Billy G. Smith is Professor of History at Montana State University. He is the author of The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750 1800 (1990) and the co-editor of Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (1989) and The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (Penn State, 1992).