The Runaway Slave Women of New Orleans: An Urban Perspective in the Antebellum South

While working on a project collecting runaway slave ads, it became apparent that women slaves were less likely to run away. So what can we learn from looking at those women who did run? Our team is working with the Times Picayune. These runaway slave ads provide fascinating detail about the fugitives: how they looked, spoke, who they traveled with, and where they were going. This poster provides insights into female runaways in the city (New Orleans), and compares our early results with those of our cohort in Mississippi and Alabama, where there were largely rural populations