Newspaper advertisements, notices, tell a story of slavery in Southwestern Pennsylvania
At the start of the 19th century, The Genius of Liberty carried dispatches on events an ocean away and concerns as close as a neighbor’s pastureland.
The Uniontown newspaper carried reports on Napoleon’s military exploits in Europe and the latest proclamation from President James Madison. It also carried items of special local interest, such as the revenue Fayette County took in over the course of a year and what land was for sale. Missing saddlebags, lost sheep and wandering mares were given attention, as were abandoned husbands, who would inform friends and neighbors about wives who had bolted from “my bed and board without any just cause,” as one stated.
In one edition, from 1820, there is a notice so brief and unassuming at the bottom of an inside page that it almost escapes attention.
“For sale a negro Girl and Boy. Inquire of THE PRINTERS.”
That notice regarding the buying and selling of slaves, and the search for runaway slaves, was one of many that appeared in The Genius of Liberty and in other newspapers throughout the region in the 1800s. Looking at them two centuries later, they tell a story of how slavery remained legal and how human beings were used as chattel in many parts of Pennsylvania even many years after the commonwealth had moved to end slavery.
“People could be enslaved in the state,” according to Samuel Black, director of the African American program at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. The first ship transporting slaves arrived in Philadelphia in 1684, and William Penn, the commonwealth’s namesake, was himself a slave owner. Penn is said to have held at least 12 slaves who built the structures on his estate.
The late 1700s and early 1800s saw a worldwide movement to abolish slavery gather momentum, and in 1780 Pennsylvania lawmakers approved the Gradual Abolition Act. It made Pennsylvania the first state to abolish slavery – Vermont did so three years before when it was still a colony – but the word “gradual” turned out to be a key part of the law. Its provisions allowed slavery to endure in the commonwealth for decades after it was put into effect. The act specified that Africans who were enslaved when the law was approved would remain that way throughout their lives as long as slave owners registered them every year.
The Gradual Abolition Act also stated that “every negro and mulatto child born within the state after the passage of the Act would be free when they reached 28,” which meant that they would not be free until they were well into adulthood.
Historian Douglas Harper wrote that “the act that abolished slavery in Pennsylvania freed no slaves outright, and relics of slavery may have lingered in the state almost until the Civil War.” Census data from 1810 said that, 30 years after the Gradual Abolition Act, there were still 795 slaves in Pennsylvania. By 1840, 64 slaves remained in the commonwealth.
One slave who was not going to be freed or was not willing to wait had been given the name Bob, and he escaped from a farm near Canonsburg in Washington County. According to a notice placed in The Washington Reporter in April 1809, Bob “ran away” from the home of Joseph Pentecost, who offered a $30 reward for his return. That would be about $800 in today’s money. Bob is described as being “about 6 feet high” and wearing “patent cord pantaloons, a striped cotton round about, a swansdown vest, and a fur hat.”
In 1814, the Reporter ran a notice from John Cooper in Fallowfield Township headlined “CAUTION,” and stated that “All persons are cautioned against harboring my negro girl Anne, as her negro man, Ethos Faris, has made a practice of taking and concealing her. I am determined to put the law in force against him, or any person, who will harbor her without a pass from me.”
Another notice from the same year in the Reporter carried a menacing tone. It describes a “runaway negro fellow” named James Ross as “a thief and a liar,” and states that a $10 reward will be offered by T. Bair of Washington “for taking up the rascal and delivering him to me or confining him so that I can get him.”
That James Ross had a first name and a last name was something of a rarity, since many slaves were reduced to simple first names. A Genius of Liberty notice in 1815 offered a $40 reward if slaves identified as only David and Nat were captured and placed in jails in either Fayette and Washington counties. Another notice placed that year in The Genius of Liberty by Archiba D. Johnston of Uniontown said two slaves identified as Solomon and Michael had fled near Brownsville “on the Washington road.”
The Gradual Abolition Act allowed for slaves to enter into a state of indentured servitude or “apprenticeships.” Along with notices about escaped slaves, The Genius of Liberty contained notices about apprentices who had bolted. Black explained that the notices “are the same as those for (the) enslaved.”
Samuel Bylington of Connellsville let readers of The Genius of Liberty know that an 18-year-old apprentice in his blacksmith’s shop named Israel had escaped and “it is supposed that he has gone down the river to Pittsburgh or Kentucky.”
In 1815, Uniontown resident John Phillips placed a notice in The Genius of Liberty offering a $20 reward for an escaped “apprentice boy” named James Morford, who is described as having “a dark complexion” with “one leg apt to swell and be a little lame when exposed, he is of a ready wit and a lively turn.”
Despite the Gradual Abolition Act, “Pennsylvania was the battleground between free and slave, western Pennsylvania especially,” according to Black. Washington, Fayette and Greene counties bordered what was then Virginia, a slaveholding state, and they were close to Maryland, a state which did not abolish slavery until 1864. Black said that some residents of the region were sympathetic to slaveholding states and had more cultural common ground with them than with Philadelphia and eastern parts of the commonwealth.
That being the case, slaveholders from neighboring states would place notices in newspapers like The Genius of Liberty and The Washington Reporter regarding runaway slaves. In 1807, The Genius of Liberty carried a notice about a $50 reward being offered by Bennett Taylor of Jefferson County, Va., for a slave named Solomon, who fled from Taylor’s farm and is described as being “very fond of spirituous liquors, but is perfectly humble and submissive, either drunk or sober.”
Blair Moran of what is now West Liberty, W.Va., placed a notice in The Washington Reporter in 1814 seeking the return of an 18-year-old slave named Jacob, who is described as being “a handsome boy” but possessing “a very sore toe.” Moran asks that if Jacob is apprehended, he should be taken to the jail in Wheeling.
Black pointed out that even free Black people were in danger of being grabbed by slave catchers who roamed the region, sent south and placed in slavery, like the story depicted in the book and movie “12 Years a Slave.” Black people living in Allegheny County had to file affidavits attesting that they were, in fact, free, he explained.
“Even if you were free, you really weren’t free, because there was always that threat,” Black said.