Charmaine A. Nelson writes:

“Fugitive slave advertisements, claim historians Shane White and Graham White, are “the most detailed descriptions of the bodies of enslaved Africans Americans available.”[1] I would argue that their contention also applies to most regions of the Americas in general, including the territories that were to become Canada, particularly places where abolition predated the development of photography.[2] Such newspaper notices provide evidence of the ubiquity of resistance by the enslaved as well as the types of heightened and invasive scrutiny and surveillance under which they lived….”

Read the rest and explore the sources: Canadian Fugitive Slave Advertisements: An Untapped Archive of Resistance | Borealia