pretends he can read’’ - appalachian state university · absent in that body of scholarship is...

‘‘Pretends he can read’’Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–1776

A N T O N I O T . B LY

A p p a l a c h i a n S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y

abstract For half a century or more, historians have turned to run-away notices to make known the complexity of African American life dur-ing the colonial era. Although some, for example, have made use of themto illustrate instances of slave discontent or their understanding of thepolitics of the day, others have used notices to reveal slave efforts to keeptheir families together or retain African customs and ways. Surprisingly,absent in that body of scholarship is a discussion of slave literacy, which isthe focus of ‘‘Pretends he can read.’’ Breaking with tradition, which haspresumed that slaves were denied access to books and literacy, except fora rare few such as Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Lucy Terry,this essay demonstrates otherwise, as it shows increasing rates of literacyamong runaways throughout eighteenth-century British North America.

June 1766, three months after colonials successfully protested the Stamp Act,Charles, a thirty-year-old ‘‘Negro Man slave’’ who ‘‘speaks very good En-glish,’’ ran away from his master, one William Alston of Halifax County,North Carolina. Judging from the short notice printed in the newspaper twomonths later, it is uncertain whether the ‘‘Virginia-born’’ bond servant knewanything about the escalating tensions between Great Britain and its NorthAmerican subjects. It is also unclear whether the passionate rhetoric of the

I wish to thank Robert A. Gross, Grey Gundaker, Rhys Isaac, James Whitten-burg, as well as Billy G. Smith and the other readers and of course the editorialstaff, particularly Ann Twombly, of Early American Studies whose readings of thisessay (in its various forms) proved invaluable. I would also like to thank Sara Bon-Harper, whose advice, assistance, and archaeological work at Monticello has addedto my understanding of slave literacy and ultimately this work.

Early American Studies (Fall 2008)Copyright � 2008 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved.

262 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

day, which likened the members of Parliament to callous, despotic patricians,inspired the man’s flight. As Benjamin Throop made clear in a Thanksgivingsermon printed that year, the enforcement of the Stamp Act (before the actwas repealed) threatened to reduce the colonies to ‘‘the greatest slavery andbondage.’’1

If not prompted by the recent turn of events, Charles may have run awaythat Friday for more practical reasons. To be sure, June proved the harshesttime of the planting season. That month, Lathan A. Windley and Philip D.Morgan’s studies have observed, ‘‘saw more runaways than any other,’’ asslaves turned their attention to the arduous task of hoeing rice fields. What-ever the case, one thing did seem certain. The ‘‘5 feet 7 inches and a halfhigh, but sparely made’’ man was determined to pass for free. To that end,William Alston cautioned the readers of Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette,Charles changed his name to ‘‘Benjamin Corbin,’’ kept close to his person aforged indenture, and pretended that he could read (figure 1).2

For the past five to six decades, notices for fugitive slaves like Charles havebecome a rich resource for African American Studies. ‘‘Although the slavesadvertised as running away,’’ as Windley explained it, ‘‘constituted a relativelysmall part of the total slave population, they did represent a cross-section ofthe different types within these colonies.’’ In Peter Wood’s judgment, theyrepresent ‘‘little more than the top of ill-defined iceberg.’’ Gerald W. Mullinagreed, observing in his study of absconded slaves in eighteenth-century Vir-ginia that they were far from being the happy and dutiful servants U. B.Philips portrayed in his American Negro Slavery. During the American Revo-lution, some did absorb the rhetoric of the day, take matters into their ownhands, and run away to realize their own natural right to freedom from tyr-

1. Benjamin Throop, ‘‘A Thanksgiving Sermon, Upon the Occasion, of the Glo-rious News of the Repeal of the Stamp Act; preached in New-Concord, in Norwich,June 26, 1766 (New London, Conn.: Timothy Green, 1766), 13. For a fuller ac-count of colonial Americans’ symbolic appropriation of slavery during the AmericanRevolution, see F. Nwabueze Okoye, ‘‘Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of theAmerican Revolutionaries,’’ William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ) 37, 1(January 1980): 3–28.

2. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), August 15, 1766; Philip D. Morgan, SlaveCounterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 151; Lathan A. Windley,A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787(New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 112–14, 174; Peter Wood, Black Majority:Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York:W. W. Norton, 1975), 240.

263Bly • ‘‘Pretends he can read’’

Figure 1. Charles’s runaway notice. Virginia Gazette, August 22, 1766, 4.See column 1, runaway advertisement 1.


anny. Others were patriots in their own right. Like the Sons of Liberty, theyseized the moment and not only drove a royal governor to declare ‘‘all ablebodied Negroes’’ free but also forced an otherwise reluctant Virginia colonyinto declaring independence from England. (Suffice it to say, most slaves didnot need the rhetoric of 1776 to be committed to the idea of freedom, nordid they wait for the Revolution.) Unlike Charles, who carried with him onlythe clothes he wore, which was ‘‘a pair of old leather breeches, a brown kerseyjacket without sleeves, and an osnabrug [sic] shirt,’’ numerous fugitive slaveswere also fashion savvy. Like their owners, they realized that clothes commu-nicated status. To dress the part and pass for free, many took with themadditional articles of clothing. Ultimately, long before Frederick Douglassand others published their life stories, these short biographies revealed thetales of courageous slaves who dreamed of freedom and ran to realize thosedreams, inscribing unwittingly in print the efforts of numerous slaves whostruggled to live life on their own terms.3

3. Windley, Profile of Runaway Slaves, xvii; U. B. Philips, American Negro Slavery(New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1918), 342; John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dun-more, By His Excellency the Right Honorable John Earl of Dunmore, His Majes-ty’s Lieutenant and Governor General of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia,and Vice Admiral of the same: A Proclamation, November 7, 1775 (broadside). Fora reaction to U. B. Philips’s dutiful-slave thesis, see Gerald W. Mullin, Flight andRebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1972), 83–124. For a fuller account of the scholarship about runawaynotices, see L. P. Jackson, ‘‘Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen in the AmericanRevolution,’’ Journal of Negro History (hereafter JNH) 27, 3 (July 1942): 247–87;Lorenzo J. Greene, ‘‘The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Run-away Slaves,’’ JNH 29, 2 (April 1944): 125–46; Daniel E. Meaders, ‘‘South CarolinaFugitives as Viewed through Local Colonial Newspapers with Emphasis on Run-away Notices, 1732–1801,’’ JNH 60 (1975): 288–319; Herbert G. Gutman, TheBlack Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977);Michael P. Johnson, ‘‘Runaway Slaves and the Slave Communities in South Caro-lina, 1799 to 1830,’’ WMQ 38 (1981): 418–41; Philip D. Morgan, ‘‘Colonial SouthCarolina Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture,’’ Slavery and Abolition 6,3 (December 1985): 57–78; Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks WhoStole Themselves (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); MichaelGomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities inthe Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1998); Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds., ‘‘Pretends to BeFree’’: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York andNew Jersey (New York: Garland, 1994); Windley, Profile of Runaway Slaves; W.Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1997); Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: AfricanAmerican Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell


Less well known are those fugitive slaves who could read and/or write.Surprisingly, absent in recent scholarship is a discussion of slave literacy.While many scholars have made extensive use of runaway notices to illustrateinstances of slaves’ discontent, their understanding of the political matters ofthe day, their efforts to keep their families together and retain their Africanculture, none has used them to explore slaves achieving literacy and how thatachievement changed over time and space during the eighteenth century.Instead, historians have presumed (misrepresenting, unwittingly or not, tem-poral and spatial specificity) that most, if not all, slaves of that period weredenied access to books and literacy—except for a very rare few, such as PhillisWheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Lucy Terry.4 Consequently, perhaps more

University Press, 1998); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, RunawaySlaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); WoodyHolton, Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolu-tion in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); DavidWaldstreicher, ‘‘Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Con-fidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,’’ WMQ 56 (April1999): 243–72; Billy G. Smith, ‘‘Resisting Inequality: Black Women Who StoleThemselves in Eighteenth-Century America,’’ in Carla Gardina Pestana andSharon V. Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, N.H.: UniversityPress of New England, 1999), 134–59; and Kirsten Denise Sword, ‘‘WaywardWives, Runaway Slaves and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in Early America’’(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002).

