homework4

<p>I believe that the advertisements that we collected could best be used to answer questions about how slave owners thought about and viewed runaway slaves. Questions such as "how did slaveholders regard their runaway slaves," "why do slave holders think that their slaves ran away," and "to where do slave holders think their slaves ran" would be interesting questions that could be answered with our sources. Because our sources are written by slave owners, the information they contain may not be entirely true from the slave's perspective. The article "Jackson Unchained" shows how a primary source written by a runaway slave can be used alongside a runaway slave advertisement to reveal discrepancies between the two perspectives:</p>
<blockquote> Jackson was able to escape in part because Thomas English was looking in the wrong direction. Rather than seek his wife to the west in Georgie, as English believed, Jackson had chosen to head south, to Charleston, a route he knew from previous work leading cattle. <a href="http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/reclaiming-a-fugitive-landscape"> "Jackson Unchained"</a></blockquote>
<p>Franklin and Schweninger also support the idea that slaves often ran to places that slave owners were not expecting, despite the fact that many slave owners kept track of their slaves' family members and friends (page 165). We may not be able to know if a slave owner was right or wrong in his guess about where a slave was going because we do not have access to a primary source like a memoir, but we do know that a slave owner has incentive to tell the truth as he knows it in a runaway slave advertisement because he wants to recapture his slave. Therefore, a runaway slave advertisement is a representation of what a slave owner views to be both true and important in finding and identifying a runaway slave. According to Franklin and Schweninger in chapter seven of Runaway Slaves, we can also learn some information about the sentiments of slave owners through runaway advertisements. Some slave owners described their slaves in runaway advertisements in a very positive manner (such as calling them intelligent or good looking) (page 166). Others, however, used negative words or had very little description. These descriptions of slaves might be able to help us understand more about which runaway slaves received advertisements and what slave owners thought about runaway slaves. </p>
<p>One problem with framing our research questions based on the viewpoint of the slave owners is that the advertisements we found were not entirely runaway slave advertisements written by slave owners or overseers. Depending on how our research questions are framed, this could make it difficult to work with a portion of our sources. At the very least, though, we must keep in mind the authors and perspectives of our sources when considering questions for our research. </p>