Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 27
During his 18 years as publisher, Campbell published at least 66 slave ads with “enquire of the printer” in the notice. These ads
accounted for the sale of as many as 100 enslaved people. And many of the slave ads involved the selling of Indigenous people.8
A 2002 journal article stated that the Boston Gazette, founded in 1719, published more than 1,100 slave-for-sale ads for the
purchase of an estimated 2,000 people.9
Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729 and was the “first printer outside of Boston to
broker slave sales regularly.”10 Even though he spoke out against slavery later in his life, Franklin owned slaves.11
As Taylor notes, “during the thirty-seven years that Franklin published the Gazette, it printed at least 277 advertisements” —
113 with the phrase “enquire of the printer” — “offering at least 308 people for sale.”12 Taylor also notes that “the text of a few
advertisements” suggests that printers like Franklin may have “handled slave sales personally.”13
It’s estimated that the more than 200,000 runaway-slave ads that newspapers published represented just a small percentage of
the actual number of enslaved Black people who attempted to escape.14 These ads included a great deal of information — or
data, to use today’s terminology — about runaway slaves, such as their height, weight and age, the languages they spoke, and
whether they could read or write. Many ads contained descriptions of physical marks that slaveowners had inflicted on the
bodies of those they enslaved.15
Edward E. Baptist, a Cornell University history professor, told The Washington Post in 2017 that runaway-slave ads were “the
tweets of the master class” that served to “alert the surveillance system that was the entire body of white people in the South
to help this individual recover this human property.”16
And the nation’s so-called founding fathers were among the slave owners to activate this surveillance system.
George Washington placed a runaway-slave ad in the Maryland Gazette in 1761 calling for the capture of four men he enslaved,
including two men he bought from an “African ship” two years earlier.17 Washington also placed a runaway-slave ad in The
Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser in 1796, while he was still president. He offered a reward for the capture of
Ona (Oney) Judge, who was his wife Martha’s maid in Philadelphia’s President’s House, a precursor to the White House. Judge
was never captured.18
Thomas Jefferson placed a runaway-slave ad in the Virginia Gazette in 1769 and offered a reward for a Black man he enslaved:19
Before he became president, Andrew Jackson published an 1804 runaway-slave ad in the Tennessee Gazette that offered “ten
dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.”20
Many prominent newspaper chains such as Advance Publications, Gannett and Tribune Publishing — as well as companies like
Knight Ridder and Media General that were absorbed into larger corporations over the past two decades — bought newspapers
that had once published slave ads.21
In 2000, The Hartford Courant, a Tribune Publishing property founded in 1764 that is the country’s oldest continuously
published newspaper, apologized for running slave ads.22 It did so in an article that confronted the paper’s racist history.
“Unfortunately, the practice of advertising for slaves was commonplace in newspapers prior to abolition,” said Courant
spokesman Ken DeLisa in 2000. “We are not proud of that part of our history and apologize for any involvement by our
predecessors at The Courant in the terrible practice of buying and selling human beings that took place in previous centuries.”
The Courant also acknowledged that the “views of early editors were undeniably racist.” The paper pointed as an example to
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