were undertaken to lessen the expenses of distant marketing.[31] Some of these recourses were promptly adopted in the newer settlements also; and others proved of little avail for the time being.  The net effect of the betterments, however, was an appreciable offsetting of the western advantage; and this, when added to the love of home, the disrelish of primitive travel and pioneer life, and the dread of the costs and risks involved in removal, dissuaded multitudes from the project of migration.  The actual depopulation of the Atlantic states was less than the plaints of the time would suggest.  The volume of emigration was undoubtedly great, and few newcomers came in to fill the gaps.  But the birth rate alone in those generations of ample families more than replaced the losses year by year in most localities.  The sense of loss was in general the product not of actual depletion but of disappointment in the expectation of increase.

[Footnote 30:  H.T.  Cook, The Life and Legacy of David R. Williams (New York, 1916), pp. 166-168.]

[Footnote 31:  U.B.  Phillips, History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860.]

The non-slaveholding backwoodsmen formed the vanguard of settlement on each frontier in turn; the small slaveholders followed on their heels and crowded each fertile district until the men who lived by hunting as well as by farming had to push further westward; finally the larger planters with their crowded carriages, their lumbering wagons and their trudging slaves arrived to consolidate the fields of such earlier settlers as would sell.  It often seemed to the wayfarer that all the world was on the move.  But in the districts of durable soil thousands of men, clinging to their homes, repelled every attack of the western fever.

CHAPTER XI

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