Runaways, Rewards, and the Social History of Money

Abstract

This article considers servant and slave runaway advertisements as a qualitative rather than quantitative source focusing less, as others have, on the fugitives' agency, and more on their commodification as laborers and its relationship to the rise of print culture and paper money. I am concerned in particular with the payment of rewards and what they signified of the runaways' relation to wider colonial society. Rewards were introduced in the mid-seventeenth century by public authorities and were payable in fixed amounts and stipulated commodity monies. These early settlement measures treated runaways as a social and disciplinary challenge to the common good. Thus, the earliest use of rewards developed within a publicly administered framework of corporate priorities and obligations and produced mixed results. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the use of printed newspaper notices transformed the pursuit of runaways into a public and private endeavor, enhancing established institutions and processes in the service of individual interests and market-oriented ends. Most important, private notices offered monetary rewards to potential pursuers and thus an assurance that their efforts would be recompensed in negotiable currency. In so doing, newspaper notices and rewards stigmatized runaway servants and enslaved workers in ways that fostered a sense of their alterity and subordination within civil society.