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.  This means either that the selling of slaves to the southward was very slight, or that the statistical effect of it was canceled by the northward flight of fugitive slaves and the migration of negroes legally free.  There seems to be no evidence that the traffic across Mason and Dixon’s line was ever of large dimensions, the following curious item from a New Orleans newspaper in 1818 to the contrary notwithstanding:  “Jersey negroes appear to be peculiarly adapted to this market—­especially those that bear the mark of Judge Van Winkle, as it is understood that they offer the best opportunity for speculation.  We have the right to calculate on large importations in future, from the success which hitherto attended the sale."[7]

[Footnote 7:  Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, Aug. 22, 1818, quoting the New Orleans Chronicle, July 14, 1818.]

The internal trade at the South began to be noticeable about the end of the eighteenth century.  A man at Knoxville, Tennessee, in December, 1795, sent notice to a correspondent in Kentucky that he was about to set out with slaves for delivery as agreed upon, and would carry additional ones on speculation; and he concluded by saying “I intend carrying on the business extensively."[8] In 1797 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt met a “drove of negroes” about one hundred in number,[9] whose owner had abandoned the planting business in the South Carolina uplands and was apparently