# 10: Maroonage and advertisement metadata
David Edward Cronin (artist), Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1888. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Daniel Parish Jr.
Advertisements for fugitives desperately need to be called out for the individual artifacts they are because each one tells a story of an individual and, as you’ve seen from many of my posts, those glimpses, inadequate thought they might be, are precious and usually the only documentation we have for that individual’s choices and for that individual’s existence.
And yet, advertisements in the aggregate can tell us a great deal. Long ago, I was involved in a project to digitize runaway advertisements in SC that didn’t ever get off the ground. As I watch the great progress going on elsewhere with massive digitization and consolidation projects, I marvel at the possibilities for what collective metadata might tell us.
What I’m thinking about in particular, is petite marronage and grand marronage. When individuals fled from bondage in North America, it frequently took a while before an advertisement seeking their whereabouts might appear. This suggests that the enslavers were initially confident that either they could, personally catch up with that runaway or, that the runaway might have been enacting the resistance of petite marronage…fleeing a beating or a conflict but only for a short while and then returning, perhaps for punishment but their disappearance would still be a bit of leverage they might be able to wield in their on (see this and this about marronage)
Aggregate data can suggest how long between disappearances and advertisements can tell us something about the cultures of resistance in that particular site. In border states, for example, do advertisements appear sooner than in deep south states, because the presumption that they might be fleeing across a border would make enslavers panic about grand marronage a bit quicker?
For further reading, check out https://www.thoughtco.com/maroons-and-marronage-4155346
To Cite:
Ashton, Susanna. "Maroonage and Advertisement Metadata" The Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 07/15/2024.
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