Hidden Chronicles: Published Ads On Buying, Selling and Recapturing Enslaved Africans in Marshall County, Mississippi

Astonishing answers to unspoken questions revealed!

Sy Oliver's Hidden Chronicles provides a good general overview of the types of slave advertising found in the newspapers of Marshall County, Mississippi before the start of the Civil War. Marshall County had the largest enslaved African population in Mississippi, with the exception of Hinds County. Specifically, this study focuses on the types of advertisements used by slaveholders, sheriffs and jailors to buy, sell and recapture runaway enslaved Africans as a way to safeguard the domestic slave trade in Mississippi. Rather than focusing on the bulk of comparative slave ads from several newspapers in the entire state, Oliver has undertaken a narrower and more analytical approach by examining only the newspapers ads from a single county. Many small town newspapers between 1832 and 1862, explicitly or implicitly accepted the capitalist/materialist mode of handling advertising for slaveholders and its associates as a circuitous method of perpetuating slavery advance even after the State of Mississippi had passed laws to get rid of slavery in 1831. This collection of ads and laws governing the daily life of enslaved Africans points to a commonly overlooked aspect in the scholarship on slavery and how its ingrained evilness and legitimized support system led to the Civil War. The sprightly details contained in these engrossing chronicles provides an lucid introduction to the latest scholarship in African-American history on the internal workings of slavery from a local perspective.