Back to the Professor's page.

DANIEL MEADERS Curriculum vitae

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in History, Yale University, June 1990

M.A. in History, Yale University, 1979

B.A., College of Staten Island, City University of New York, 1974.

Graduate Center, City University of New York 1974

Ph.D. Dissertation: "Fugitive Slaves and Indentured Servants Before 1800"

Abstract: Between 1607 and 1800, the slave and the indentured servant rebelled in several ways: feigned obsequiousness, malingering, work slowdowns, flight, poison, arson, self-mutilation, suicide, slaying the planter or his family members, and finally, the highest resistant form - insurrection. Flight appears to be a major irritant because it reduced labor time, decreased revenues, and compelled the diversion of monies toward capturing the fugitive: Money for the informer, money for the jailer and money for the newspaper owner for advertisement fees. Even if the planter caught the fugitive and lashed him or cut his hair or cropped his ears or branded him on the face or sliced his achilles heel or chopped his testicles off, the fugitive still represented a symbol of defiance, a symbol that could stir others to escape.
The publication of fugitive ads, the enactment of fugitive laws, the dispatchment of the watchmen and the militia, and the use of terror failed to stop the black or the indentured servant from absconding. Flight kept the planter busy, but it posed no real threat to the institution of slavery or indentured servitude until the Revolutionary War when the escape of thousands of blacks and servants virtually destroyed the institution of indentured servitude and shook the foundations of chattel slavery. Ruined planters, pitying their losses, cared less about the lofty concepts of liberty and freedom and more about crop output, the reenslavement of blacks, and the rebuilding of their plantations. After the Revolutionary War the North moved to abolish slavery gradually, thus giving the blacks hope that the North would be the promised land. Pushed by Pierce Butler of South Carolina, Congress enacted a Federal fugitive law designed to block the anticipated escapes to the North where the Quaker offered solace to the hapless fugitive in Philadelphia, the home of the Federal government. The blacks kept absconding, the planter kept chasing and the Quakers, headed by Isaac Hopper, kept offering solace. It would not end until slavery was abolished.

EXPERIENCE

William Paterson State College, Wayne, New Jersey
Assistant Professor, Sept., 1991 - Present
Adjunct Professor, Jan. - May, 1991

Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City
Adjunct Professor, Jan. - May, 1991

Frederick Douglass Papers, Yale University
Associate Editor, 1989-1990
Research Assistant, 1986-1989

PUBLICATIONS

"South Carolina Fugitives as Viewed Through Local Colonial Newspapers with Emphasis on Runaway Notices, 1732-1801," Journal of Negro History (1976).

Isaac Hopper: Tales of Oppression (forthcoming by Garland Press)

18th Century White Slaves: Fugitive Notices, Pennsylvania Gazette 1729-1760 (under contract, Greenwood Press).

Dead or Alive: Fugitive Slaves and White Indentured Servants before 1830 (Garland, 1993)

AWARDS

Woodrow Wilson (Martin Luther King) Fellowship, 1974