Contested Property: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum U.S. South

While U.S. slave institutions formally guaranteed slaveowner property, the threat of fugitive slaves constrained economic development in the slave sector. We present new evidence on the economics of the slave South, focusing on the enforcement of slave property rights. We collect data on the characteristics of, and money rewards offered to slave catchers for, individual runaway slaves from 20,000+ newspaper advertisements. We also construct the first panel dataset describing the universe of individual slaveholdings in the USA 1840-1860. We link the data from runaway slave advertisements to the slaveowner data to document trade offs faced by entrepreneurs using slave labor over which property rights were contested. While we find that more productive plantations experienced more runaways and paid higher rewards individually, at the county level higher runaways and rewards are associated with lower plantation size and growth rates. Contrary to previous research, we find that fugitive slaves were more prevalent than once thought, and required substantial expenditures to manage. ∗Dittmar: American University. Email: [email protected]. Naidu: Columbia University & NBER. Email: [email protected]. This research has been supported by a grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We thank Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, Jess Chen, and George Panterov for excellent research assistance. Jeremiah Dittmar acknowledges assistance through the Deutsche Bank Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. 1 “Drapetomania, or the disease causing negroes to run away...is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers.” – Dr. Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” (1851)