Warm-up: Provide students with Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in the Virginia Gazette—Activity 4 and tell students to follow the instructions for the class warm-up, using Advertisement 1.
Next, have students share their responses. In the share-out, students should discuss the possibilities that Harry might have taken resources to pass along to his family, as ‘compensation’ for his own stolen labor, or to build up a store for when he sought freedom, among other possibilities.
Divide the class into small groups. Then ask students to follow the Group Work instructions for Advertisements 2-4, answering the questions below.
Answer for each source (discuss and summarize):
- What past form of resistance is noted in the advertisement?
Choose one additional question to discuss and summarize. Not all questions will apply to each source.
- Why do you think that the enslaver chose to include this past form of resistance?
- In what ways might the past form of resistance relate to this incident of freedom seeking?
- How do these forms of resistance inform our understanding of slavery and freedom in the 18th century?
Alternatively, you may wish to assign only one advertisement to each group and then switch to a Jigsaw activity to form new groups in which students share their responses to the questions and discuss shared and unique experiences across the sources.
Students should share the question they answered for each source and discuss their findings. As a concluding activity, students might write a journal entry using at least two sources to respond to question 4: How do these forms of resistance inform our understanding of slavery and freedom in the 18th century? Note that, when utilizing the advertisements you should engage as in Activity 2 with defining unfamiliar words and/or preview words/phrases. Not all unfamiliar words will be included in the larger Vocabulary & Key Term as they often only appear once in the text and are generally infrequently utilized words and terms from the 18th-century.