I congratulate you on the purchase of said negro.
He says he is quite satisfied to be here and will do as he has always done 'during the time I have managed him.' No drink will be offered him.

All on my part will be done to bring John all right." Finally, on October 15, Capers reported: "I have found John as good a driver as when I left him on Santee.

Bad management was the cause of his being sold, and [I] am glad you have been the fortunate man to get him."[48] [Footnote 48: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 337, 338.] Leaving aside for the present, as topics falling more fitly under the economics of slavery, the questions of the market breeding of slaves in the border states and the working of them to death in the lower South, as well as the subject of inflations and depressions in slave prices, it remains to mention the chief defect of the slave trade as an agency for the distribution of labor.

This lay in the fact that it dealt only in lifetime service.

Employers, it is true, might buy slaves for temporary employment and sell them when the need for their labor was ended; but the fluctuations of slave prices and of the local opportunity to sell those on hand would involve such persons in slave trading risks on a scale eclipsing that of their industrial earnings.