Prologue: Ben

He knew the way.¹ Walking quickly but quietly along Pancras Lane, Ben passed the ruins of St Pancras, weeds growing around the tumbled stones still black from the fire that had destroyed the church years before he was born. He continued walking along Bucklers Berry. It was a bright spring day, yet Pancras Lane and Bucklers Berry were shadowy and gloomy: these streets were narrow and each ascending storey of the buildings on either side of him jutted further out over the street, blocking all but a little natural light. When he looked up, only a narrow strip of clouds and sky was visible, and sunlight illuminated the lower stories of these streets’ buildings and the ground beneath his feet for only a brief period in the early morning and mid-afternoon when the sun shone down the length of the street. As he walked out of Bucklers Berry, the street broadened and became lighter and busier, and he turned left and headed northward into Stocks Market before turning east onto Lombard Street.

For more than a year Ben had served the successful merchant Theodore Johnson. He had accompanied Johnson around the city, carrying papers and delivering messages as Johnson arranged shipping, signed contracts and negotiated purchases and sales. Before he turned onto Lombard Street Ben saw crowds of people heading along Cornhill towards the Royal Exchange and he was tempted to join them. He had spent long hours attending or waiting for Johnson on the floor of the exchange and in the coffee houses nearby, all the time listening and learning. It was an exciting place, with shops filled with colourful goods and the likelihood of encountering other boys like himself. But he continued walking eastward, seeing Lloyd’s coffee house on his right and Garraway’s on his left, and there were small crowds of people buzzing around the other coffee shops of Exchange Alley. Johnson regularly met friends and colleagues in several of these establishments, sharing coffee and chocolate as he conducted his business. Ben increased his pace as he approached Bowman’s, hoping to quickly pass by Johnson’s favourite coffee house. He saw merchants and businessmen who traded with Johnson but lowered his eyes and looked downwards. This look was well practised: he hid his eyes, secreting himself and his feelings in a seemingly deferential act that protected him. Passing beyond Bowman’s, Ben looked up and along Lombard Street, and glimpsed the Tower of London rising above the jumble of buildings. It was no more than a few hundred yards distant, and if the crowds thinned out he would soon walk around it, heading east towards his destination. But the streets were full of waves of people heading in different directions and his progress was slow.

The streets were as loud as they were busy. Above the constant hum of conversation, criers advertised their wares, a pieman here, a newspaperwoman there, an oyster seller across the street and so many more. Ben looked at the signs hanging from the buildings on either side of the street, bearing colourful images identifying the premises and sometimes the occupation of the inhabitants. As he passed one of them he felt his chest tighten. Hanging above the door swung a sign bearing an image of a young African, and it was known as the sign of the Black Boy. It marked the business of the banker Stephen Evance, and when Johnson visited Evance Ben had been ordered by his master to wait outside beneath the sign. On one visit Ben had been joined by another African boy, and while each of them waited for the men who claimed ownership of them they exchanged words quietly in English, for they spoke different African languages. Both were conscious of the sign of the Black Boy swinging above their heads but they acted as if it were not there, silently agreeing to ignore the image of a Black child like themselves. Both had experienced the trade in gold and people on the coast of West Africa, and for them the link between Evance’s wealth and the sign above his business was personal.

As he passed by the sign Ben clutched in his hand a packet of papers secured by a ribbon. He held them tightly, making sure that everyone could see he was about Johnson’s business. He held the documents as if his future depended upon them, and in a way it did: they were his passport, helping to protect him and giving him a reason to be out on the streets. Crossing Grace Church Street, he looked to his right down towards London Bridge but did not change direction, continuing along Fenchurch Street. He would keep to the north of the Tower, continuing his journey eastward.

