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chapter five
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor
The lives of fugitive slaves in the cities across the South did not only take
place in clandestine social gatherings, segregated churches, and a fter dark.
Fugitives needed to work to survive, and if the cities to where they escaped
could not provide access to employment, they w
ere not long-term refuge options. But where did they find work? After all, they had occupations before
leaving slavery and many were skilled and highly mobile. The best-case scenario for men and w
omen would have been to be able to capitalize on their
skills acquired under slavery. However, in antebellum cities, finding a job that
was tied to one’s specific occupational expertise was only in very exceptional
cases feasible.
Runaways were aware of this even before they decided to make a bid for
freedom. Thanks to their mobility and their broad social networks, they were
informed about the conditions and opportunities in the cities. Many of those
who later fled to Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans had
already been t here and had firsthand knowledge about the landscape of work.
Why could they in most cases not make use of their often advanced skill sets,
and what kind of work could they really hope for?
Antebellum urban labor markets were coded by race and legal status. This
had consequences for fugitives from slavery, who, being Black and undocumented, were adversely affected by both codes. Women were especially impeded in their search for economic independence by a strong division of
urban labor by gender. And so, fugitives encountered an array of obstacles to
finding a job that corresponded to their skills. When they arrived in a city,
they had to be able to decipher coded working areas and worksites in order to
navigate the spaces that the l abor markets offered. T
hese codes w
ere dynamic
and developed over time, generally to the disadvantage of people of African
descent. Yet, fugitives seemed to have an understanding of where to work to
earn enough money to survive and remain anonymous in the city.
Besides the economic position of free Black Americans, which was generally worsening, the fugitives’ presence in the labor markets worked to their
further disadvantage despite being facilitated in the first place by their solidarity and the possibility to camouflage among them. F
ree African Americans
forfeited even more of their already severely restricted leeway by counting
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
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112 Chapter Five
among their group large parts of illegal and, hence, powerless workers. Due
to legal restrictions and discrimination, Black workers had to toil harder and,
in competition with lower-class Whites and European immigrants, accept
lower remuneration. This kept the overall wages low and provided capitalist
employers with the cheap workforce they wanted.
Copyright © 2022. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
The Racial Coding of Labor
The volume of the runaway population in southern cities depended on the
relative and absolute size of the free and unfree Black population and on
the opportunities the labor market offered. Since the majority of absconders
attempted to pass as free persons in the South, they aimed to find work in
those occupational sectors in which free Black Americans were represented.
Generally speaking, in terms of artisan skills and White competition, employment prospects for free Black men were better in the Upper South than
in the northern states, and superior in the Lower South to the Upper South.1
Looking more closely, race organized labor differently from place to
place. W hether an occupation was coded White or Black depended on many
factors, including demography and customs. In most southern cities, the lives
of free Black p eople were interwoven with urban slavery. This overlap occurred on social, economic, and professional levels since Black people shared
certain jobs and professions that—varying from place to place as well as over
time—were regarded as suitable only for them. Deprecatingly labeled “nigger
work,” many of these jobs were carried out by both free and enslaved Black
people. Most of them comprised menial, servile, dirty, or distasteful occupations and Black people on average received less salary than Whites; barbering
and butchering are examples.2
Historian Ira Berlin has argued that while Black-coded work reinforced
damaging racial hierarchies, it could also offer job protection for Black
people, especially in those regions where slavery was strongest because it
discouraged White people from competing with them for t hese undesirable
jobs. Consequently the differences between skilled workers of African descent in the Upper South, where slavery was weaker, and the Lower South,
where it was stronger, were remarkable. One-third of Richmond’s f ree Black
men were skilled in 1860, compared to almost 80 percent in Charleston,
where they composed a fourth of the city’s carpenters, 40 percent of its
tailors, and three-quarters of millwrights.3 Additional large numbers of
free Black men worked as painters, barbers, butchers, bricklayers, shoe
makers, and blacksmiths.4 People of African descent with the highest economic
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor 113
standing were in Louisiana.5 Essentially, New Orleans was the only American
soil that provided economic opportunities for people of African descent.