4. Save for Lorenzo J. Greene, whose survey of colonial New England runawaysrevealed that only 1.6 percent could read or write, no scholar—to my knowledge—has used runaway notices to explore slave literacy in the colonial period. Recently,however, in her exhaustive account of reading and writing in early America, E.Jennifer Monaghan observed that slaves ‘‘in rare cases’’ had access to books andliteracy. She notes cursorily runaway advertisements as a potentially useful source ofslave literacy. Greene and Monaghan notwithstanding, scholars on the whole havepresumed that most slaves were illiterate. That is certainly the view of KennethLockridge, whose seminal study of literacy in colonial America did not take intoaccount slaves’ reading and writing. That is also true of Robert E. Desrochers’sstudy of slaves-for-sale advertisements in colonial New England that did not con-sider or make any reference to slaves’ reading and writing. Lorenzo Greene, ‘‘TheNew England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves,’’ JNH 29, 2(April 1944): 138–39; E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colo-nial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 239, 243, 436n9;Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Inquiry into the SocialContext of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974),93–94; and, Robert E. Desrochers Jr., ‘‘Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slaveryin Massachusetts, 1704–1781,’’ WMQ 59, 3 (July 2002): 623–64.

Though varied, studies of slave literacy in the nineteenth century have provenmore fruitful. Between 1825 and 1861 Carter G. Woodson estimated, 10 percent of


striking than Charles’s endeavor to pass for free was his attempt to convinceothers that he could read, which he clearly thought an essential part of hisplan.

Indeed, besides demonstrating slaves’ resourcefulness, runaway noticesshow slaves mastering letters. In the context of Kenneth Lockridge’s classicstudy, advertisements registering instances of slaves reading or reading andwriting represent (albeit indirectly) signatures that can be used to establishfugitive slave literacy rates specifically—and possibly, in a very broad sense,slave literacy rates in general. In other words, if runaway advertisements doin fact represent the tip of an iceberg or a cross section of the enslaved popula-tion, as modern scholarship suggests, then it is also possible that the degreeto which they were literate may be representative of the larger group as well.

Starting with Virginia—England’s largest colony, the birthplace of the Af-rican American experience in North America, and likewise the place whereCharles’s story began—the number of literate absconded slaves grew overtime and space. Between 1736 and 1776 approximately 1,000 runaway no-tices appeared in the Virginia Gazette. Of that number, 55 runaways (morethan 5 percent of the whole) were described as being literate. Starting in1736, when William Parks established the first newspaper in the colony, thenumber of literate slaves represented in the notices for absconders grew overtime. And so did the overall number of runaways in the colony. In the firstthree years of the paper’s publication, 44 slaves were reported as having ab-sconded. None, however, was noted as being literate. But in the decade fol-lowing the 1730s, 1 of 33, or 3 percent of the runaways, was identified as

‘‘adult Negroes had the rudiments of education.’’ Similarly, in his survey of runawayadvertisements in Kentucky from 1792 to 1865, Ivan E. McDougle determined that20.3 percent (71 of 350 slave fugitives) were advertised as being able to read. Ofthose 71, 37 slaves (52.1 percent) could also write. According to Harvey J. Graff,above 50 percent of (free) black Canadians were literate, a figure that correspondsroughly with the average literacy rate for free blacks in the United States recordedin the 1850 census. More recently, Janet D. Cornelius’s studies of slave educationin the antebellum South determined that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent ofenslaved African Americans were literate. Carter G. Woodson, The Education of theNegro prior to 1861 (1919; rept., Brooklyn: A & B Publishers Group, 1997), 139;Ivan E. McDougle, ‘‘Slavery in Kentucky,’’ JNH 3, 3 (July 1918): 289; Harvey J.Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-CenturyCity (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 68; Janet D. Cornelius, ‘‘ ‘We Slipped andLearned to Read’: Slave Accounts of the Literacy Process, 1830–1865,’’ Phylon 44,3 (1983): 186; and Cornelius, ‘‘When I Can Read My Title Clear’’: Literacy, Slavery,and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,1991), 8–9.


Table 1Literacy Rates among Virginia Runaways

No. of ads No. of literate PercentPeriod examined runaways literate

1736–39 44 – –1740–49 33 1 3.01750–59 72 3 4.21760–69 233 16 6.91770–76 648 35 5.4

Source: Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database.

being able to read and/or write. By the 1750s that number was growing.Around the same time the colony’s slave population nearly doubled, and 3 of72 runaways were noted as being literate. In the decade that saw the LandonCarters of colonial Virginia amassing greater fortunes in tobacco, wheat, andslaves, expanding their already large landholdings, and solidifying furthertheir positions as social and political grandees in their counties, 4 percent ofenslaved Virginians who disappeared from their owners’ estates had solvedthe mystery of letters.5 In the 1760s that number increased by almost threepercentage points, as 16 runaways of 233 were noted as being able to readand/or write. In the decade in which the growing tensions between the Oldand New Lights gathered to a head, almost 7 percent of the runaways inVirginia were literate and reading the word to and among themselves. But bythe time the colony declared independence, that percentage had dropped offby 1 1/2 percentage points. In hard numbers, 35 of 648 runaways between1770 and 1776 had achieved literacy (table 1).

Notices farther south told a different story. In the low country estates ofSouth Carolina, where slaves labored in rice and indigo fields, literacy did notthrive. Compared to the tobacco aristocrats of the Chesapeake, the rice lordsof the colonial Deep South ruled over a slave population one-half the size of

5. By all contemporary and modern accounts, early Africans and African Ameri-cans initially perceived print as a form of magic. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signify-ing Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988), 127–69. Also see Grey Gundaker, ‘‘Give Me a Sign: Afri-can Americans, Print, and Practice, 1790–1840,’’ in Robert A. Gross and MaryKelly, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation(forthcoming).


Table 2Estimated Enslaved Population in Colonial America

Colonies

Period Va. S.C. Mass. Pa. N.Y.

1700s 16,390 2,444 800 430 2,2561710s 23,118 4,100 1,310 1,575 2,8111720s 26,559 12,000 2,150 2,000 5,7401730s 30,000 20,000 2,780 1,241 6,9561740s 60,000 30,000 3,035 2,055 8,9961750s 101,452 39,000 4,075 2,872 11,0141760s 140,570 57,334 4,566 4,409 16,3401770s 187,605 75,178 4,754 5,761 19,112

Source: [United States Bureau of the Census], The Statistical History of the UnitedStates, from Colonial Times to the Present; Historical Statistics of the United States,Colonial Times to 1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 1168.

Virginia’s (table 2). The newspapers of that colony, however, give a differentimpression. Over the four and a half decades before independence, the SouthCarolina Gazette, the sole newspaper in the colony, carried three to four timesas many notices for runaways as its counterpart, the Virginia Gazette, ran. Inthe 1730s the Charles Town–based paper carried notices for 275 runaways,compared to a mere 44 in the Williamsburg paper. Not one of the SouthCarolina fugitives was described as literate. In the four decades that followed,at no time was there ever a literacy rate among runaways of as much as 1percent (table 3).

