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Found Missing: Fugitive Slaves, Jailer Ads, And Surveillance In Antebellum New Orleans, Tara L. Garbutt

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores fugitive slave advertisements from the pages of the New Orleans Argus in 1828. As the main repository for runaway slave advertisements in New Orleans at the time, the Argus played a critical role in policing and surveillance of the city’s enslaved population just as New Orleans was becoming the largest slave market in the South. Using the Argus as well as historians’ accounts of the city, this thesis argues that as the market in enslaved people grew, slave owners depended upon local jailers in tandem with papers like the Argus, to police the enslaved population. The large …