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
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 thr