Colonial Runaways

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Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996
From: Michael Fitzgerald
Subject: Query: Colonial Runaways

Dear Colleagues,

An undergraduate is doing a research project with me, and he came across something I've never seen commented upon, though I should confess that slavery in the colonial era is not my specialty.

In examining colonial Virginia runaway slave advertisements, he has come across a curious pattern. Among runaways, he has found that African-born female slaves appear far less frequently than among those born on this side of the Atlantic, relative to male runaways. Among men, the ratio is 2 to 1 among men, vs. 7 to 1 among females (American-born to African-born). My student seems pretty persuaded he's counted correctly.

Has anybody written anything about this? I don't recall having seen any reference to it in the standard sources, nor can I think of any obvious cultural reason why it should be the case.

Any thoughts?

Michael Fitzgerald
fitz@stolaf.edu

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Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996
From: David Carlton
Subject: Re: Colonial Runaways--4 replies

Two queries:
(1) What's your student's sample size? There could be a fair amount of random variation here, though I doubt it would explain all.
(2) How do these ratios compare to those for each gender in the full population? Given the unbalanced sex ratio among African-born slaves, some of the difference between women and men might simply be the proportion of native-born Africans among each group.

David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-3326 carltodl@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu

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I published a little article last fall in the JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC about blacks in the Old Northwest, most of whom were fugitive slaves from the South. This is for a later period (1810-1850s), but most of the fugitives came from two states, Va and NC. I looked at a sample of black households from five Nwestern states in the census of 1850 for the naming patterns among the children, and I found that African names were extremely unusual; a total of two among 200-plus children. All of which tends to line up with what yr student has discovered.

Joan Cashin, Ohio State

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Your student should look first at slave demography in Virginia; no cultural explanation may be necessary. African background looms larger among male than among female runaways, in part, because that was true of the entire slave population (especially adults) in the colony. The sex ratio among imported slaves was at least 2:1 (or 200, using the proper demographic measure) and probably higher at certain times and places. By the time the VIRGINIA GAZETTE was publishing those runaway notices (1730s on), natural increase among the slave population in the colony was beginning to match and then overtake imports as a source of growth. What needs to be explained is not why African women were such a small fraction of female slave runaways (they were a pretty small fraction of the whole female slave population by the 1750s-70s), but why African men were probably OVER represented among male slave runaways. This is related, of course, to the shifting ratio of African-born to American-born in the runaway populations.

Doug Deal
History/SUNY-Oswego

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What about the possibility that there were fewer African-born slave women in the general population, and hence fewer in the runaway population? Weren't men imported far more often than women? The ratio of female to male slaves in the population did not come close to equalizing until the maturation of a "creole" generation, which of course would be both male and female. So the ratio of males to females in one Maryland parish fell from 1.8 in the 1690s to 1.1 by the Revolution. Clearly, native-born births tended to minimize gender imbalances imposed by the nature of the slave trade.

For strong support of this, see Peter Kolchin, _American Slavery_, p. 39 [his footnotes should prove helpful as well], and more generally Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society" _AHR_ 85 (Feb. 1980), 44-78.

Hope this helps,

Patrick Rael
Bowdoin College