By Kyle Rogers, LVA Newspaper Project volunteer
As part of an ongoing effort to give voice to nineteenth-century African Americans through digital projects like Virginia Untold and Virginia Chronicle, the Virginia Newspaper Project has identified nearly 500 advertisements posted by free African Americans during the antebellum era and the Civil War (c. 1800-1865) concerning their freedom papers. The example, below, was published in the Richmond Daily Dispatch on July 12, 1859:
These notices were grouped with other advertisements for lost or stolen goods, and they could even be found on the same page as rewards posted for the capture of runaway slaves.
Freedom papers, or “free papers,” were protective documents that certified a free African American’s non-slave status. Frederick Douglass, as usual, best explains the legal and personal significance of free papers to their bearers:
Read More: