Reviewing the maps from the year 1856 revealed several things. The largest data set from the year was from the Texas State Gazette, which was based in Austin, Texas. Therefore, most of the runaways revealed by the map were shown to be leaving from areas such as Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. They were also…
My maps indicate a small eastern movement of runaway slaves in general. There are a few exceptions where slaves have specifically intended to return home to their families, but in many cases they travel west. Additionally, the slaves owners believe their slaves are generally headed for Mexico. The Gazette shows this trend more than the…
The mapping of the runaway slave ads in the Telegraph 1849, Standard 1849, and Gazette 1854 shows that runaway activity not only heightened dramatically in a matter of six years, but that most of the activity became more and more concentrated to the Austin area. I created three maps: Slave Destination, Place Captured, and Place…
After mapping the aggregated spreadsheets of the three newspapers for 1851, Place Captured overwhelmingly fell to the west and southwest of Place Left. However, since there was a large deviation in Place Captured that stretched as far north as Grayson County, as far south as Nueces County, and as far west as Webb County, an…
Upon mapping the places slaves left, where their masters thought they were going to, and where they were eventually caught, several interesting things can be learned from the Telegraph, Standard, and Gazette slave ads. In the Telegraph, slaves left from a more western area, the master proposed that they were traveling east, and they were…
Several of our class research questions centered on geography. We wanted to know the places that slaves left from, where their masters believed that they were going, and were they were going. After mapping both the individual papers and my aggregate sample, I finally have some answers for 1859. It appears that most slaves fled…
Mapping the runaway slave ads for the year 1857 really sheds light on the paths of runaway slaves. Unfortunately, the ads from the Telegraph and Northern Standard do not include any ads of captured slaves, which limits the possible analysis. The Texas Gazette does include captured slave ads, which shows a spread of where slaves…
Viewing the data layers over a map was very exciting – the experience was very different from just viewing spreadsheets. This is the point of research that I have most been looking forward to, and for good reason. Thanks to the pin dots placed by Google Maps, the data sets come to life showing where each…
Many words that passed through the program produced predictable results. ‘County’ most often occurred with ‘said’ and ‘Texas,’ and the word ‘said’ usually was used before a noun; i.e. ‘said slave’ or ‘said negro.’ The most interesting words were descriptive adjectives like ‘complexion,’ ‘color,’ ‘copper,’ ‘negro,’ and ‘black.’ They did not occur as might have…
Certain patterns in the language of the runaway slave ads were revealed by running the n-gram program. The majority of these words were used to describe the runaways. For example, the word “negro” appeared the most throughout all three newspapers. This word was used to describe the race of the runaways. The words “man” and…