This was not the case north of the Chesapeake. In Boston there were moreliterate runaway slaves than in the Chesapeake. Though Boston had a smallerslave population compared to its southern counterparts, its newspapers re-ported almost twice as many runaways between the 1730s and the 1750s asappeared in the several versions of Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette. In the1730s, 67 runaways appeared in the Boston press, compared to only 44 inVirginia. Two of the Boston absconders were literate. In the following decadethat number grew along with the ranks of runaways. Four of 111 runawaysin the 1740s, approximately 4 percent, were literate, marking the beginningof a sustained rise in slave literacy. The proportion of literate slaves amongrunaways nearly doubled to 7 percent in the 1750s, and then grew to 9 per-cent in the 1760s, when New Englanders began to sound liberty’s bell. The


Table 3Literacy Rates among South Carolina Runaways


1730–39 275 – –1740–49 353 1 .281750–59 559 1 .181760–69 831 6 .721770–76 633 5 .79


Table 4Literacy Rates among New England Runaways


1730–39 67 2 3.01740–49 111 4 3.61750–59 103 7 6.81760–69 104 9 8.71770–76 115 11 9.6


figure peaked at close to 10 percent in the decade that saw not only the birthof independence but also the historic publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poemson Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

In context, Wheatley was clearly not the phoenix of her race, as HenryLewis Gates Jr. and other literary scholars have claimed. As the notices fromBoston show, she was one of many literate blacks. Put another way, theAfrican-born poet personified the African American literary tradition; slaveslike Charles represented the African American literacy tradition (table 4).6

Figures among runaways west of New England reveal higher numbers ofliterate slaves compared to the Chesapeake as well. Like Boston, Pennsylvania

6. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 127–69. For a fuller account of the AfricanAmerican literacy tradition, see my ‘‘Breaking with Tradition: Slave Literacy inEarly Virginia, 1680–1780’’ (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2006).


Table 5Literacy Rates among Runaways in Pennsylvania


1730–39 25 1 4.01740–49 64 2 3.11750–59 82 3 3.71760–69 246 20 8.11770–76 152 15 9.9


did not have as large a slave population as the southern colony. Even so, fromthe 1730s to the 1760s, the number of runaways there almost equaled thetotal in Virginia. Initially, Pennsylvania’s runaways were no more likely to beliterate than Virginia’s. In both colonies, the proportion hovered between 3and 4 percent in the 1740s and 1750s. The 1760s marked a turning point,when Pennsylvania diverged from Virginia, as the numbers of runaways andof literate slaves rose. Some 8 percent of Pennsylvania’s runaways (20 of 246)were described as literate in the 1760s, compared to 7 percent of Virginia’s.By the time the colonies declared independence, the number of Pennsylvaniarunaways decreased. But the percentage of literate runaways continued togrow, from 8 to 10 percent (table 5).

Similar figures were recorded for runaways in the colony of New York. Inthe 1730s 17 notices appeared in the New-York Gazette. Of that number, 3runaways were identified as being literate. In the ensuing decade, at the startof which New York was thrown into an uproar by the detection of a slaveconspiracy, 2 of 44 runaways were noted as being able to read.7 In the 1750sthat figure doubled. Of the 91 slaves who ran away, 5 could read and write.During the 1760s only 3 runaways were reported as being literate. Between1770 and 1776, 6 of 70 runaway slaves who appeared in the papers in NewYork could read or write (table 6).

Not surprisingly, runaways in societies with slaves were more likely to be

7. Thomas J Davis, ‘‘The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 as Black Protest,’’JNH 56, 1 (January 1971): 17–30; Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer Jr., ‘‘Slave Resistancein Colonial New York: An Interpretation of Daniel Horsmanden’s New York Con-spiracy,’’ Phylon 41, 2 (1980): 137–52.


Table 6Literacy Rates among Runaways in New York


1730–39 17 3 17.6a

1740–49 44 2 4.51750–59 91 5 5.51760–69 122 3 2.51770–76 70 6 8.6

Source: Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database.a. This figure may overstate the literacy rate because some issues of the New-YorkGazette are missing.

literate than their counterparts in full-blown slave societies. As Ira Berlin hasshown, the institution of slavery varied over time and from one region of themainland to next. In the northern colonies, for example, slavery representeda significant yet marginal part of society, and slaves performed a multitude oftasks from farm labor to specialized occupations like ironwork or carpentry.They were also disproportionately urban, and most worked alongside andwith whites. As a result, enslaved Bostonians, Philadelphians, and New York-ers were quick to adopt Euro-American ways of life. In the southern colonies,however, slavery drove the economy. In the Chesapeake tobacco was king,and rice ruled the lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia. Compared to theeconomies that developed in the north, the cultivation of tobacco and ricedemanded larger numbers of slaves, as well as more complex structures oflabor organization. In Virginia slaves toiled on plantations. In the Carolinas,by contrast, they worked in larger work gangs, and each slave was assigned aspecific task.

Despite these differences, enslaved Virginians adopted European ways aswell. Like their brethren farther north, they worked in close proximity totheir masters. Most of them were country-born (Creole) and quite familiarwith the language and customs of their owners. This was not so farther south,where geography and the nature of farming life seem to have conspired to-gether, requiring the frequent importation of Africans into the Carolina lowcountry to sustain its fragile slave population. There, African Americans lived,for the most part, in greater isolation from whites, and as a result of that


isolation they managed to retain a greater degree of their African ways andtraditions.8

Like the institution of slavery, slaves’ access to letters varied. As early asthe 1710s, as the studies of Carter G. Woodson, John C. Van Horne, and E.Jennifer Monaghan have observed, slaves received biblical literacy instructionfrom their masters, who thought it their duty to impart religion by letters.9

Bond servants such as Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon were taught inthe homes of their owners, but other slaves were taught by catechists em-ployed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Ifnot by the S.P.G., others gained knowledge of letters under the auspices ofthe Associates of the Late Dr. Thomas Bray, a philanthropic Bible societythat held fast to the Apostle Timothy’s injunction to ‘‘give attendance toreading, to exhortation, to doctrine’’ until Christ returned. Indeed, in thatcommission they established a series of charity schools that provided Chris-

8. Ira Berlin, ‘‘Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society onBritish Mainland North America,’’ American Historical Review (hereafter AHR) 85,1 (February 1980): 44–78. For a fuller account of how the institution of slaverychanged over time and space, see Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colo-nial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (Wheeling, Ill.: Har-lan Davidson, 1990); William D. Piersen, From Africa to America: African AmericanHistory from the Colonial Era to the Early Republic, 1526–1790 (New York: TwaynePublishers, 1996); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries ofSlavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1998); Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cam-bridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); and Philip D. Morgan,Slave Counterpoint. For a fuller account of how geography and region informed thesurvival of African customs, see Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Accultura-tion and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

Interestingly, none of these studies has addressed slaves achieving literacy overtime and space. Instead, most appear to have conceded to the very temporary andspatial basis they have redefined. Allan Kulikoff, whose study of the Chesapeakehas become a cornerstone of many of the aforementioned works, appears to havespoken for many when he observed: ‘‘White training of slaves, however, was limitedto those jobs that did not require literacy. Slaves understood the power of literacy,and many probably wanted to read and write, but whites used their monopoly ofreading and writing to help control black behavior.’’ Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves:The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 396.

