Editor's note: In honor of Black History Month, this story was written to convey both the terror of enslaved individuals as they sought their freedom and as they were tracked with the help of advertising that ran on the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser. We acknowledge both the complicity of the Montgomery Advertiser in this horrific time and the harm it caused Black Alabamians who were dehumanized and denied freedom, equality and dignity in their time.

The writing was already on the wall for the end of slavery, but a few last desperate words made it into print on April 22, 1865.

“My Negro Woman JANE left my house, one Tuesday April 5^th,” wrote N.G. Scott in a legal ad that appeared on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser.

Jane, somewhere between 35 and 40, is the last known subject of a legal ad for runaway slaves in the Advertiser. Scott offered a $100 reward for her to be brought back or taken to a jail where Scott could pick her up.

Once captured, these runaways were often sent to jail — a practice also documented in Montgomery Advertiser legal ads — where they’d wait to be reclaimed by those who enslaved them, or sold back into slavery ostensibly to cover costs of holding them. In ads published to alert slaveholders of runaways that had been found, the runaways themselves were somehow persuaded to tell authorities where to return them.

Jane should have already been considered a freewoman, not a slave. Though President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had the intention of freeing all slaves in the Union on Sept. 22, 1862, slavery remained a huge business in Alabama, and especially Montgomery, under the Confederacy.

By the time the ad about Jane ran, the South had already lost the Civil War. Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865 — though that didn’t stop the war from continuing for a few days longer in Alabama with a Union invasion. The ratification of the 13^th Amendment made slavery unconstitutional on Dec. 6, 1865, and Alabama would rejoin the Union in June 1868.

We don’t know what became of Jane. All we know from Scott’s ad was that she was 5 feet 4 inches tall, had skin the color of dark copper, and was “quite fleshy.” These ad descriptions often demeaned runaway slaves. We also learn she had a husband, enslaved by a Mr. Townsend, about 7 miles north of Wetumpka.

Still, Jane left an indelible mark on Montgomery’s history, as did others from her time. A review of the Montgomery Advertiser’s archives revealed more than 130 such ads for either runaway slaves at large, or escaped slaves that had been captured and jailed — not just in Montgomery and Alabama, but from surrounding Southern states as well. They’re dated from 1849 to 1865, and often ran in several issues of either the Weekly Advertiser, the Montgomery Advertiser, or both.

Along with age, skin tone, hair, height and weight, the ads gave insight into the abuse these people had suffered: scars, lash marks, missing teeth, missing fingers, among other past injuries.

Walk through history:Many slavery advertisements have been reproduced and are on display at The Legacy Museum in Montgomery.

It’s almost unimaginable today, but this was a time when Black men, women and children of all ages were dehumanized, treated only as property. Cotton plantations were a huge source of labor needs, and enslaved Black Alabamians also served in households or were lent out for work on railroads and in private businesses.

For runaways who remained at large, owners would offer rewards — usually somewhere between $15 and $25 for the runaway's return if captured in Alabama. Sometimes they offered more, like the $100 in Jane’s case. If captured outside the state, the reward was often double. The reward for capturing white people who assisted with escapes — or who stole enslaved people for use elsewhere, as was often suggested by disgruntled owners — was considerably higher: $100, $250 or more.

Though there wasn’t one for Jane’s, slave ads often included small illustrations depicting runaway enslaved men and women, to make the ads easier to spot in print. The Advertiser did similar things for other items. Runaway slave ads were just an ordinary part of the paper’s classifieds, appearing alongside ones for land, livestock, and other goods — including things like “negro shoes.”

Slave auction ads were also frequent. Montgomery was a major player in the slave auction business. The downtown Montgomery Square fountain site, which today carries a painted Black Lives Matter message, was a slave trade location.

There were also ads for smaller business or estate sales that included enslaved people. In one instance from May of 1854, a group of slaves were sold to pay off a mortgage owed by Joseph J. Wright. Daniel, 29, Dice, 38, Peter, 18, Eli, 6, Ellen, 5, and Manilla, 3, were all to be auctioned in Montgomery for cash. On May 24, 1854, another ad listed enslaved woman Louisa and her child, Caroline, to be sold to settle the estate of the late Eleanor Goldthwaite of Montgomery.

"The dominance of slavery in the American South extended way beyond enslavers and enslaved people," said Tera DuVernay, deputy director of museum & memorial operations for the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. "Most businesses were directly or indirectly profiting from slavery.  Everyone was compelled to support the institution and nothing dramatized that more than ads for 'fugitive slaves,' which empowered anyone to gain rewards for capturing people seeking freedom."

With the end of slavery, the South’s oppression of freed Black people still wasn’t quite over — nor was the Advertiser’s involvement.

On Dec. 5, 1865, the day before the 13^th Amendment was ratified, the Advertiser began printing a “notice to freedmen” legal ad. An “intelligence office” had been set up in Montgomery on Commerce Street, where all the area’s freedmen and freedwomen — previously almost always referred to in print as just “negroes” — were required to come and register their names, occupations and addresses. The pretext was to know where they were to help them find paying work. But there was a catch. The notice said that these former slaves — who had just been thrust into society at large — were legally required to obtain gainful employment.

“Idleness will subject you to prosecution for vagrancy,” the ad stated.

At the same time, a “white labor agency” began advertising to fill the void left by slavery’s end. They sought white laborers to sign a one-year contract “to do the same work as the negro, live in the same cabins, and on the same rations.” The yearly salary for laborers was $150 for men, $100 for women, and $50 for each child 12-14 years old. It was payable at the end of the year, minus a $20 per head transportation cost.

House servants got a better deal of $15 per month — a whole $180 if they could make it through a year. It's not an especially appealing deal today, but it was a better opportunity than what many post-Civil War white Alabamians might have had otherwise. According to an inflation calculator, $100 in 1865 was worth $1,820.84 in today’s money.

The Advertiser continued to print, and the loss of legal advertisements for runaway or captured slaves didn’t seem to make much difference in newspaper ad space of the day. By then, those spaces in the classified sections were filled with numerous for-sale ads for cotton plantations.

Montgomery Advertiser reporter Shannon Heupel can be contacted at sheupel@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Newspaper ads for enslaved runaways made their lives harsher in 1800s