Full Citation

Title: Contested Property: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum U.S. South

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: A consensus in economic history has held that fugitive slaves were rare, and thus not a significant threat to property rights in the U.S. South before the civil war. This research presents new data from over 29,000 fugitive slave advertisements posted in historic newspapers. The evidence shows that the number of fugitive slave advertisements is higher than the commonly used Census data on the number of fugitives, and that owners placing advertisements for runaways typically are not listed as having runaways in the Census. We document that there were relatively high numbers of ads and relatively high money rewards offered for fugitive recovery in border states. We also provide evidence of cases where plantation records document runaway slaves that are not reported in the individual-level Census manuscripts and/or are not observed in newspaper advertisements. We develop a model to describe the process determining whether an owner would place an advertisement for a runaway and whether a slave would choose to runaway. We use the model and historical evidence to provide new estimates of the rate of slave flight. We estimate that the true runaway rate was at least double, and possibly up to 10 times larger, than the rate reported in the census.

Url: https://economics.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/runaway_paper_april_2015_jd.pdf

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Authors: Dittmar, Jeremiah; Naidu, Suresh

Publisher: London School of Economics

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Methodology and Data Collection, Other

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