The geography of Black occupations in southern cities dictated the economic integration within their borders. Seamstressing, for instance, was a job
for Black women in Charleston but not in Baltimore.6 Tailoring was a male
Black occupation in Charleston, but not in Richmond.7 Because they did not
want to raise attention, prospective fugitives who worked in sectors where
Black people were overrepresented had an easier time fitting in after their escape. T
hose who formerly engaged in occupations where their skin color was
conspicuous might have been advised to switch jobs. If an enslaved tailor
from Charleston decided to escape to Richmond and start a new life t here, he
might want to consider employment as a factory worker instead, where there
were higher concentrations of Black workers.
In Richmond, skills in construction, shoemaking, carpentering, plastering,
and barbering were in high demand.8 A runaway trained in one or more of
these trades who could convincingly pass as a f ree man could find a decent job
in this city. After all, it was the human capacities of enslaved people’s bodies
and minds that made them valuable to their o wners, and many of the professional skills they possessed were also wanted elsewhere. In 1836, the Richmond
police w
ere informed that “Mr Benjamin Wallers man Humphry runaway
from Mr Thomas Mayberry of Rockbridge County whom he was hired to this
year.” Humphry, besides being a hired slave and a “good coarse Shoe maker,”
also had networks with free Black people in the city: “His wifes father lives in
Richmond[,] a free man of colour name[d] Jonathan.”9 Humphry possessed
the skills to find employment, the experience of mobility as a hired slave, and
personal contacts to seek support.
The factories in Richmond w
ere even better places to look for a job. Labor
was always in high demand and employers did not seem to care where it came
from or what the status of their workers was. Richmond’s focus on production and manufacturing attracted large numbers of free and enslaved men to
the booming city. Half of the Black male workforce worked in factories such
as paper mills, ironworks, flour mills, and tobacco manufactories on the eve
of the Civil War. Tobacco was a labor-intensive business that relied on a variety of workers with differing skills. Besides tobacco factories, there were
numerous warehouses where tobacco was lodged before export. In 1820,
760 people worked in 20 tobacco manufactories; in 1850, 1,400 people w
ere
employed in 19 factories. During the 1850s, both the number of manufactories
and laborers who worked in them r ose nearly threefold, with 80 percent of
people working in tobacco being enslaved men.10
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
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114 Chapter Five
In ironmaking, a large industrial sector in Richmond, blacksmiths were
constantly needed.11 Enslaved Billy likely had promising employment prospects when he escaped from his owner Jeremiah Hoopers in King William
County in 1835. Having “a Scar on the Side of his neck produced by the cut
of an ax & a good Blacksmith by trade said man is Suspected to be about
Richmond.”12 The fact that subscribers felt the need to include this information in the search notice demonstrates that they reckoned with the possibility
that fugitives would indeed try to apply their skills in the cities to which they
escaped. If Billy found employment, he would be able to make a decent living
as a blacksmith.
That being said, race and legal status tended to trump skill set, although
the importance attributed to those f actors often varied according to a partic
ular work site or individual employer. The famous Tredegar Iron Works in
Richmond was one of the city’s largest employers and expanded in the 1850s
to supply hardware to railroads and mills in Cuba. In the early 1840s, White
artisans dominated the factory landscape, and Billy would not have had a
chance at employment if he sought it in there. His chances would likewise
remain slim later, when Tredegar’s manager Joseph Anderson began experimenting with enslaved labor, b ecause he meticulously monitored his staff at
all times.13
Typically, fugitives had to carefully weigh the risks of pursuing a particular
job and how employment in any given industry might affect remuneration,
visibility, and mobility. In South Carolina, free Black people were very urban
with a focus on artisanal occupations.14 It is unlikely, though, that highly
skilled runaway slaves in Charleston attempted to find employment as barbers, blacksmiths, or carpenters b ecause people working in t hese trades often
operated their own workshops and depended on White customers for business. Charleston’s free Black community was so small and the number of
those in skilled jobs was even smaller so that every newcomer trying to
integrate there would have attracted attention, although the level of risk
depended on the distance from one’s master and the reach of the latter’s
network.
