There are now many published collections of newspaper advertisements for enslaved people who escaped, both printed and digital. Online collections often feature searchable transcriptions and statistical databases of many thousands of freedom seekers across space and time, enabling researchers to learn a great deal about enslaved people in the aggregate. During the past few decades scholars engaged in the labor-intensive work of transcribing advertisements and tabulating various characteristics of escapees to provide a structure within which to understand aspects of the lives of individual freedom seekers. For example, using statistics calculated from numerous advertisements allows us to assert, with some confidence, that Free Poll was considerably older than most people who fled, that she planned her escape meticulously in comparison to other escapees who carried fewer items, that she ran during the warmer months just as many others did to maximize their chance for freedom, and that she ultimately headed for Philadelphia—a popular destination for many freedom seekers during and after the Revolutionary Era.
However, as scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have argued, the tabulation of enslaved bodies in such databases can implicitly reaffirm the treatment of enslaved people as property to be enumerated. If not done carefully, such work may inadvertently echo enslavers’ objectification of enslaved people and their bodies as property. In addition, what often is lost in the compilation and utilization of statistical databases of freedom seekers is what most fascinates those who read them, namely the tantalizing hints the advertisements contain about the stories of individual men, women, and children who resisted slavery by escaping. Databases reveal the bigger picture of numbers and patterns, but they can also obscure the details about individuals, their lives, experiences and whatever else can be gleaned from the few dozen words of a newspaper advertisement and whatever related records that exist.
In rare cases it is possible to research and write a great deal about a single freedom seeker, as in the case of Ona Judge who escaped from George and Martha Washington. The surviving records related to Judge are exceptional, however, and most freedom seekers remain obscure and largely hidden from our view. Often all we know about them is contained in the brief newspaper advertisement penned by an enslaver, a source that is inherently biased. Yet these advertisements have fascinated readers since their first appearance, and a combination of contextual research and imagination can allow the freedom seekers to reach across the centuries and transcend the words used in advertisements by enslavers to categorize and define the enslaved.