He was not Ben.² He had been born among the Oyo people almost eighteen years earlier, but nobody here knew his Yoruba-language name. The slave-ship captain who had brought him up from the hold to serve as his cabin boy had named him Ben for the Bight of Benin where he had been brought aboard, and that was his name when he and the captain arrived in London from Jamaica. Ben was the person he had been forced to become. He had been in London for more than a year, most of it spent serving Johnson, who had purchased Ben from the ship captain in another of his coffee-house deals. Twice during the past year he had met other Igbo people and they had held short, whispered conversations in the language of their birth and had told one another their true names. But he spoke that language so rarely that he was now thinking in English and forgetting some of the words of his native language. He struggled to recall the faces of the people he had left behind: all that he had left from his life in Africa were fading memories and a name he kept to himself.

Ben’s stilted English frustrated Johnson, yet the young man knew and spoke English better than Johnson suspected. He intended to use his knowledge of London, his smart clothing and his language skills to escape from Johnson. He had on several occasions accompanied Johnson east of the City out to Wapping and Ratcliff to meet with ship captains who were about to set sail on ships laden with goods belonging to Johnson. While Johnson spoke with these men in riverside taverns, Ben had spoken with others like himself and had learned about the small community of free Black people who lived and worked in the East End.

Johnson regularly sent Ben to deliver or collect documents and today was no different. Johnson had arranged to meet colleagues at the exchange and, Ben hoped, to follow his business there by spending hours socializing and gossiping in a coffee house. It might be evening before Johnson realized that Ben was missing, his errand unfulfilled. Although the streets were crowded, his destination was less than two miles from Johnson’s home and, if fortune favoured him, Ben could be there before anybody knew he was gone. If he could find shelter in the East End, he could be free – free of Johnson, free of the expensive uniform he wore and hoped to sell, and free of the name that was not his.

Ben began his journey to freedom late in the morning of 11 March 1686. He was absent for three days before Johnson acted, visiting Thomas Newcomb at his printing office in the Savoy. The following day the first and second pages of the London Gazette were filled with a proclamation by the new monarch, James II. Eight advertisements appeared on the third page of the newspaper, and Johnson’s was sandwiched between one seeking the return of a mislaid white leather bag and another offering a reward for a spaniel lost near London Bridge.

A Blackamoor Boy, call’d Ben, about 17 years old, middle sized, well set, some pockholes in his Face, having an old gray Camblet close-bodied Coat on, and a musk-coloured quilted Sattin Wastecost, and a black feather’d Cap flower’d with Gold and Silver, speaks English indifferent well, Run away from his Master Theodore Johnson Merchant, living in Pancridge Lane near Bucklers-berry, London, the 11th Instant. Whoever gives notice of him to his said Master, shall have a Guinea Reward.³

Newspaper advertisements like this are often the only surviving documentary evidence of the people who attempted escape, revealing little more than a few, sketchy details of freedom seekers whose interior lives are all but invisible. These fragments are inherently problematic sources, constructed by White men and women who controlled the definition of enslaved people within brief newspaper advertisements just as they asserted ownership and control over them in life. ‘Runaway slave’ advertisements rendered the people they described as property and as criminally fugitive: by their very nature, these advertisements became part of the process of the commodification and depersonalization of enslaved people. Historians today who collate and analyse these advertisements engage in an act of remediation that risks continuing the datafication of enslaved people.⁴

In Restoration London, enslavers and their associates are generally far easier to find in the archives, but while the enslavers come into focus the enslaved become increasingly indistinct. It is possible to build on contextual research to imagine aspects of the material circumstances of bound people in London, such as a liveried domestic servant in a wealthy merchant’s household or an enslaved seafarer on an ocean-going trade ship. But how such people experienced their lives is another matter. How did they think and feel about their earlier lives in South Asia, Africa or the colonies, about the voyages that had brought them to England, about the people who now commanded their service and about London and the people who inhabited the city? And, if we cannot know the answers to these questions, to what degree can we imagine them? Can a historian imagine London’s enslaved in a manner that transcends an archival record constructed by their enslavers? Perhaps the best we can do, treading carefully as we go, is to build from archival research to hint at possibilities, encouraging readers to imagine real people who remembered, who suffered, who ate, who slept, who laughed, who sang and who danced.