Seabourn, who spoke French and English, is also a case in point. His
owner, H. Stackhouse from Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans, offered $100
for his arrest in 1848 and announced that “he is supposed to be across the Lake
or in the vicinity of Pass Manchac cutting wood.” Believing to know the be
havior of his slave, Stackhouse informed the readers of the paper that Seabourn “is somewhat of a circus actor, and when a little tired of work will no
doubt attempt to pass himself off as a circus performer.” Apparently, the
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor 115
slaveholder was wrong and Seabourn resisted the temptation of earning quick
money by performing for an audience. Five years later, Seabourn was still at
large: “He is somewhat of a circus actor,” claimed the ad, sticking to the same
strategy to find him, “by which he may easily be detected as he is always
showing his gymnastic qualifications.”15 Yet, it is likely that Seabourn never
exposed himself this way.
Self-hired slaves, free Blacks, and undocumented men and w
omen passing
as one or the other had to stay alert and flexible to make ends meet and to
adapt their strategies to the changing surroundings. Work was, moreover, not
steady for most p eople. When laboring as a slave in the shipyards of Norfolk
as a caulker, t here was not always work for George Teamoh and he took on a
variety of other jobs aside: “When not in their [the shipyard o wners’] ser
vice, I was found at the common labor of carrying grain, lading and unlading
ships freighting Rail Road iron, and, perhaps there is no species of labor, such
as may be reckoned in the catalogue of Norfolk’s history but I have been
engaged at.”16 Following every opportunity that opened up could mean the
difference between being able to pay the rent or not.
The casual sectors, where one would not know today if they were employed again tomorrow, met runaway slaves’ need for wages by offering them
low-level employment. These jobs did not correspond to the profile of often
highly mobile and experienced runaways.17 Runaway slaves migrating to southern cities w
ere aware of the opportunities the l abor market offered and poorly
paid jobs were almost always available, especially in port cities beginning in
the 1820s. From that time on, demand for laborers for the construction of
roads, canals, houses, and ships, and for dock work grew extensively due to
increasing commercial and trading activities.18 Stepney from Columbia, who
had been absent for at least eight months when the ad was placed in 1820, was
“of a smiling countenance,” and could have made it as a bricklayer in Charleston, his owner believed.19 This was also an option for t hose who escaped in
the Upper South. Baltimore, the fastest-growing city featured in this book,
had approximately 600 h ouses built per year in the 1830s; in 1851, it was 2,000.
The 1850 census registered 1,400 brickmakers in the city of Baltimore and
Baltimore County, most of them of African descent.20
With high urbanization rates and a decline in the relative demand for
skilled work, the demand for menial and unskilled labor soared. New urban
residents needed houses in which to live, clothes to wear, and food to consume. Streets had to be cleaned and maintained, dikes repaired, new canals
dug, and rail tracks placed. Flexible, dilative labor allowed employers to
hire and fire workers on short notice, according to their daily needs. Dock
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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116 Chapter Five
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figure 5.1 Dock work in New Orleans, 1853. Southern ports were busy and stevedores
were always ready to load and unload incoming and outgoing ships. Hippolyte Victor
Valentin Sebron, “Bateaux á Vapeur Geant, la Nouvelle-Orléans 1853,” oil on canvas,
58 inches x 82 inches, courtesy of Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, Gift of
D. H. Holmes Company.
workers and stevedores, for instance, could be hired the minute a vessel got
into port. The challenge for refugees was to read the landscape of labor to
decode the particular permutations of race and legal status in a given city
(see figure 5.1).
