The Civil War News & Views Open Discussion Forum - Archive

Runaway Slaves...

Because this thread was heading toward the East and off the map I thought I would begin anew at the top.

Now the subject of runaway slaves was brought up and the where they ran away to discussed.

A study of slaves running away was done in the book "Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation" by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger.

Facts:

The number of slaves that ran...unknown.
Estimated number of slaves that ran...maybe 50,000 a year.
Total advertised runaway slaves from 1790 to 1860...8,400 (ad submitted only after the slave had been gone over a month).
Over 80 percent were male, three out of four were under thirty. The proportion of mulattoes among runaways was three to four their proportion of the slave population. Usually acted alone. Most returned on their own accord.

[Reasons for running away]

Change of masters
Change of overseers
Sale
Threat of sale
Forced separation from wives or husbands, children or parents (most common)
Quarrels between master and master's wife that disrupted discipline
Being hired out on loan

[Where they ran to]

Most stayed in the South, often in the immediate area.

[When they ran]

Most anytime of the year except at fall harvest.

"Slavery,...was a negotiated relationship, varying from time to time and from place to place. The threat of running away was one of the few bargaining chips that slaves could always bring to the negotiations; and ...a few instances in which slaves actually "left with the intention of lying out for a few days, or weeks, and then negotiating to gain concessions....

...Just as the threat of punishment accompanied by frequent exercise of it was sufficient to prevent most slaves from running most of the time, the threat of running away accompanied by continual examples of it was sufficient to keep the exercise of owner's powers within limits acceptable to the owned. By showing that they could be pushed just so far and not farther, slaves won what amounted to rights that could be violated only be endangering the relationship: the right to grow a small crop of their own, to buy and sell property of their own, and especially the right to have a family of their own...."

Edmund S. Morgan, The Genuine Article.

_______________________
David Upton

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