Enquire of the Printer

It is unlikely that these questions can be answered.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, North American newspaper printers published thousands of advertisements that empowered enslavers and strengthened the slave system. They regularly published  advertisements  to track down "runaways" who had emancipated themselves from slavery.

Runaway advertisements are widely studied, because they offer an extraordinary window onto the lives, aspirations, and appearances of enslaved people. When carefully analyzed, their allow us to see slavery from the perspective of the enslaved.

Slave sale notices have been largely ignored. In part, this is because they are terser than runaway ads. They usually refer to enslaved humans only as categories: a "wench," a woman, a lad, a boy, a fellow, a man, a girl, or a child. They usually provided no more than a few details about age, skills, health, sex, and the conditions of sale.

They never noted an enslaved person's defiance, resistance, or personality. Indeed, sellers often noted that an enslaved person was being sold for "no fault." Most advertisements selling enslaved people presented them as ideal workers. While runaway advertisements reveal enslaved peoples' agency and choices, slave sale notices reveal enslavers' aspirations.

Slave-for-sale advertisements offer little to help us understand the lives of individual enslaved people. But they can help us to better understand the complex relationship between capitalism, slavery, and revolutionary politics in early America.

Advertisements directing readers to "enquire of the printer" offered the newspaper printer's services to assist slave sales. Printers connected buyers with sellers, provided information about the terms of exchange, provided access to the enslaved bodies for a buyer's view, and helped to mediate between the reputations of the involved parties.

The slave trade would have continued to thrive without the intervention of newspaper printers. But for many enslavers, advertisements were more flexible and profitable than auctions and merchant firms.

In this sense, early American newspaper printers acted as slave brokers. Many of the founding figures in early American print played this role...

For most of the eighteenth century, printers only brokered slave sales in the North. But over time, the practice spread throughout the continent.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, New England and Pennsylvania newspapers began to publish fewer of these advertisements as slavery was gradually barred in those states. New York printers published more in the late eighteenth century, because their state did not begin to gradually abolish slavery until 1799. Southern and western areas, where newspapers were not well developed until later in the century, also began to publish more printer-brokered slave sale ads toward the century's end.

Behind each advertisement, and behind every data point in the above map, were human beings: enslaved people, enslavers, and printers acting as mediators between them. As Jessica Marie Johnson has  argued , viewing these humans only as data points risks reproducing the vantage of the enslaver, in which the bodies of the enslaved appear as objects, rather than subjects. Little of the subjectivities of these enslaved people, though, appear in these advertisements. They raise more questions than answers.

By producing a valuable source of advertising revenue, the slave economy supported newspaper printers' participation in a revolutionary political culture. Many eighteenth-century newspapers operated at fine margins, and depended on this income. The capitalism that supported early America's print culture was the same capitalism that drove, and developed out of, Atlantic slavery.

Throughout the eighteenth century, North American printers shared essays, letters, and news that promoted republican and revolutionary ideals. Without newspapers, the American Revolution would have looked very different, or may have never happened.

Yet, as the examples above from Eleazar Oswald's Independent Gazetteer demonstrate, printers also placed advertisements for enslaved people alongside political essays and civic texts. The proximity of these texts asserted that freedom and slavery could operate easily alongside one another in separation.

After the American Revolution this began to change. Printers had recently begun to take political stances, as Loyalists and Patriots, as Pro-Ratification and Anti-Ratification, and as Republicans and Federalists. Readers began to expect printers to act as authors, and for their newspapers to have some coherence. In this context, the proximity of freedom and slavery in the pages of a newspaper became jarring and strange. A few readers challenged printers to account for these odd proximities.

In 1777, as the American revolutionary war exploded around him, a man named William Gordon wrote a letter to Edward Powars and Nathaniel Willis, the editors of a Boston Patriot newspaper called the Independent Chronicle. He asked them to "be consistent, and never more admit the sale of negroes, whether boys or girls, to be advertised in your papers. Such advertisements in the present season are peculiarly shocking."

Powars and Willis, though, ignored Gordon's demand. The very next page of their issue contained this advertisement.

A decade later, an anonymous person using the pseudonym "Humanus" wrote a similar letter to Eleazar Oswald. Like Gordon, this writer argued that newspapers' embrace of the slave trade showed Americans to be "an inconsistent people."

Like Powars and Willis, though, Oswald was unconvinced. A month later, he published another offer to broker a slave sale.

Two letters in the Poughkeepsie Journal raised similar points. First, "A Correspondent, Friend & Customer" pled with the paper's editor Nicholas Powers to no longer act as a "channel through which those unfeeling mortals dare advertise their fellow beings for sale."

Another letter signed "Enquire of the Conscience" reiterated this point. It began by attacking the formulaic request that buyers and sellers "enquire of the printer" in order to learn more about a slave sale.

What would they enquire about? "To find who are willing to deal in human as in brute." Much like Gordon and "Humanus," this letter claimed that slave selling was inconsistent with an "enlightened age" and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

Like his fellow printers Powars, Willis, and Oswald, Nicholas Powers rejected this request. In fact, on the same page that these essays appeared, just below them, Powers printed the following notice:

These activists' efforts were unsuccessful for the moment. But they did successfully draw attention to the entanglements binding together the print economy and the slave economy. The phrase "enquire of the printer" signaled this. If the press was to be a guardian of liberty, as many printers were already imagining, these writers pointed out that it should not promote human bondage.

Even as they were writing, though, these northern essayists would have been finding fewer slave sale advertisements printed around them. By the end of the century, gradual abolition laws led printer-brokered slave selling to fall into a steep decline in New England and much of the mid-Atlantic region.

Indeed, by the 1790s, it had become unusual to see these kinds of advertisements in northern newspapers. Writing in Boston's Columbian Centinel in 1795, an anonymous writer accused Virginians of hypocrisy for speaking so often about the "sacred and unalienable Rights of Man," when their newspapers contained advertisements such as "For sale, a likely young Negro Wench; apply to the Printers."

Though the practice originated in Boston and persisted there into the 1780s, this Bostonian used printers' brokerage of slave sales to attack Virginia.

As these advertisements demonstrate, northerners had long engaged in enslavement. But their obscurity, and their decline before the nineteenth century, have helped to obscure northern complicity in the slave trade.

Slavery and freedom converged in the pages of early American newspapers. Oddly, most readers saw nothing wrong with these ideological opposites being separated by a divider the width of a fingernail. Writers such as Humanus, William Gordon, and Enquire of the Conscience were unusual in drawing that connection.

Yet their arguments remind us that it was possible for people to recognize, and object to, the hypocrisy of a publication that promoted liberty in one column and human bondage in the other. That none of the printers attacked by these activists ceased publishing such ads, though, suggests that they found the cash paid for advertising to be more valuable than moral consistency.

According to the relentless capitalist logic by which newspaper printers, freedom and slavery were both simply commodities to be brokered.