9. Woodson, Education of the Negro, 139; Monaghan, Learning to Read andWrite, 241–301. Significantly, both these studies of slave literacy are primarily quali-tative in nature. By comparison, my work ventures to complement them by empha-sizing a quantitative analysis.


tian instruction to slaves through reading. Not surprisingly, their efforts metwith varying degrees of success. In Philadelphia their doors were open forwell over seventeen years, fourteen in Williamsburg and New York, thirteenin Newport, and six years in Charleston.10 Significantly, other slaveholderswho allowed their servants to be instructed did so for less pious reasons.Thomas Jefferson, as Lucia Stanton has explained, permitted several of his‘‘people’’ to be taught, as such lessons were deemed essential to the Virginiagrandee’s personal sense of happiness. The same was true of Peyton Ran-dolph, who relied on his trusted body servant, Johnny, who had been knownto run errands on his master’s behalf. Whatever their rationale, many slaveowners were not as open to the idea of teaching slaves writing (or penman-ship), which represented a specialized skill that for a time had been reservedprimarily for well-situated white men. By Monaghan’s exhaustive account,this divide between the two literacy skills (which, by the way, had been thecommon practice of literacy instruction in general) became increasingly rigidfor the enslaved as incidents of rebellion flared up throughout British NorthAmerica. Hence, while reading could be taught to the enslaved, writing couldnot.11

And yet, unbeknown to their owners, enslaved African Americans weremore than likely seizing moments to learn and sharing with one anotherknowledge of letters. Consider an extant three-page letter written by a Vir-ginia slave to the bishop of London in 1723, weeks after Edmund Gibsonhad been appointed the chaplain of the trans-Atlantic colonies.12 According

10. 1 Tim. 4:13 (KJV); John C. Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy and Colo-nial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717–1777(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 1–38. By Van Horne’s account, thePhiladelphia school reopened after the American Revolution and continued in-structing slaves up until the 1780s. Like Woodson’s and Monaghan’s, Van Horne’sstudy is largely qualitative.

11. Lucia Stanton, ‘‘ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Thomas Jeffersonand His Slaves,’’ in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: UniversityPress of Virginia, 1993), 147–80, esp. 168; Julie Richter, ‘‘ ‘The Speaker’s’ Men andWomen: Randolph Slaves in Williamsburg’’ Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter 20(2000): 47–51; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write, 241–301. For a fuller ac-count of how race and gender functioned as social divides that restricted access toletters, see E. Jennifer Monaghan, ‘‘Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free:Reflections on Liberty and Literacy,’’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society108 (1998): 309–41, and her ‘‘Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial NewEngland,’’ American Quarterly 40 (March 1988): 18–41.

12. Anonymous slave to Bishop Edmund Gibson, 1723, Fulham Papers, Lam-beth Palace Library (Williamsburg: College of William and Mary, Swem Library,World Microfilms), 17:167–68. A copy of the letter and a transcript can be found


to Thomas N. Ingersoll, who discovered the letter while examining the bish-op’s manuscript papers, the author may have had help from other slaves incomposing the correspondence, written between August 4 and September 8.Taking into account ‘‘the singular and plural forms of the first person’’ theauthor employed, Ingersoll observed, the letter was probably the work of agroup of slaves.13

Apparently, the bishop of London’s commission inspired the slave to write.News of Gibson’s appointment probably filled the streets in Virginia, as wellas the alleys of the colony’s urban centers. By word of mouth, reports hadprobably made their way far into the backcountry of the Piedmont, fartherwest into the Appalachian Mountains, and into the equally sparsely populatedsouth and eastern shore countrysides. If not in that manner, news of thebishop’s appointment could certainly have been heard echoing about thetabby-plastered walls of the local parish, where clerks and sextons talked andwhere parsons were sure to keep their congregations, which included slaves,apprised.

However the writer may have learned of the bishop’s appointment, theletter, anonymously written, entreated the service of the ‘‘Lord arch Bishopof Lonnd’’ on behalf of other enslaved Virginians. To a lesser extent, it alsobeseeched ‘‘Lord King George’’ for assistance. The intention of the petitionwas twofold. In the first part of the letter, the writer lamented the deplorablecondition of the mulattoes and Negro slaves in the colony. By this ‘‘poore’’slave’s account, slaves in Virginia were exploited much like ‘‘the Egyptianswas with the Chilldann of Issarall.’’ According to the writer, those whoowned slaves ‘‘doo Look no more up on us then if wee ware dogs.’’ Suchbeing his lot, the slave writer then begged ‘‘The Right Raverrand father ingod’’ and the king of England to intervene on the slaves’ behalf. ‘‘Releese us,’’he asked in a plea at once bold and deferential, ‘‘out of this Cruell Bondegg.’’14

In the second part of the appeal, the writer, who identified himself as buta ‘‘poore partishinner’’ of the Church of England, beseeched the bishop totake responsibility for instructing Virginia’s slaves in Christianity. ‘‘Wee . . .do humblly beg the favour of your Lord Ship . . . [to] Settell one thing uponus which is . . . that our childarn may be broatt up in the way of the Christianfaith.’’ That meant teaching them ‘‘the Lords prayer, the creed, and the tencommandments,’’ the basic texts by which children were introduced to the

in Thomas N. Ingersoll, ‘‘ ‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg’: An Appeal fromVirginia in 1723,’’ WMQ 51, 4 (October 1994): 777–82.

13. Ingersoll, ‘‘ ‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg,’ ’’ 778.14. Anonymous slave to Bishop Edmund Gibson, 17:167–68.


Anglican faith. But that was not sufficient for the bishop’s correspondent. Healso implored the Church official to put the slave children ‘‘to Scool andLarnd to Reed through the Bybell.’’ In the eighteenth century, as Monagh-an’s study has shown, the three R’s were reading, ’riting, and religion.15

Interestingly, that part of the appeal is striking because it underscores therole slave women may have played in the composition of the anonymousletter. Besides expressing their grave concerns about their mistreatment, theauthors of the letter convey what seems a parental interest about their chil-dren’s educational opportunities. Moreover, as the shifts from singular to plu-ral voice point out, there was more than one author who addressed the bishopof London in this regard. When addressing the diocese on behalf of otherslaves, the author used the singular pronoun to separate himself, whose plightwas no different from the others. The cruelty of these modern-day ‘‘Egypt-tions,’’ he reminded the bishop, allowed one brother to own another: ‘‘It is tobee noted that one brother is a SLave [sic] to another and one Sister to another which is quite out of the way and as for me myself I am my brothersSLave but my name is Secrett.’’ But when making the case for instructingyounger slaves, the voice of the writer shifts and becomes plural. In that shift,the unknown writer spoke not only for himself or herself but also for theothers who helped put the letter together. ‘‘Sir wee your humble perticners. . . [desire that our Children] may appeare Every Lord’s att Church beforethe Curatt to bee Exammond for our desire is that godllines Shoulld abboundamong us.’’ In short, slave mothers and fathers desired more for their childrenand perhaps indirectly more for themselves. More for them meant bettertreatment and lessons for their sons and daughters in how to read the Bible.

From this letter it becomes clear that enslaved African Americans werebeing taught. It appears that some were being taught by local church offi-cials. Others taught one another. Afro-Virginians,16 as the anonymous 1723letter told it, were working together in achieving literacy: throughout thecolony, they were sharing what they learned, teaching each other how toread and write.

Undoubtedly, some of those lessons in letters went on in private and inclandestine places, away from their owners’ watchful eyes. In spite of theChurch of England’s efforts in Virginia, not all slaves acquired literacy.Though some slaveholders afforded slaves the opportunity, others did not.

15. Ibid.; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write, 241–301.16. My use of the term Afro-Virginian does not refer to politics, nomenclature,

or history. Rather, it denotes the complex cultural processes through which Africansbecame Americans.


