Runaway Slaves in Virginia

White Virginians wanted to believe that their slaves were basically happy, to the point that they would prefer to serve their masters rather than to choose their own freedom. Slave flight, “running away,” the most common form of slave resistance, called into question the notion of benevolent paternalism and struck particularly hard at the idea that slaves were basically happy. This was only one of the psychological issues which running away posed for white slave owners.
Overall, the problem of runaway slaves was tied to four issues which, when combined, produced a siege mentality among many slaveholding Virginians by the late 1850s: (1) running away underscored the importance of slavery to the economic well being of large parts of the white population and threatened that sense of economic well being; (2) runaway slaves challenged the moral legitimacy of slavery; (3) running away was a form of resistance, and slave resistance underscored the dangers of servile insurrection in a system based almost solely on coercion; and (4) Virginians perceived external enemies as encouraging runaways and undermining the constitutional rights of slave owners.