Early on the morning of Valentine’s Day in 1661 Samuel Pepys called on Sir William Batten. Knocking on the door, Pepys jokingly enquired if it was a man or a woman who was unlocking the door to grant him entry. Presumably speaking in a deep and unmistakably male voice, Batten’s enslaved servant Mingo responded with the words ‘a woman’, and both men laughed at a joke Pepys recorded in his diary. Mingo was an enslaved man working in the household of an elite government official, with perhaps little contact with people like himself. Yet he joked and laughed and, as Pepys recorded in other entries, sang and danced ‘with a great deal of seeming skill’.⁵ Runaway advertisements described and defined people in ways that denied their full humanity and agency, and it is essential that we allow ourselves to imagine the people behind the text. By imagining the full humanity of these freedom seekers, we refuse to be bound by an incomplete and biased archive that does little more than define these people by their enslaved status.⁶

In addition to locating and imagining freedom seekers in the history of Restoration London, this book will assess their significance in the larger history of racial slavery in the British Atlantic World. Historians have focused on the mid-seventeenth-century colonies, especially Barbados, Virginia, Maryland, Jamaica and South Carolina, as the focal points for the institutionalization of racial slavery. Many scholars have assumed that White colonists enslaved West Africans and indigenous Americans beyond the oversight of an English government that was preoccupied with religious conflict, civil war and the Cromwellian Protectorate. English colonists, historians have argued, created not only a coercive labour system but also a complex legal system designed to subordinate people of colour while protecting White colonists from resistance and rebellion by the enslaved.⁷

But this interpretation has overlooked direct English involvement, on English soil, in the early development of racial slavery. From the mid seventeenth century onwards planters, merchants, military officers, ship captains and other English men and women brought enslaved people to London, many of them children. Some of these enslaved people resisted by attempting to escape, and a few of the enslavers who claimed them responded by publishing newspaper advertisements describing the freedom seekers and offering rewards to anyone who could provide information leading to the recapture of the runaway. These were some of the very first advertisements to appear in London’s (and England’s) earliest newspapers, appearing alongside notices offering property, goods and especially books or livestock for sale, or seeking the return of lost or stolen goods.

Seventeenth-century London’s runaway slave advertisements reveal a network of merchants, ship captains, wealthy investors and others who were all to varying degrees engaged in the creation of both the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery. As these short newspaper notices make clear, their engagement extended to a clear desire to establish and protect racial bondage within London and England, and an enthusiasm to make use of the new print media to lay claim to ownership of people of colour who resisted by escaping. As such the runaway advertisements published in seventeenth-century London functioned as an assertion by enslavers of the legitimacy of their status as legal owners of enslaved people. While colonists in the Caribbean and Chesapeake were developing both plantation slavery and the legal foundations upon which it relied, enslavers in London were likewise engaged in making slavery real and in developing a system to recapture any bound people in the capital who dared challenge their status by escaping. The creation of the runaway slave advertisement in London provides telling evidence of a much deeper and more direct English engagement in the construction of racial slavery than historians have appreciated. Racial slavery was being created simultaneously in London and in the colonies, and the development of runaway slave advertisements as a response to this form of slave resistance was actually a London creation.

Yet, if London’s early runaway slave advertisements display enslavers’ efforts at control, and if they represent a key part of the process of objectification of the enslaved, they simultaneously and necessarily reveal the insurgency and attempts at self-determination of the bound and enslaved. By definition these advertisements reveal resistance to bondage and assertions of individuality and agency; in a very real way these short newspaper notices were the creation as much of freedom seekers as of masters and mistresses, as narratives of agency and escape.⁸ Some of these advertisements offer remarkable detail, from place of origin in Africa or South Asia to physical characteristics and mannerisms, to linguistic ability and workplace skills, to the clothing worn by a freedom seeker. However, the few dozen words of each advertisement were those of an enslaver (or the head of household or employer if the person was in a liminal state between slavery and the service of employed free people) asserting legal control of the freedom seeker, defying his or her agency by defining the freedom seeker by their bound status, the clothing they were required to wear, and more often than not a single name that had been imposed upon them. These advertisements reveal the constructions and understandings of freedom seekers by those who wrote these short notices: the words, the experiences, the motivations, the hopes and dreams of the freedom seekers themselves are largely absent from the archival record, and it requires contextual research and more than a little imagination to see the freedom seekers as individuals rather than as objects.

