A $100 bounty for a runaway slave named Abram from Richards’ Ferry, Culpeper County, Virginia. September 24, 1800s.

The notice went out across Culpeper County with a hundred dollars set against the name of a man called Abram, as if a man might be measured in coin and his freedom entered into the ledger like livestock or land. Somewhere beyond Richards’ Ferry he had gone into that old Virginia country beneath the trees and the enormous sky, carrying with him whatever he could carry and leaving behind what no man ought to own. Men would read the notice and reckon the money and perhaps saddle horses to hunt him, but Abram was already moving through a world that did not know him as property, crossing fields in darkness and listening for dogs and hoofbeats and the voices of strangers. The paper would yellow and the men who printed it would go to dust, but there in its faded lines remains the terrible arithmetic of the age: one human being seeking liberty, and another offering a hundred dollars to take it from him.

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