In their judgment, instruction served only to make a slave saucy. Withknowledge of letters, slaves could indeed write themselves free. To dissuadesuch efforts, some slaveholders threatened certain punishment if slaves con-tinued in their endeavors to learn. The slave authors may have been writinganonymously and in secret not to hide their literacy from their masters, butrather to conceal their denunciation of their masters to the AnglicanChurch official overseeing religious life in the colony. Whatever their rea-sons, they wrote in fear. The ‘‘poore’’ slave writers conceded that muchwhen, in the closing lines of the letter, they explained to the bishop theirreasons for anonymity: ‘‘Wee darer nott Subscribe any mans name to thisfor feare of our masters for if they knew that wee have Sent home to yourhonour wee Should goo neare to Swing upon the gallas tree.’’17

Also consider the notices of literate runaways in Virginia, specifically theliteracy skills they achieved. In the tobacco colony 31 percent of abscondedliterate slaves were identified only as being able to read. In 1770, just threedays before Christmas, Edith, ‘‘a Virginia born Negro woman,’’ ran awayfrom her owner in Charles City County. Besides remarking on the woman’s‘‘yellowish complexion, and two of her toes [that] grow together,’’ NicholasHolt warned the public that his bond servant ‘‘can read pretty well.’’ Thesame had also been true of William Freedom’s slave woman Zophir, whoran away from his residence in Norfolk three years later. Less than 10 per-cent (7.3 percent) of the advertisements noted only the literate runaway’sability to write that in all likelihood may also underscore a slave’s ability toread and write and possibly his mastery of certain domestic and urban skills.Such was the case of William Griffin’s manservant John, who by his mas-ter’s account ‘‘writes intelligently.’’18 Probably to the chagrin of their owners,most literate runaways had managed, and overwhelmingly so, to masterboth skills, inadvertently complicating current scholarship regarding slaveliteracy. In the Chesapeake 62 percent of runaways with literacy skills knewhow to both read and write. Notices farther north and south recorded evenhigher figures. While changing notions of patriarchy may in part explainhow some of these slave fugitives acquired literacy, it appears that slavesconcealed the other part of the story (table 7).19

17. Anonymous slave to Bishop Edmund Gibson, 17:168.18. Virginia Gazette, (Rind), March 22, 1770; Virginia Gazette (Purdie &

Dixon), September 16, 1773; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), November 10,1774.

19. For a fuller account of changing notions of patriarchy in colonial America,see Woodson, Education of the Negro, and Mullin, Africa in America. For more recentregional studies of the subject, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Anthony S. Parent,


Table 7Literacy Characteristics of Literate Runaways in Colonial America as

Reported by Their Owners, 1730–1776

Colony Read only Write only Read and write

Virginia 30.9% 7.3% 61.8%South Carolina 30.1 — 69.2Massachusetts 14.8 5.7 80.0Pennsylvania 19.0 7.1 73.8New York 20.0 10.0 70.0


Additionally, more slaves could probably read than were reported. Tojudge from the notices, for example, few slave women ran away. Fewer stillwere recorded as being able to read and/or write. In the Chesapeake,women accounted for a modest share (110 of 1030) of the notices printedin the Gazette between 1736 and 1776. Of that number, only 4 could reador read and write.

For most slave women in Virginia, running may not have been a viablechoice. Though familiar with the language and customs of their masters,many chose to stay put. Family bound them to the quarters and to thehouse. Presumably, as they were not as skilled as their menfolk, they alsohad little to no chance to hire themselves out. And because of their sex,female fugitives faced yet an additional obstacle when they attempted topass for free or endeavored to find work.

By Gerald Mullin’s account, most preferred truancy. In his judgment,only a few ran off to leave the colony or to escape slavery permanently. Inmany instances, their owners had some idea of their whereabouts. One-quarter of women fugitives in Virginia left to visit their husbands or chil-dren on nearby plantations. Another quarter, he noted, went to town topass for free. To support themselves in Williamsburg and in other urbancenters, fugitive women sold corn or potato hoecakes, eggs and chickens,and a variety of baked goods—all of which support the fact that many mayhave had help.

Billy G. Smith’s recent study has added greater nuance to this portraitof women stealing away. Though their efforts varied, the threat of being

Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Berlin, Generations of Captivity.


sold or of sexual exploitation compelled many slave women to abscond.Whereas most men fugitives ran away alone, women fled in groups. Moreoften than their male counterparts, they also used the threat of flight as anegotiating tool to wrest power from their owners, as well as to gain privi-leges. By Smith’s account, more slave women than men responded to theopportunity of freedom provided by the American Revolution and its after-math. In other ways, needless to say, women probably registered their lit-eracy.20

The same was also true of women farther north and south. In SouthCarolina nearly one-fifth of the notices (492 of 2651) were for women whodisappeared between the 1730s and 1776. Significantly, by the time theplanters there decided to sign the Declaration of Independence, only onerunaway woman had been noted as being literate. In Pennsylvania, womenmade up a tenth of the runaways who appeared in Benjamin Franklin’sGazette. In that port colony, Mary Deklyn’s Rachel was one of three femaleslave fugitives who could read. In 1775, when she ran away, her mistressnoted, the Negro woman ‘‘Took with her . . . a hymn book.’’ In Bostonwomen accounted for almost one-tenth of printed notices. Surprisingly,none was literate. Not so in New York. There, Jenny, the wife of a ‘‘negropreacher’’ by the name of Mark, who could also read, was the only one of34 female fugitives who appeared in the New-York Gazette between 1730and 1776. In the notice posted for the slave couple’s recovery, ThomasClarke and Major Provost described the ‘‘Wench’’ as ‘‘smart’’ and likely to‘‘make a travelling Pass.’’ To judge from that account, though her husbandcould read, Jenny could read and write (table 8).21

Surely, more women could probably read than those who appeared innewspaper advertisements. More could also read and write. Though it isimpossible to discern, in exact numerical terms, how many had achievedletters, it is nonetheless reasonable to assume, considering that they madeup half the slave population in full-blown slave societies like Virginia andSouth Carolina for much of the eighteenth century, that a fair number ofthem did learn. To be sure, in the tobacco colony, judging from extantchurch registers, equal numbers of slave men and women attended churcheswhose parsons, as early as the mid-1720s (if not before), considered literacy

20. G. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 103–5; Smith, ‘‘Resisting Inequality,’’134–59.

21. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 23, 1775; New-York Gazette, January 12,1775.


Table 8Percentage of Female Slaves Advertised as Runaways in

Colonial America, 1730–1776

Colonies

Period Va. S.C. Pa. Mass. N.Y.

1730s 9% 21% 12% 11% 11%1740s – 20 10 10 91750s 10 23 10 3 101760s 12 16 7 4 91770–76 11 16 12 8 8


instruction as part of their sacred commission.22 Be that as it may, noticesreveal only one part of the story, that part being what masters knew abouttheir slaves for certain.

The notices also overrepresented skilled slaves and domestics. As the casehad been with women, runaway notices reveal only part of the story. Be-tween 1733 and 1775, as Philip D. Morgan’s study demonstrates, slavedomestics and artisans accounted for approximately one-tenth of all slavesin the Virginia colony. By contrast, they represented 21.6 percent of allabsconding slaves in the advertisements.

Over time, skilled runaways were also more likely (and increasingly so)to be literate. Four years after William Parks started the Virginia Gazette inWilliamsburg, three runaways were noted as being skilled. At age forty-two, James Ball’s Will, who ‘‘carried with him, a white Fustian Jacket, alooping Ax, and a Fiddle,’’ worked as a jack of several trades. As his mastertold it, the Virginia native was ‘‘a Carpenter, Sawyer, Shoemaker, andCooper.’’ But Will could neither read nor write—at least that is the casejudging from the notice placed in the paper. Neither could the other twoskilled runaway slaves reported in the 1730s. By the following decade, thatchanged. Six of 33 runaways were artisans. Eight worked as domestics andone was semiskilled. Among that exceptional group was Peter, John Custis’shouse slave, who was also the only literate runaway recorded in the Wil-

22. Bly, ‘‘Breaking with Tradition,’’ 79–138. For other accounts of the connec-tion between Protestantism and literacy, see Woodson, Education of theNegro,11–30; Monaghan, Learning, 143–65; 241–72.


liamsburg-based press in the 1740s. By the time religious dissenters beganto settle the colony’s frontier, that number became bigger in each succeedingdecade. Skilled slaves made up a little over one-fourth of those who ranaway in the 1750s, and 11 percent of them could read and write. In theensuing decade, 8 of the 64 skilled runaways reported (one-eighth) wereliterate. In the 1770s, when Virginia declared independence, 123 of 648runaways were noted as being smiths and carpenters, waiters and coachmen,boatmen, farmers, and other such skilled hands. Almost one-tenth of those123 could read and/or write.23

The shortcomings of runaway notices notwithstanding, recent archaeo-logical findings may offer us a useful counterbalance. Much like printedrunaway advertisements, artifacts found in archaeological excavations pro-vide evidence of slaves’ reading and writing. But, unlike the notices, whichtend to represent what masters knew about their slaves, the archaeologicaldiscoveries may reveal what masters may not have known. For instance,unlike runaway advertisements, archaeological findings suggest that slavewomen were more than likely learning along with slave men. It also suggeststhat both slave artisans and slave field hands were probably learning to readand write as well.

