s waiters. Jack died Nov. 20, and the insurance was duly paid.]

A slave's market price was affected by sex, age, physique, mental quality,
industrial training, temper, defects and vices, so far as each of these
could be ascertained. The laws of most of the states presumed a seller's
warrant of health at the time of sale, unless expressly withheld, and in
Louisiana this warrant extended to mental and moral soundness. The period
in which the buyer might apply for redress, however, was limited to a few
months, and the verdicts of juries were uncertain. On the whole, therefore,
if the buyer were unacquainted with the slave's previous career and with
his attitude toward the transfer of possession, he necessarily incurred
considerable risk in making each purchase. But in general the taking of
reasonable precautions would cause the loss through unsuspected vices in
one case to be offset by gains through unexpected virtues in another.

The scale and the trend of slave prices are essential features of the
regime which most economists have ignored and for which the rest have had
too little data. For colonial times the quotations are scant. An historian
of the French West Indies, however, has ascertained from the archives
that whereas the prices ranged perhaps as low as 200 francs for imported
Africans there at the middle of the seventeenth century, they rose to
450 francs by the year 1700 and continued in a strong and steady advance
thereafter, except in war times, until the very eve of the French
Revolution. Typical prices for prime field hands in San Domingo were 650
francs in 1716, 800 in 1728, 1,160 in 1750, 1,400 in 1755, 1,180 in 1764,
1,600 in 1769, 1,860 in 1772, 1,740 in 1777, and 2,200 francs in 1785.[8]

[Footnote 8: Lucien Peytraud, _L'Esclavage aux Antilles Francaises avant
1789_ (Paris, 1897), pp. 122-127.]

In the British West Indies it is apparent from occasional documents that
the trend was similar. A memorial from Barbados in 1689, for example,
recited that in earlier years the planters had been supplied with Africans
at L7 sterling per head, of which forty shillings covered the Guinea cost
and L5 paid the freightage; but now since the establishment of the Royal
African company, "we buy negroes at the price of an engrossed commodity,
the common rate of a good negro on shipboard being twenty pound. And we are
forced to scramble for them in so shameful a manner that one of the great
burdens of our lives is the g