THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE In the New England town of Plymouth in November, 1729, a certain Thompson Phillips who was about to sail for Jamaica exchanged a half interest in his one-legged negro man for a similar share in Isaac Lathrop's negro boy who was to sail with Phillips and be sold on the voyage.

Lathrop was meanwhile to teach the man the trade of cordwaining, and was to resell his share to Phillips at the end of a year at a price of L40 sterling.[1] This transaction, which was duly concluded in the following year, suggests the existence of a trade in slaves on a small scale from north to south in colonial times.

Another item in the same connection is an advertisement in the _Boston Gazette_ of August 17, 1761, offering for sale young slaves just from Africa and proposing to take in exchange "any negro men, strong and hearty though not of the best moral character, which are proper subjects of transportation";[2] and a third instance appears in a letter of James Habersham of Georgia in 1764 telling of his purchase of a parcel of negroes at New York for work on his rice plantation.[3] That the disestablishment of slavery in the North during and after the American Revolution enhanced the exportation of negroes was recited in a Vermont statute of 1787,[4] and is shown by occasional items in Southern archives.
One of these is the registry at Savannah of a bill of sale made at New London in 1787 for a mulatto boy "as a servant for the term of ten years only, at the expiration of which time he is to be free."[5] Another is a report from an official at Norfolk to the Governor of Virginia, in 1795, relating that the captain of a sloop from Boston with three negroes on board pleaded ignorance of the Virginia law against the bringing in of slaves.[6] [Footnote 1: Massachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XXIV, 335, 336.] [Footnote 2: Reprinted in Joshua Coffin, _An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections_ (New York, 1860), p.

15.] [Footnote 3: "The Letters of James Habersham," in the Georgia Historical Society _Collections_, VI, 22, 23.] [Footnote 4: _New England Register_, XXIX, 248, citing Vermont _Statutes_, 1787, p.

105.] [Footnote 5: U.B.Phillips, "Racial Problems, Adjustments and Disturbances in the Ante-bellum South," in _The South in the Building of the Nation_, IV, 218.] [Footnote 6: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, VIII, 255.] The federal census returns show that from 1790 onward the decline in the number of slaves in the Northern states was more than counterbalanced by the increase of their free negroes.