In the past, scholarship on early African American history and AfricanAmerican material culture has sought to reconstruct everyday life in theslave quarters. From her analysis of faunal remains in York County, Vir-ginia, slave quarters, for example, Ywone Edwards-Ingram concluded thatslaves were able to supplement their diets by hunting and trapping localgame. Other scholars have used slave archaeology to examine the socialrelationships between masters and slaves and the processes of cultural inter-action and exchange that occurred between Africans and Europeans. InUncommon Ground, Leland Ferguson discovered among slave quarter arti-facts a wide assortment of ceramics, clay pots, and fragments of other items.Judging from the variety of these artifacts, Ferguson determined that inaddition to supplementing their diets, slaves in Virginia and elsewherebartered with their masters for certain commodities. In that manner,slaves acquired items like silverware, porcelain, and creamware dishes andplates. Such trading challenges old assumptions that slaves, denied accessto luxuries and overawed by the authority of their well-fed, well-clad, andwell-housed masters, were unable to develop a sense of economy and inde-pendence. In Ferguson’s judgment, enslaved Virginians, as well as slaves

23. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 204–44; Virginia Gazette (Parks), April 28–May 5, 1738.


elsewhere, acquired property of their own through which many expressedand enjoyed a certain modicum of social prestige among their fellow bondservants.24

Sifting through the debris, archaeologists have discovered evidence notonly of slave foodways and forms of social stratification but also of WestAfrican cultural retentions. Fragments of tobacco pipe stems and bowls,unearthed in the root cellars or subterranean pits at the quarters at Carter’sGrove in the James City County, home of Carter Burwell, the grandson ofRobert ‘‘King’’ Carter of Lancaster County, indicate that Virginia slaveswere consumers of the very tobacco they were forced to produce for whitemasters engaged in trans-Atlantic trade. In the early part of the eighteenthcentury, they too smoked tobacco, possibly as a way of coping with slavery.But they also smoked tobacco because it was a custom with which manywere already familiar from their native African homelands (table 9).25

That is certainly the view of Lorena S. Walsh. In her From Calabar toCarter’s Grove, Walsh suggested that in addition to producing and consum-ing tobacco, Africans in Virginia brought to the Chesapeake African tech-niques of growing the crop. Although historians have long recognized the‘‘contributions of enslaved Africans to the development of rice culture inthe Carolinas,’’ Walsh observed that African contributions to the develop-ment of tobacco culture in the Chesapeake have received little to no atten-tion. In her judgment, excavated tobacco stems and pipes demonstrate notonly slave consumption but also the likely presence of African methods of

24. Ywone Edwards-Ingram, ‘‘The Trash of Enslaved African Virginians,’’ CWI20 (Winter 1999–2000): 9–12; Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeologyand Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1992). For a fuller treatment of slave archaeology see Patricia Samford, ‘‘TheArchaeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture,’’ WMQ 53 (Janu-ary 1996): 87–114; Theresa A. Singleton, ed., ‘‘I, Too, Am America’’: ArchaeologicalStudies of African-American Life (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999);and Ann Smart Martin, ‘‘Suckey’s Looking Glass: African Americans as Consum-ers,’’ in her Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 173–94.

25. Carter’s Grove, Artifact Inventory; Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Car-ter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: UniversityPress of Virginia, 1997), 61–65, 195–99. For a fuller account of the artifacts foundat slave sites, see Matthew C. Emerson, ‘‘African Inspirations in a New World Artand Artifact: Decorated Pipes from the Chesapeake,’’ in Singleton, ‘‘I, Too, AmAmerica,’’ 47–82, and L. Daniel Mouer, Mary Ellen N. Hodges, Stephen R. Potter,et al., ‘‘Colonoware Pottery, Chesapeake Pipes, and ‘Uncritical Assumptions’ ’’ inSingleton, ‘‘I, Too, Am America,’’ 83–115.


Table 9Archaeological Evidence of Tobacco Use at Slave Sites

Artifacts: tobacco pipes

Site name Occupancy stems bowls unid.

Governor’s Land44JC298 1690–1720 92 122 12

Carter’s Grove 1710–85 56 83 –Palace Lands 1740–80 75 58 1Fairfield Quarter 1746–75 964 996 170Richneck 1750–70 404 750 44Monticello

Building O 1770–90 139 67 –Building S 1770–1826 25 22 –Building L 1780–1810 3 2 –Building R 1793–1826 13 7 –Building T 1793–1826 27 16 –

Poplar ForestNorth Hill 1770–80 20 45 –Quarter 1790–1810 95 60 9

Mount VernonHouse for families 1759–92 212 401 3

Stratford HallST116 1770–1820 30 49 –

Sources: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Carter’s Grove Artifact Inventoryand the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery Database, www.daacs.org.

producing tobacco. After all, both Gold Coast and Angolan Africans whowere transported to Virginia were quite familiar with tobacco farming.When they arrived in the Chesapeake, they carried with them centuries ofexperience. Consequently, fragments of tobacco pipes and stems representa complex artifact in which African and European husbandry realized com-mon ground.26

Archaeological findings also reveal evidence of the enslaved masteringletters. Pencil leads, pencil slates, writing slates, and, to a lesser extent, un-

26. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove, 63–65.


identified slates have been found at several sites excavated in the Tidewaterand Piedmont regions of the Chesapeake. In the Richneck Quarter in YorkCounty, for example, three writing slates and three unidentified slates wereuncovered. Similarly, in the Palace Lands Quarter in York County, onewriting slate and eight unidentified slates were excavated. Archaeologistshave also unearthed one unidentified slate at the slave site at the Governor’sLand estate in James City County. Identical artifacts were found at GeorgeWashington’s Tidewater plantation. At his estate in Mount Vernon, oneunidentified slate was discovered in the first president’s slave quarters. Muchlike runaway notices that appeared in the Virginia Gazette and in othercolonial newspapers, these artifacts demonstrate slave literacy. Indeed, asthis archaeological evidence shows, slaves were practicing letters in thequarters and probably sharing the skill.

Particularly compelling are the artifacts unearthed at the slave quartersites at Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello. There 237 unidentifiedslates, 27 pencil leads, 2 pencil slates, and 18 writing slates were uncoveredin houses once occupied by Jefferson’s black bond servants. In Free SomeDay, Lucia Stanton took these writing slates in slave quarters as evidence ofenslaved Virginians’ reading and writing. In her view, evidence ‘‘unearthedin archaeological excavations below Mulberry Row attests to the hunger foreducation at Monticello. . . . The writers probably had only the hours ofdarkness to practice [their] letters and found a piece of locally availablestone that saved [them] the purchase of pen and paper.’’27 Perhaps unknownto Jefferson, who by Stanton’s account had no problem with a number ofhis skilled slaves reading and writing, some of his plantation hands werealso literate and apparently teaching one another (figures 2 and 3).28

Evidence of slaves reading and writing has also been unearthed at Jeffer-son’s Poplar Forest estate. Poplar Forest was his retirement plantation inBedford County, Virginia. There, archaeologists have discovered four un-identified slates in the root cellars excavated at the North Hill site. At thequarter site they unearthed even clearer evidence of slave literacy: fragmentsof five writing slates. Barbara J. Heath took these artifacts as a clear indica-tion of slaves reading and writing. By her account, the fragments of writingslates ‘‘may have been part of an artisan’s tool kit or may have been used bya resident of the site as he or she learned to read and write.’’ ‘‘Although

27. Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello(Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000), 100.

28. Stanton, ‘‘ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness,’ ’’ 168; and Stanton, FreeSome Day, 97–101.


Figure 2. Writing slates excavated at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello slave quar-ters. Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery Database, www.daacs.org.


Figure 3. A writing slate and slate pencil excavated at Thomas Jefferson’s Mon-ticello slave quarters. Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake SlaveryDatabase, www.daacs.org.


formal education was denied to slaves,’’ she noted, ‘‘John Hemming, whodid much of the carpentry at Poplar Forest, and Hannah, the cook, areknown to have been literate, because letters written in their hand survive.’’In Heath’s judgment, ‘‘It is likely that others, particularly craftsmen andwomen, needed some degree of literacy to perform their work effectively.Bent over writing slates in the yards and doorways of the quarter, these menand women might have shared their knowledge with others.’’29

Though not formally schooled, some slaves at Jefferson’s Monticello andPoplar Forest estates, much like other slaves in other parts of the Chesa-peake, learned how to read and write. Judging from the artifacts, it seemslikely that Jefferson afforded certain slaves the opportunity to achieve letters;they then shared what they learned with other slaves. It also seems apparent,however, that a number of Jefferson’s people did not wait for their master’sapproval when it came to learning how to read and write. Far from it: severaltook it upon themselves to learn letters, and others passed on what they hadlearned. While some used slates, others may have practiced their letters bywriting in the dirt, which may have proven to be a more effective surfacethan slates; the fact that slaves were learning to read and write could easilybe concealed with a sweep of the dust. Presumably, one of every twenty-five field hands in the tobacco colony had some knowledge of letters, andthis is at best a conservative estimate in light of both Woodson’s and Mo-naghan’s studies.30 Whatever the case, besides demonstrating literacy fromthe perspective of bond servants, the archaeological evidence appears to cor-roborate the figures recorded by runaway notices (table 10).�Alas, modern historians have overlooked runaway notices as a possible formof slave signature, as well as the importance of literacy in slave efforts to livelife on their own terms. To judge from Charles’s story, which opened thisaccount, the printed or written word was particularly significant to manyenslaved African Americans because they were bound by it. As early as

29. Barbara Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jeffer-son’s Poplar Forest (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 55.

30. For a fuller account of literacy rates in colonial Virginia, see Bly, ‘‘Breakingwith Tradition,’’ 19–78. Significantly, in their studies of slave education in earlyAmerica, both Woodson and Monaghan observed numerous avenues throughwhich African Americans achieved literacy. Besides demonstrating change overtime and space, Woodson and Monaghan noted revolt as a significant factor that inmost instances hindered slave efforts to learn how to read and write. Woodson,Education of the Negro; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write.


Table 10Archaeological Evidence of Literacy at Slave Sites

Artifacts

pencil pencil writing slateSite name Occupancy (lead) (slate) (slate) (unid.)

Governor’s Land44JC298 1690–1720 – – – 1

Carter’s Grove 1710–85 – – – –Palace Lands 1740–80 – – 1 8Fairfield Quarter 1746–75 – 1 – 11Richneck 1750–70 – – 3 3Monticello

Site 8 1750–1807 – – – 78Building O 1770–90 – 2 1 –Building S 1770–1826 1 20 9 105Building L 1780–1810 – – – –Building R 1793–1826 1 5 3 45Building T 1793–1826 – – 5 9

Poplar ForestNorth Hill 1770–80 – – – 4Quarter 1790–1810 – – 5 –

Mount VernonHouse for families 1759–92 – – – 1

Stratford HallST116 1770–1820 – – – –

Sources: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Carter’s Grove Artifact Inventory, andthe Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery Database, www.-daacs.org.

1680s in places like the Virginia colony, the ‘‘generall assembly’’ declared itunlawful ‘‘for any negro . . . to goe or depart from his master’s groundwithout a certificate from his master, mistress or overseer, and such permis-sion [should] not be granted but upon perticular and necessary occasions.’’Without written consent, an apprehended slave received ‘‘twenty lashes onthe bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris oroverseer.’’ Over time, slaves found without a pass or ticket were taken upand held as fugitives. If taken up a second time without a pass, a slave couldsuffer several forms of punishment. As a result, writing stood for the plant-


er’s power and the slave’s confinement, and the absence of writing carriedheavy burdens (figure 4).31

Understandably, for many slaves, the ability to read and write representeda form of power and liberty, which probably explains why Charles pre-tended he could read. In all likelihood, he could in fact read. William Al-ston’s reference simply concealed the complex politics of slavery. Indeed,some slaveholders, as David Waldstreicher explained, were reluctant to ac-knowledge that their fugitives had acquired skills. As a way of refusingthem status, they would indirectly note a runaway’s ability. Thus, numerousnotices included remarks that fugitives ‘‘passed,’’ ‘‘pretended,’’ or ‘‘professed’’certain skills, of which literacy was but one.32

In any event, certainly with a knowledge of letters, enslaved AfricanAmericans like Charles could pass for free. They could convince others thatthey were their own property. As the runaway notices demonstrate, somewere able to do just that. Being able to read and write, they moved aboutmore easily, unencumbered to some extent by the fear of being capturedand returned to slavery. Intellectually, literacy prepared them for the roadtoward freedom. Through reading, slaves were exposed to different ideas.They also became more aware of the larger world around them. Considerthe story of Peter, another fugitive slave, which appeared in the VirginiaGazette.

ran away, about the 10th of April last, from the Hon. John Custis, Esq; of Wil-liamsburg, a Negro Man named Peter, of a middle Stature, about 30 Years of Age;has a Scar in his Forehead, or somewhere about the upper Part of his Face, occa-sion’d by falling into the Fire when a Child, is Virginia-born; he went away withIrons on his Legs, a Kersey Waistcoat, and a Cotton Pair of Breeches, laced on theSides for Conveniency of putting them on over his Irons; he has robb’d me, in Cash,Household Linen, and other Goods to a considerable Value; and notwithstandinghe is Out-law’d will not be taken or return home; he can read, and I believe write.Whoever apprehends and conveys him safe to me, shall have Two Pistoles Reward,besides what the Law allows. john custis

In May 1745 John Custis paid William Parks five shillings to publishthis advertisement in his Williamsburg paper. The notice had only a single

31. William W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all theLaws of Virginia . . . (Richmond, Va.: Samuel Pleasants Jr., 1819–23) (hereafterSAL), 2:481; Windley, Profile of Runaway Slaves, 4–10.

32. David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and theAmerican Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 9.


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appearance in print. Nor did anything about the middling stature, Virginia-born ‘‘Negro man’’ with a scar on his forehead appear in the county courtrecords that also registered instances of slaves running away. There is nonotice of Peter’s being captured in the neighboring Carolina colonies or inMaryland. No news appeared of the Virginia runaway’s apprehension inBoston, Philadelphia, or New York. To judge from the published accountconcerning John Custis’s servant, Peter probably succeeded in his bid toescape slavery.

