Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790.

In 1731 a man named Gideon Gibson, along with several of his relatives, emigrated from Virginia to South Carolina. At first it was reported with consternation that Gibson was a free black man married to a white wife. 1 However, when the South Carolina House of Assembly took up an investigation of Gibson, then governor Robert Johnson concluded that the Gibson family were "not Negroes nor Slave but Free people." 2 The Gibsons were allowed to remain in the colony, and they prospered, eventually purchasing 450 acres of prime South Carolina land; Gibson owned black slaves, and his sister married a wealthy planter. Gideon Gibson's son married a white woman and himself became the owner of at least seven slaves. It would be forty-five more years before the colonies declared independence from Britain, but it seems the Gibsons had already declared themselves free from the social, legal, or ideological codes that would construct them as black, Negro, or mulatto. Another investigation in 1768 revealed that Gideon Gibson, Jr., "escaped the penalties of the negro law by producing upon comparison more red and white in his face than could be discovered in the faces of half the descendants of … [the House of Assembly]." 3 Gideon Gibson, Jr., was judged to have been passing for white; he was in actuality a very light-skinned black man with black ancestors. 4 Yet he was also a slave owner and a prosperous member of South Carolinian society.

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Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality

Hancock¹

2013

cwh

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Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790.

Cited by 10 publications

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Freedom for Too Few: Slave Runaways in the Brazilian Empire

Freedom for Too Few: Slave Runaways in the Brazilian Empire

“As White as Most White Women”: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term

Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality

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