Slave pass

[2] One of the reasons for anti-literacy laws was to prevent slaves from writing their own passes, as described in a Mississippi runaway slave ad of 1814 for Jim, who was described as "talkative and has a good address, but is much marked by the whip, is a great thief, can read and write, may forge a pass as a free man.

[4] According to historian Ryan Quintana, slave passes were a tool of social control: "...passes importantly extended planter authority and claims of ownership over mobile enslaved bodies, and provided an important differentiation between slaves who had run away from plantations and those simply, and obligingly, beyond the plantation's walls.

Tickets, then, transformed slaves into abstracted, embodied extensions of their owners' desires granting them the legal rights to move to and fro and into places that might otherwise have been deemed dangerous.

With a ticket, a slave could travel up and down South Carolina's numerous waterways, visit neighboring plantations, and even enter stores and markets to conduct trades for their owners and, some feared, for themselves...given the variety of slaves' activities, both on and off the plantation, passes were necessarily and intentionally vague.

[5] An "alleged abolitionist" named Grace received "thirty or lashes" in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1837 "for encouraging slaves to escape by writing false passes for them.