to see, and that White subjectivity functioned as a domain for looking. Slavery’s media further promoted the development of a White eye/I by focusing attention on Black bodies and away from White bodies, especially away from Whites who were actively involved in the processes of enslaving others. Print media insinuated a White audience—a band of readers for whom literacy was not outlawed. It further invested Whiteness with the power to look, and encouraged Whites to remain on the lookout for people of African descent.
The runaway notice was the most prevalent and most powerful example of media used to develop White viewership. Runaway advertisements in regional newspapers circulated across state boundaries to inform the public, both literate and illiterate, that an owner or an overseer needed (and would pay for) assistance in retrieving fugitive property. Runaway notices are important to the visual archive because they were among the earliest pictures of Black freedom; they portrayed people of African descent more negatively than all of slavery’s media materials did. These items pictured Black freedom as stolen, situated among other kinds of theft; frequently, they marked runaways as unstable individuals who represented a danger to law-abiding persons. Runaway notices detail Blacks doing more than just absconding; Blacks are also depicted as stealing clothes, passing as White, and using “passes” given to run errands in order to escape. The accompanying illustrations are standard images of “free” men and women, Blacks depicted without chains and shown in motion, often with one foot off the ground. Images of an enslaved figure seemingly on the run, in possession of stolen goods, the body itself a stolen good, shown with an enlarged monetary amount on the page, called out to Whites to watch for Black fugitives and to remain attentive to free Black people, in general. Runaway materials imagined fugitive Black people as elusive figures who treacherously evaded visual attention by deploying various tricks to manipulate their bodies and to deceive White owners. Runaway notices picture freedom (unlike the abolitionist material I discuss later) as the sly cultivation of tropes that tricked the eye. They reveal fugitive Blacks as “confidence men” and women who seized clothing, literacy skills, manual labor skills, and local spatial knowledge to escape enslavement and to erode public confidence in the institution of slavery.41 Media meant to assist in the capture or retrieval of Black bodies imagined them as uniquely visible, open to the scope of the White gaze or duplicitous in their attempts to “pass” for free. Ironically, these publications also revealed how runaways capitalized on slavery’s peculiar visual culture, showing that while slavery demanded a deferred gaze from unfree persons as a signal of deference, fugitive free Blacks actively manipulated these demands on Black spectorial practice.42 Such a discrepancy only intensified anxieties of observation.
Picturing freedom in slavery’s media meant imagining Black freedom as wholly problematic. Runaway notices indicate that the first and farthest-reaching illustrations of freedom were derogatory. Quite simply, in their existence and their format, runaway notices imagined Black freedom as misbegotten and volatile. Postings with bold letters that described “RUNAWAY,” both as a person and an action, illustrated with a Black figure in motion, helped to assert freedom as a stolen entity, further diminishing the sense that slavery purloined life and labor from Black bodies. Additional details included in runaway advertisements also organized Black freedom as dangerous. Many runaway ads described multiple kinds of theft: the fugitive body, clothing taken for disguise, as well as pilfered horses and weapons. Runaway advertisements were intended to help the public identify very specific individuals who escaped custody. Printed notices about fugitive free Blacks attempted to give precise details about “the demeanor, dress, speech, character, abilities, background, and possible destination of runaway slaves” to describe them more robustly than any other depiction of unfree persons during this period.43 Through word and image, these materials “recreated the slave’s body as a living and moving text” that encouraged viewers to read the Black body, to find the scars, brandings and wounds described in the announcements on the physical person.44 Runaway notices attended to the specificity of the individual fugitive rather than to the collective bounty. Runaway advertisements helped to parse unfree Blacks into legible groups or “personality types” such as “‘surly,’ ‘sour,’ ‘impudent,’ and ‘bold’” in one category; “‘shy,’ ‘complaisant,’ and of ‘meek countenance’” in another; and “‘cunning,’ ‘artful,’ ‘sensible,’ ‘ingenious,’ and ‘smooth tongued’” in a third.”45 These descriptors represented the needs of White owners attempting to make sense of Black runaways, after the fact. They pictured free Blacks as crafty and visually fraudulent, disrespectful and wild, for running away from slavery.
The specificity of the individual runaway notice was somewhat undercut by pairing them with images of Black bodies taken from larger sheets of newspaper cuts or prototypes. The salience of advertising to the early U.S. print industry emphasized the role of pictures in relaying messages to consumers. These advertisements similarly imaged the figure of a mobile Black body bound for escape, despite other kinds of textual distinctions. Images were an important aspect of the mediation of slavery because depictions of Black bodies may have made runaway notices and auction advertisements understandable to an illiterate populace. Most Whites throughout the colonial United States remained illiterate well into the nineteenth century, although literacy rates for White adults in the northeastern states were generally higher than in the southern and western territories due to their unique economic, geographic, and historical conditions.46 Literacy rates were difficult to determine, even once U.S. census takers began accounting for the “literate” and “illiterate” class for the 1840 survey. Moreover, a literate individual might have been able to read or write, but not necessarily both, since many people learned to read first, and then received separate instruction in writing. The ability to sign one’s name was often a marker of literacy in the colonial United States, but this determinant only revealed itself in a class of people privileged to sign property documents, such as wills and deeds.47 Pictures cut across all of these designations, appealing to various kinds of readers. Both literate and illiterate Whites could discern the meaning of the stereotyped figure of a runaway. Numerous advertisements for runaways often appeared on a single page of a newspaper, like the sheet from the South Carolina Gazette shown as figure 1.3. Both ads are headlined “RUNAWAY,” but the top notice for “a tall, slim, black negro wench, named JENNY” may not have been as accessible as the lengthier ad below for “Saul,” “Charlotte,” and “Fortune,” a man “notoriously known for his Villainy.” This notice illustrated three different people with the stock illustration of a presumably “African” person—in motion, clad in nativist garb, carrying a stick.48 Not only does the image distinguish one ad from the other, but it also helps the longer ad stand out on a page among other kinds of images.
Black women were in precarious positions once framed within the confines of the runaway notice. First, as mothers, Black women runaways needed to choose between leaving their children behind or taking them on the run. A number of Black women ran away from slavery while pregnant. Although “it was not easy to feed, clothe, care for, and protect children” in these scenarios, a number of women did, as indicated by notices that list an infant “at the breast” of a runaway.49 Still, other women who were not nursing children might find their bodies described in advertisements in ways that invited sexual objectification. A “mulatto woman, named Silvie” ran away with a fifteen year-old boy, “Joseph,” but the ad directs readers to look for a “flat belly, and a mark on both sides of her breast” when trying to identify this woman.50 Such a description gave further license to any would-be
