# 1: Go, Moses, Go!
This advertisement ran regularly in the Charleston Mercury between July 1837 and early March 1838
[A few years ago I shared a few social media posts about advertisements that caught my attention. This is one worth unearthing]
Stumbled across this advertisement. Couldn't avoid it, actually, because it appeared EVERY OTHER DAMN DAY between mid-July 1837 and early March 1838 in the Charleston Mercury. (well, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays). I’ve read and studied such advertisements for much of my career and I can assure you that virtually no advertisement I have ever seen ran for more than a few months at most.
Whatever Moses did, he really, really pissed off his enslaver, T. J. Pickens, who was lounging around in his summer vacation spot in Pendleton, South Carolina but nonetheless angrily hunting by proxy for Moses down in Charleston, all the while.
I say, GO, MOSES, GO. And every week that I kept seeing that advertisement, I felt happier and happier. He was still out of Pickens' grasp. GO, MOSES, GO. Don't know what happened to him. Did he succeed? Was he caught? Did he die? Did Pickens just give up? Hard to say but the metadata of these advertisements tells stories in the aggregate that individually they cannot tell.
**********
To learn more about The Runaway Chronicles and what to expect in future installments, check out my preview here. Installments will be posted each week on Mondays
TO CITE:
Ashton, Susanna. "Go, Moses, Go!" The Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 05/13/2024. https://susannaashton.squarespace.com/config/pages/65c93bd35c81e32bb1a08098/content
Click here to pre-order A Plausible Man. The True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin