Online Collections
The following are collections of newspaper advertisements for freedom seekers that are freely available online. Many of these collections are searchable.
Freedom On The Move
More than 10,000 advertisements from 18th and 19th century North American newspapers.
Ancestry.com via Newspapers.com
Thousands of freely available advertisements, particularly from the years of the early American republic.
The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, 1736-1803
Advertisements from the Virginia Gazette.
North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices, 1750-1865
More than 5,000 North Carolina advertisements from 1750-1865.
Runaway Slaves in Britain
More than 800 advertisements from English and Scottish newspapers, 1700-1780.
MEAD Repository of runaway advertisements from Barbados, Grenada, and Jamaica
Downloadable PDF documents with scans of advertisements.
Online Databases
The following are databases of newspapers that include freedom seeker advertisements: these are commercial products and require a subscription or access through a subscribing library.
America’s Historical Newspapers’ database
Link: https://www.readex.com/products/americas-historical-newspapers-periodicals
Click on ‘Browse publications’ for a complete listing, and either browse the list or enter a search term to filter (this could be the name of a newspaper, a place of publication, a date range etc.). This collection includes key newspapers from the revolutionary era, including the Boston Gazette, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the Maryland Gazette, and the South Carolina Gazette (with different names like South Carolina and American General Gazette).
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers’ database
Link: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Click on ‘Advanced Search’ and then select a state and select a date range of years. For example, entering ‘Pennsylvania’ and ‘1770 to 1800’ and then clicking ‘Search’ will reveal thousands of pages of newspapers from this city during these years.
Caribbean Newspapers (1718-1876) database
Link: https://www.readex.com/products/caribbean-newspapers-series-1-1718-1876-american-antiquarian-society
Click on ‘Browse publications’ for a complete listing, and either browse the list or enter a search term to filter. For example, this could be the name of a newspaper, a place of publication, a date range etc. This collection includes key newspapers from the revolutionary era including Jamaica’s Royal Gazette, and the Barbados Mercury.
19th Century U.S. Newspapers
Link: https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/nineteenth-century-collections-online
Click on ‘Browse’ for a full listing of newspapers, and then limit your search by state, place of publication, and date.
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
Link: https://www.gale.com/c/seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century-burney-newspapers-collection
This is the most complete digital collection of British newspapers, from the collections of the British Library. Click on ‘Browse’ for a full listing of newspapers, and then limit your search by country or county of publication, publication town or city, and a date range.
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Nichols Newspaper Collection
Link: https://www.gale.com/c/seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century-nichols-newspapers-collection
This is a thorough collection of earlier English newspapers from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Click on ‘Browse’ for a full listing of newspapers, and then limit your search by country or county of publication, publication town or city, and a date range.
Print Collections
The following are printed collections of advertisements. A blue link denotes free online access. Other links lead to WorldCat.
- Antonio T. Bly, Escaping Bondage: A documentary history of runaway slaves in eighteenth-century New England, 1700-1789 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012).
- Antonio T. Bly, Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native American Runaways in British North America (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022).
- Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds. “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey. 1st ed. Fordham University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7xbrzd.
- Daniel Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1801-1820 (New York: Garland, 1997).
- Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, eds. Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790. (Philadelphia, 1989).
- Lathan A. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements: a documentary history from the 1730s to 1790 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 4 vols