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Law and Disorder North of the Ohio
Runaways and the Patriarchy of Print Culture, 1793–1815
ROBERT M. OWENS
| In the years following the Revolution, American leaders codified their vision for the territory north of the Ohio River. In the ordinances passed from 1784 to 1787, the Confederation Congress laid out a blueprint for land sales, political structures, and jurisprudence in the fertile, potentially rich region. The ordinances supported education, promised the peaceful practice of varying religious beliefs, and provided for settlement and commerce to proceed at an orderly pace. The Ordinance of 1787 also promised liberal and fair treatment for the region's natives, "except in just wars authorised by Congress," and banned slavery in the Northwest Territory.1 |
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The leaders of the new territory assumed the continuation of a patriarchal and paternal system of social order, the maintenance of which would require ongoing controls. Rather than maintain these strictures through heavy-handed government enforcement, they hoped to wield the societal reins through a dialogue among like-minded, property- holding white males. But the frontier confounded many expectations. As settlers poured onto the new lands, nascent governmental bodies struggled to keep pace with their numbers. Highly structured religious groups found themselves unable to provide the needed leaders and buildings. To make matters worse, many of the settlers who flooded into the Ohio Valley seemed unruly, even rebellious, and from their ranks came an ever-increasing number of property-holding males, now eligible to vote and contend for public offices. |
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Even on the frontier, however, there were still ways to distinguish one group of men from another. In the Early Republic, as during the Colonial era, the possession of slaves (still possible just across the Ohio River in Kentucky), apprentices, and wives helped to distinguish successful men of property from their lesser competitors. These three groups provided essential labor and connoted social capital as well. But the frontier, with few towns and partially cleared farms scattered through a forested wilderness, provided excellent opportunities for human possessions to make off. Property-owning men faced the question of how to maintain control in such a volatile environment. |
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One of the ways in which these men appealed to one another was through the public press, in terms that maintained both their actual assets and their social standing in the new republic. Some of the best examples of how this played out come from newspaper advertisements for three categories of runaways—slaves, apprentices, and wives. |
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From the perspective of free adult men with at least some property (i.e., the electorate), runaway slaves, runaway apprentices, and runaway wives constituted particular nuisances. They provoked debate and dialogue about the socio-legal code of bound labor. The efforts of slaves, servants, and aggrieved wives to resist the control of their masters provides an important window into how the electorate's ethos of what we might call "controlled liberty" functioned. By definition, the system offered liberty for some and not for all, and the runaway ads tell us as much about how it would ultimately fail as they do about how it was justified and maintained. |
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Looking specifically at runaway ads in the early territorial newspapers offers advantages to the historian seeking to understand the maintenance of social order in the region. The Northwest Territory would be divided into some of the first post-Revolutionary states added to the U.S.—a process that in itself proved a bold experiment. Also, while some excellent scholarship has examined runaways in the eighteenth-century Mid-Atlantic,2 little work examines this phenomenon on the turbulent frontier of the Early Republic. Finally, this study addresses the key issue of people using the newspapers as a form of public dialogue and as an auxiliary of law enforcement in an area where law and order could be scarce. |
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