It was a professional job - just like bounty hunters. It's a major enterprise. |
The ads had to be effective. There's no photography so there has to be physical descriptions. |
Those ads have become extremely useful to scholars because they are one of the few places that describe slaves physically, their appearance, what type of clothes they wore, whether they were literate, what type of talents they had. While slaves are treated impersonally as a group, when one runs away, then we get a personal description. |