The seasonal job market in the Lower South also offered opportunities for
runaway slaves. Hundreds of White laborers from the North migrated south
for the winter months and departed again in spring, leaving vacant jobs
behind them ready to be filled by Black workers. In New Orleans, Whites fled
the city during the summer months when residents tended to fall ill with yellow fever, and fugitives who were familiar with this cycle knew that jobs were
likely to be found then. In the spring and fall, V
irginia slaveholders often
hired their bondspeople out to Richmond and other cities to work in industries located t here.21 Conversely, this also meant that in some months of the
year, competition was particularly dire. Economic fluctuations also determined job availability and migration patterns. After the crisis of 1857, for example, the movement of unemployed workers from the North to the South
soared.22 This made life harder for the lower classes, and harder still for the
Black lower classes.
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor 117
Although many jobs were coded Black, the large share of White laborers
meant that manual and menial occupations w
ere often not limited to p eople
of a specific racial group. In fact, most of these jobs w
ere carried out by
Whites, simply because they came to be more numerous in many cities,
including Baltimore.23 In railroad construction Black people sometimes
worked alongside Whites b ecause it was more efficient to employ f ree Black
and White workers than slaves.24 In the event of accidental death, employers
did not have to reimburse o wners for loss of property, and b ecause the death
tolls were relatively high, slaveholders were discouraged from hiring their
slaves out to the railroads, which w
ere desperate for labor.25 This opened up
spaces for fugitive slaves in need of work. In fact, most industries in the South,
including the lumbering, mining, and salt industries, were of an extractive
nature and therefore located outside of city centers. This made it even more
challenging to satisfy the high labor demands.26 In Virginia, the press reported on a railroad worker named Quintus or Terry “who has lived here for
four years without a register, stated that he was employed by the Central Railroad Company.”27 W hether Quintus was residing illegally in the state as a free
Black or a runaway is unclear, but his case illustrates that it was perfectly pos
sible for any group of illegals to find work without showing any sort of register or freedom papers. Work sites that w
ere too dangerous for slaves w
ere an
option for runaways.
Tobacconists in Richmond, railroaders in Baltimore, and other industrialists and employers in Charleston and New Orleans w
ere first and foremost
businessmen. Their goal was to gather enough workers to make their businesses run and to pay them as l ittle as possible to gain the highest profits. They
knowingly employed illegal Black residents and they did not pay attention to
whether some of their employees w
ere actually runaway slaves. It is likely that
some might have taken advantage of the vulnerable situation of their illegal
employees to exploit them even more. Others simply did not want to know.
Turning a blind eye was the most common and helpful support for them.
How to Find Work
The racial coding of certain occupations structured the search for work, but it
does not illustrate what people did to procure employment. In the majority of
cases, the subtleties about how to find work are lost because they do not show
up in historical records. Seth Rockman, in an attempt to reconstruct hiring
processes in Baltimore, has speculated that information was obtained through
observation and informal communication.28
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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118 Chapter Five
Early January was usually the time when self-hired bondsmen and -women
roamed the streets of southern cities looking for contracts for the new year.
Around Christmas and well into January, manufacturers closed businesses,
and free and enslaved workers were increasingly found on the streets, both
celebrating their days off and negotiating the terms for the following year.
This was a welcome opportunity for fugitive slaves to blend in with the Black
community and to establish important business connections. Robert Russell,
a British visitor, observed this in the mid-1850s, stating that “Richmond was
at this time literally swarming with negroes, who were standing in crowds at
the corners of the streets in different parts of the town.”29
When looking for work, runaways had to be careful to avoid detection. A convincing story and other p eople to back it up w
ere fundamental prerequisites.
While January was the most convenient time to blend in with the job-seeking
crowd, it was not the only time that that runaways could find work. Many cities
contained specific places where day laborers gathered to wait for recruitment.
