efforts
to discourage kidnapping. It was said to be highly esteemed even among the
negroes.[29]

[Footnote 29: E.A. Andrews, _Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade in the
United States_ (Boston, 1836), pp. 135, 143, 150.]

Soon afterward this traveler made a short voyage on the Potomac with a
trader of a much more vulgar type who was carrying about fifty slaves,
mostly women with their children, to Fredericksburg and thence across the
Carolinas. Overland, the trader said, he was accustomed to cover some
twenty-five miles a day, with the able-bodied slaves on foot and the
children in wagons. The former he had found could cover these marches,
after the first few days, without much fatigue. His firm, he continued, had
formerly sent most of its slaves by sea, but one of the vessels carrying
them had been driven to Bermuda, where all the negroes had escaped to land
and obtained their freedom under the British flag.[30]

[Footnote 30: _Ibid_., pp. 145-149.]

The scale of the coasting transit of slaves may be ascertained from the
ship manifests made under the requirements of the congressional act of
1808 and now preserved in large numbers in the manuscripts division of the
Library of Congress. Its volume appears to have ranged commonly, between
1815 and 1860, at from two to five thousand slaves a year. Several score of
these, or perhaps a few hundred, annually were carried as body servants by
their owners when making visits whether to southern cities or to New York
or Philadelphia. Of the rest about half were sent or carried without intent
of sale. Thus in 1831 James L. Pettigru and Langdon Cheves sent from
Charleston to Savannah 85 and 64 slaves respectively of ages ranging from
ninety and seventy years to infancy, with obvious purpose to develop newly
acquired plantations in Georgia. Most of the non-commercial shipments,
however, were in lots of from one to a dozen slaves each. The traders'
lots, on the other hand, which were commonly of considerable dimensions,
may be somewhat safely distinguished by the range of the negroes' ages,
with heavy preponderance of those between ten and thirty years, and by the
recurrence of shippers' and consignees' names. The Chesapeake ports were
the chief points of departure, and New Orleans the great port of entry.
Thus in 1819 Abner Robinson at Baltimore shipped a cargo of 99 slaves to
William Kenner and Co. at New Orleans, whereas by 1832 Robinson had himself
removed to the latter place