The Great Escape: Runaway Slave Narratives in Chicago’s Antislavery Press

“The Great Escape” explores the interplay between fact and fiction in press accounts of fugitive slaves. In several studies on runaway slave advertisements, scholars presume the press’s reliability and veracity because masters had every incentive to report complete and accurate information. Yet this evaluation overlooks important narrative, and possibly fictionalized, press accounts of self-emancipated slaves. “The Great Escape” relies on accounts from the 1840s and 1850s published in Chicago’s Western Citizen, a flagship abolitionist paper, that provide rich narratives of runaway slave’s activities. Press reports focused on slave catchers dragging runaways into bondage, and at times printed sensationalized tales of mob violence against suspected fugitives. As these accounts circulated, they gave the impression that human bondage knew no boundaries as, time and again, the authors intoned against slavery’s long arm that could reach into the North. These runaway slave accounts served different objectives and reached different audiences than fugitive notices. “The Great Escape” explores how compelling narratives and potentially fictionalized accounts reshaped discourses in Chicago about slavery’s place in the nation. As newspapers called into question the boundaries between slavery and freedom, they accomplished this by relying on narratives and, perhaps, crossing the threshold between fact and fiction.