These spots could be ordained by the municipal government or developed organically. This was also connected to the organization of slave hire. New Orleans
and Charleston, for example, set clear rules regarding the hiring of unskilled
slaves, including places where they could go to get hired by the day, the daily
lengths of the service, and sometimes the wages.30 In Baltimore and Richmond,
by contrast, slave hire was less regulated by city authorities, and instead occurred
through private negotiations, also involving brokers.31
Fugitives in search of work understood where to go to seek work and how to
avoid detection. After fleeing enslavement, James Matthews went to Charleston.
Being able to read the racial and regulatory landscape of labor in Charleston, he included detailed information in his autobiographical account on
how finding employment as an enslaved laborer worked: “I went down to the
stevedore’s stand and waited there with the rest of the hands to get work. By
and by a stevedore came along and asked if I wanted work. I told him yes. He
said come along, and I followed him on to the wharf, and worked with a good
many o thers in stowing away cotton in a vessel.”32
Whatever they decided to do, most illegal workers—fugitive or other
wise—needed the help of o thers to find work. Historian Calvin Schermerhorn’s research sheds much light on how enslaved people operated as networkers,
driven by their need for patrons. While Schermerhorn focuses on White supporters, urban fugitive slaves built similar networks based on their reliance
on free Black supporters not just for shelter but to create pathways for them
to employment. Social networks provided access to security, goods, information, allies, and even status, and reputation as a reliable worker was useful to
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor 119
get frequently hired.33 Free p eople of African descent played a distinct role in
these networks. Not only did they have jobs in which they could lobby for the
inclusion of a newcomer, f ree Blacks offered daily services like food and accommodation to enslaved workers.
Like Matthews, John Andrew Johnson first fled to Charleston before leaving for the North on a vessel. His account on laboring in the city is similar:
“I joined a gang of negroes working on the wharfs, and received a dollar-and-
a-quarter per day, without arousing any suspicion.”34 Apparently, it was a feasible endeavor to go to the docks and activate the sympathies of other Black
men by talking to them. This must have happened regularly as petitions from
rural slaveholders lamented that their runaways were hired in Charleston to
load vessels at night.35
Evidence suggests that many men indeed attempted to work as common
laborers. To succeed, they needed information about the internal infrastructure of Black work and about strategic locations. George Teamoh, an enslaved
man from Norfolk, Virginia, wrote in his autobiography that in 1853, his wife,
Sallie, was brought to Richmond together with their youngest child and stored
in the slave pen until they were sold. Teamoh wrote his own pass and went to
visit them. Since he intended to “remain a few weeks,” he had to find a job,
which apparently was not a problem: “I sought, and found employment during a few days,” Teamoh wrote, and he added that he started working at a dockyard at the Richmond Basin as a common laborer.36 Working on the docks
was a frequent occurrence that connected the experiences of fugitive men in
all four cities. People usually knew that these were the places where casual
work was to be found. When they were in Baltimore, they went to the harbor;
in Richmond to the docks on the James River where the Basin was one of the
major loading stations; in Charleston to the port in the east; and in New Orleans to the levee at the Mississippi River.
The New Orleans levee was an active construction project that needed
maintenance all year long and the demand for laborers never slowed, which
was very convenient for Black men who needed work. Enslaved Jim, twenty-
eight years of age, “stout and muscular, with sullen expression of countenance,”
was in October 1855 absent from his owner (which was a firm) in New Orleans
for already four months. “The negro was seen in the lower parts of the city on
Saturday and Sunday last, and is no doubt lurking about the city,” read the advertisement, and that he “has been seen twice on the Levee during the last
month.”37 The levee itself also functioned as a recruitment site and it was common for captains to send out mates or stewards to fill their crews with men laboring on the New Orleans levee, among them many runaways.38
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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120 Chapter Five
Terence was a New Orleans local who in May 1850 was “taken into custody” together with Jackson and William, “for working by the day on the
levee without badges.” While Jackson and William were in all likelihood
hired-out enslaved men, announced the paper, Terence was “supposed to be a
runaway.” Terrence legally belonged to Mr. Duplantier, a tobacco inspector,
who resided on 33 Dauphine Street in New Orleans.39 There is no information about what kind of work Terence did for Duplantier but it appears that
once he stopped laboring for him, he pursued work as a common laborer. Jim
and Terence also demonstrate that not all urban fugitives covered a vast physical distance when they escaped. Some simply decided to break ties with their
legal o wners. When they escaped from their masters and stayed in the same
city, they could make use of their existing networks and judge the l abor market based on their own firsthand experiences. At the same time, there w
ere
considerable dangers involved, such as the risk of being recognized by someone who would report to one’s owner.
