Virginia Gazette Runaway Advertisements Document Systematic Violence Against Enslaved People

Between 1745 and 1775, the Virginia Gazette published hundreds of advertisements from enslavers seeking the return of enslaved people who had fled. These advertisements constitute an inadvertent archive of slavery's violence. Physical descriptions routinely catalogued whipping scars, branding marks, iron collar abrasions around the neck, missing fingers from cotton gin accidents, and cut marks from axes. Advertisements describe enslaved people 'easily frightened by the whip,' indicating conditioned trauma responses. Many describe African-born enslaved people with ritual facial scarification from specific West African ethnic groups, providing evidence of the ongoing importation of Africans. The ads also reveal resistance: enslaved people who spoke multiple languages, who claimed to be free, who had trades enabling them to pass as free workers, and who had relatives in other towns whom enslavers guessed they were seeking.