Nonetheless, of this former slave we can discern something of a smallbiography in that notice. As a child, Peter received a scar on his foreheadafter falling into a fire. The accident suggests that the lad may have beenthe child of one of Custis’s house servants, possibly the cook. Like otherdomestics, he probably worked about his master’s house, initially perform-ing minor tasks such as carrying a wooden pail of water for his mother.33

At thirty, Peter had grown rebellious. Though bred to be a house servant,he adopted another line of work. For a time, truancy became this slave’schoice of occupation. Not quite yet a real fugitive, Peter stayed in the vicin-ity of his master’s Williamsburg estate. He lurked about town and engagedin mischief. And like other truants, he eventually returned to John Custis’shouse on Francis Street—weary or in want of familiar company, food, andshelter.34

Judging from the notice, Custis accepted Peter’s unruly behavior. By allaccounts, he was a benevolent master. His slaves had little reason to runaway or to engage in roguery. Indeed, like other slaveholders, Custisthought himself a modern-day patriarch of the Bible and treated his ser-vants reasonably. Those who ran away were afforded time to return on theirown.35

33. The nature of Peter’s clothing suggests that he may have been a domestic.For a fuller account of slave clothing, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal:The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg: ColonialWilliamsburg Foundation and Yale University Press, 2002), and Baumgarten,‘‘ ‘Clothes for the People’: Slave Clothing in Early Virginia,’’ Journal of Early South-ern Decorative Arts (November 1988): 27–70.

34. G. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 55–56. Also see Windley, Profile of RunawaySlaves, chap. 1. As Windley’s study suggests, outlawing Peter—a last-ditch effort tocontrol the slave—underscores the fact that the domestic had more than likely runaway on other occasions.

35. To judge from other runaway notices he placed in the Gazette, Custis clearlygave Peter time to return on his own volition, a practice that had become commonin the Chesapeake. As the table below illustrates, when slaves ran away, masterswere willing to wait a while, as much as two months, before placing a notice.


The residents of Williamsburg were not as understanding of Custis’sboisterous house slave. Quite the opposite: in the minds of many, Peter hadmade a nuisance of himself. Evidently, during a previous escape from Custishe had lingered in the vicinity, stealing and slaughtering livestock and com-mitting ‘‘other injuries to the inhabitants of this her majesty’s colony.’’ Inretaliation, they had gone to the local justices and had him officially out-lawed as a danger to the community (figure 5).36

In both York and James City counties, the word got out. Peter was awanted man—preferably dead. Should he be killed or injured in the at-tempt, Peter’s would-be captors were assured certain pardon and exonera-tion from blame. The hunt for the domestic was afoot.

To Custis’s good fortune, it was a successful hunt. Peter was returned tohis master unharmed. Back in his master’s possession, Peter was forced to

Placement Intervals for Advertising Runaway Slaves in Virginia (in months)

Periods(N) �1 1 2 3–5 6–12 �12 n/a

1730s (31) 53% 25% 9% 6% 3% – 3%1740s (27) 22 26 11 7 15 – 191750s (53) 43 26 4 6 13 4 41760s (133) 23 20 11 14 8 5 201770s (419) 26 22 10 16 8 2 16

Source: Lathan A. Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary Historyfrom the 1730s to 1790, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), 1:1–210.

Custis’s benevolent treatment of his slaves may have stemmed from a personalrelationship he had with one of his servants, Alice, who bore him a son namedJohn. Upon his father’s death, John, who preferred to be called Jack, was given hisfreedom and a small plantation on the York River. Custis also made provisions inhis will that John receive an inheritance of 500 pounds sterling. For a fuller accountof Custis’s relationship with and treatment of his slaves, see E. T. Crowson, Life asRevealed through Early American Court Records: Including the Story of Col. John Custisof Arlington, Queen’s Creek, and Williamsburg (Easley, S.C.: Southern HistoricalPress, 1981), 150–52; Josephine Zuppan, ‘‘The John Custis Letterbook, 1724–1734’’ (Master’s thesis, College of William and Mary, 1978), 34–35.

36. It appears from the notice that the townspeople were responsible for outlaw-ing Peter. According to G. Mullin’s and Windley’s studies, notices for outlaws usu-ally did not encourage a slave’s preservation. Whites who apprehended a fugitiveslave were given more money for a dead than a living slave. As the notice indicates,however, Custis wanted Peter returned alive. G. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion,55–58; Windley, Profile of Runaway Slaves, 19–24. For the quote, see SAL,3:460–61.


Figure 5. Peter’s runaway notice, Virginia Gazette, May 9, 1745, 4.See column 1, runaway advertisement 2.


wear leg irons to reduce his mobility and to deter future escapes. And asCustis, like other Virginia grandees, received many guests at his Williams-burg home, especially on Sabbath days, Peter’s clothes were altered to pre-clude alarm. For the sake of politeness, his shackles were disguised to hidethe brute facts of power in his master’s genteel household. Finally, itseemed, Peter’s wayward behavior had come to an end. His days of truancywere no more.

Peter, however, did not agree. After being returned, he made plans forhis next escape. Having grown up in his master’s house, he was familiarwith the slaveholder’s way of life. Obviously, the privilege of domestic workfailed to produce a contented slave. No; just the opposite: Peter grew ob-sessed with acquiring his freedom. In that determination, he made yet an-other bid to live on his own terms. Knowing where the Custis family keptits valuables, he took what he needed and ran away again. But this time heheaded far from Williamsburg. This time, Peter became a real fugitive.

Within a month of Peter’s disappearance, John Custis posted an adver-tisement in the Virginia Gazette for the bond servant’s recovery. The rewardwas two pistoles—twice the usual sum in such cases. Clearly, Peter was avaluable as well as troublesome slave. To judge by the few facts in the notice,his ability to read and probably write may have made him so.37

APPENDIX

In compiling the ‘‘Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database,’’ I relied onboth Lathan A. Windley’s exhaustive four-volume collection of runawaynotices in the Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) and the low country(the Carolinas and Georgia) and Thomas Costa’s equally extensive onlinedatabase of runaways in Virginia. To determine the number of abscondedslaves in colonial Philadelphia, I made use of the online archives of Benja-min Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette and Billy G. Smith and Richard Woj-towicz’s Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in thePennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1790. For New York, I consulted Graham Rus-sell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown’s ‘‘Pretends to Be Free’’: Runaway SlaveAdvertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey.

37. SAL, 3: 455–56; 5:553–54. A pistole was a Spanish gold coin, sometimescalled a doubloon. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a pistole was worthalmost a pound, or a little over 18 shillings. In Virginia those who captured run-aways were given ‘‘200 pounds of tobacco, or twenty shillings . . . for apprehendingslaves ten miles or more from their master’s quarter. If above five miles and underten, a reward of 100 pounds of tobacco was paid by the owner.’’ Windley, Profile ofRunaway Slaves, 25–26.


As for eighteenth-century Massachusetts, I searched several long-runningissues of the newspapers of that colony, now at the Library of Congress,namely, the Boston Evening Post, Boston Gazette, New England Weekly Jour-nal, Boston News-Letter, Boston Post-Boy, Massachusetts Gazette, Massachu-setts Spy, Essex Gazette, and New England Chronicle. Besides those slaveswho were noted as being able to read or write, I also counted as literatethose who forged passes and carried with them books and newspapers.Those who carried literature were noted as being able to read. As for thosewho forged passes, they were noted as being able to read and write. Notably,this presumption of literacy has been shaped by Woodson’s and Monaghan’sexhaustive studies of slave education in colonial America, which provide abroader context through which to understand the religious currents thatinformed the development of literacy and black culture in the eighteenthcentury. When compiling the database, I did not count reprints of notices;only originals notices were counted. Moreover, as the circumstances thatmade slaveholders turn to the press were unfixed and because estimates fornotices printed in nonextant issues of papers yield little useful evidence inthe way of developing individual profiles, I did not take into account non-extant notices that may have appeared in lost issues of newspapers. Rather,I relied on the extant record of absconded slaves in the colonial newspapersin Virginia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Boston, and New York.

Incidentally, I did not count Charles as literate. Instead, I took the con-servative course and, in so doing, leave it the readers of this essay to cometo their own conclusions about him in that regard.

pretends he can read’’ - appalachian state university · absent in that body of scholarship is...

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