Black people that worked for Whites in the cities often coordinated additional labor on their behalf, serving in effect as subcontractors for their
owners. For example, enslaved artisans could hire other workers for legwork
if needed, and enslaved house servants could hire artisans for repairs or other
services around the h ouse. White mechanics in Charleston complained
about the power of enslaved domestic workers to hand jobs to mechanics and
craftsmen on behalf of their owners: “Many of the most opulent Inhabitants
of Charleston, when they have any work to be done, do not send it themselves,
but leave it to their Domestics to employ what Workmen they please.”40
Through this system, enslaved city dwellers could hire runaways without the
knowledge of slaveholders.
Not all f ree Black Americans, however, w
ere willing to support urban fugitives in their search for work, especially when it pertained to economic positions that had taken years to achieve or were generations in the making.
Free Black artisans, for one, particularly in a community as small as the one in
Charleston, would have resented an intrusion by newcomers who would
compete with their vested jobs. This does not mean that f ree Black Charlestonians refrained from hiring fugitive themselves, for they could profit from
cheap l abor. In 1854, a fugitive man with an unknown occupation was discovered together with a runaway carpenter (from a different owner),
both employed by the same free Black man in Charleston. In the same
year, a woman and her two children, who had escaped three years prior,
were captured by two police officers “whilst in the yard + employment of
a free Mulatto woman.”41 Just as White employers did, some members of the
Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City : Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South, University of North Carolina Press,
2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=29841598.
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Finding Work, Remaining Poor 121
f ree Black population capitalized on the vulnerable situation of undocumented
workers.
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Gendered Spaces
Urban work spaces were gendered spaces. While a considerable level of work
was open to Black women in cities, t here was not much choice because options for w
omen w
ere finite and few.42 In southern cities, Black w
omen labored as laundresses, cooks, domestic servants, h ousekeepers, and peddlers.43
In Charleston, they worked as market women, seamstresses, and to lesser extent bakers, pastry cooks, and midwives.44 Significantly smaller numbers of
female runaways appear in the official jail records of southern cities, which
reflects the overall trend of more men fleeing slavery and fewer women being
apprehended. In line with the general demographic trends of the runaway
population, women gravitated to the cities in lower numbers b ecause their
chances to secure economic mobility w
ere heavily curtailed by their race,
their gender, and their unfree status.
Enslaved women were lower skilled than men but some possessed skills or
found work that could yield an acceptable income, and despite the limited
opportunities for w
omen to make money, at times female runaways w
ere
able to work in a “good” sector. In Charleston, for instance, Amelia or Anne,
twenty-four years of age, was a mantua maker (an overgown worn by women)
by trade and her owner knew that she was engaged in that capacity a fter her
escape: “She works for respectable families about the city, and says she is
free,” the ad informed. “She has been absent about two years, and was seen
in King street last week.”45 King Street was one of the most affluent streets in
the city, and the fact that Amelia frequented the upper classes of Charleston
points to very high skills that no doubt attracted attention. The escape of
Linda, “a tall thin mustee, well looking,” was advertised in Charleston in 1859:
“When last heard of she was acting as a stewardess on board of a steamer
from this place. She has been out about three years, and passes herself for
free.”46 Linda’s example was very