How, then, can we reimagine these people as present and significant in Restoration London, and what kind of reconceptualization of the historical urban setting is necessary? How must we change the ways in which we see, hear and experience seventeenth-century London to become more aware of bound and free people of colour as present and as actors – as well as people acted upon – in the story of the creation of racial slavery in England and the colonies? And how do we build from these individuals to an understanding of what their collective presence meant for the history of racial slavery, and the history of London and England more broadly? This book represents an attempt to at least partially answer these questions. The advertisements, analysed together, offer a collective picture of those who eloped, their origins, ages and gender, and what they looked like, what they sounded like and what they wore. Together these freedom seekers may embody the many others like them who lived, worked and died in Restoration London but who did not attempt to escape or who were not the subject of advertisements. While the lived experiences of each individual remains elusive, it is possible to gain some sense of them as a community.

The first three chapters situate freedom seekers in the larger contexts of seventeenth-century London’s growing population of enslaved, bound and free people of colour; the rapidly growing city and its role as the hub of a fast-growing empire encompassing trade with South Asia, the transatlantic slave trade and the development of colonial plantation slavery; the commercial venues of the City of London and the maritime and mercantile communities hugging both banks of the Thames to the east of the City; and the development of newspapers and the advertisements they contained. The bulk of the book is then devoted to twelve shorter chapters, each of which explores a certain category or characteristic of the freedom seekers as they appeared in the newspaper advertisements. Each of these chapters begins with an advertisement and explores what we can know of the individual detailed in that short newspaper notice.

Given that surviving records tell us rather more about enslavers and their community than about the enslaved, this book also seeks to illuminate how those who owned bound people of colour in Restoration London were constructing and defending racial slavery in the metropole. The chapters focused on freedom seekers thus include consideration of the community of merchants, sea captains, investors and wealthy Londoners who owned enslaved people and who acted together to protect their right to own human property by developing and deploying runaway advertisements in the city’s newspapers.

The book concludes with two chapters and an epilogue exploring how during these same years racial slavery was taking shape in the Caribbean and American colonies, and how colonial assemblies designed legal mechanisms to punish resistance and escape. Half a century after the first runaway advertisement had appeared in a London newspaper, colonial presses began publishing newspapers containing runaway notices, and over the next century and a half tens of thousands of these advertisements were published in Caribbean and North American newspapers. These runaway advertisements constitute an invaluable resource for studying the most widespread and pervasive form of resistance to slavery, and have long shaped both academic research and popular understanding of the lived experience of slavery and resistance. In the late eighteenth century Thomas Clarkson used Jamaican runaway advertisements as evidence to support the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and Theodore Weld and Sarah and Angelina Grimké deployed thousands of American runaway advertisements as their primary source for American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, one of the most influential abolitionist works published in the United States.⁹

Crucially, however, there were no newspapers and therefore no runaway slave advertisements in England’s American and Caribbean colonies until the early eighteenth century. The oldest surviving runaway slave advertisement in a newspaper in the English Caribbean or North American colonies appeared in June 1704.¹⁰ Half a century earlier, when London’s freedom seekers challenged their bondage, they prompted the creation of a new genre vital to the history of resistance to racial slavery, the runaway slave advertisement. Thus it was in Restoration London that newspaper runaway advertisements were created and first deployed. In telling the story of London’s early freedom seekers this book will shed light on the larger story of the capital’s role in the institutionalization of racial slavery: the creation of runaway slave advertisements as a response to this most significant form of resistance to slavery and the direct role of these notices in the formation of languages and concepts of both racial slavery and resistance. Racial slavery existed in seventeenth-century London, and the stories of these Black Londoners are too significant to be neglected.