Fwd: white servants and slaves?

Lynn Lockhart

Tue, Feb 12, 5:25 PM (1 day ago)

I played around searching this database. They have 12,000+ ads so far. I searched some of the records in Crackerboy and found none of them there, even for the negroes and mulattoes included in the book. I search "Irish" in their database and found 3 results, one was Irish linen clothing, one Irish servant co-listed with a mulatto. The third record was a garbled mix of advertisements and commentary.

I was prompted to look at this because I read the chapter of Crackerboy where Mr. Bentham had recommended a WaPo article about a runaway ad by Andrew Jackson. The article was from mid 2017 and touted this university database project. The database is still in "beta" now and is of lower quality and completeness than the private websites you used for Crackerboy. These are university scholars and historians, and they can't compete with hobbyists. Besides being incompetent, they are obviously incented to omit all listings of non-black runaways.

So happy to be working on this with you.

-Lynn

Lynn, there are numerous listings in old Virginia gazette ads for Irish and Negro slaves paring up to runaway, with the Irishman posing as the owner. Which must have often ended in disaster, as Irish social graces were notably inferior to those of their partners in self-theft of African decent.

-James

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