The Runaway Press

Chapter Three details the gradual and contested process by which, by the 1750s, runaway ads had become a means by which ordinary men extended both their power over and their liability for dependents. The stories of a wife and an enslaved man who appeared side-by-side in the columns of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette illuminate the legal parallels—and distinctions—between the authority of husbands and the authority of masters. Colonial authorities legitimized their growing investment in bound labor with novel statutes, creating a coercive infrastructure that made newspaper advertisements offering rewards for runaway servants and slaves seem like a natural extension of masters’ power. In contrast, when husbands placed ads discrediting their “eloping” wives, they called attention to the ways in which the press could circumvent formal legal authority and the wishes of local communities, problems not addressed by colonial marriage statutes or legal handbooks. Masters’ entitlement to the labor and persons of bondspeople sparked little debate; husbands who claimed similar powers or who sought to escape familial obligations provoked controversy. The proliferation of such disputes in the newspapers amplified the jurisdictional chaos underpinning transatlantic debates about marriage and divorce.

Colonialism · Economics · Entitlement (fair division) · Newspaper · Parallels · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Statute · Wife · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Engineering · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law