On the other hand a rural owner disposed to sell a slave locally would commonly pass the word round among his neighbors or publish a notice in the county newspaper.  To this would sometimes be appended a statement that the slave was not to be sent out of the state, or that no dealers need apply.  The following is one of many such Maryland items:  “Will be sold for cash or good paper, a negro woman, 22 years old, and her two female children.  She is sold for want of employment, and will not be sent out of the state.  Apply to the editor."[19] In some cases, whether rural or urban, the slave was sent about to find his or her purchaser.  In the city of Washington in 1854, for example, a woman, whose husband had been sold South, was furnished with the following document:  “The bearer, Mary Jane, and her two daughters, are for sale.  They are sold for no earthly fault whatever.  She is one of the most ladylike and trustworthy servants I ever knew.  She is a first rate parlour servant; can arrange and set out a dinner or party supper with as much taste as the most of white ladies.  She is a pretty good mantua maker; can cut out and make vests and pantaloons and roundabouts and joseys for little boys in a first rate manner.  Her daughters’ ages are eleven and thirteen years, brought up exclusively as house servants.  The eldest can sew neatly, both can knit stockings; and all are accustomed to all kinds of house work.  They would not be sold to speculators or traders for any price whatever.”  The price for the three was fixed at $1800, but a memorandum stated that a purchaser taking the daughters at $1000 might have the mother on a month’s trial.  The girls were duly bought by Dr. Edward Maynard, who we may hope took the mother also at the end of the stipulated month.[20] In the cities a few slaves were sold by lottery.  One Boulmay, for example, advertised at New Orleans in 1819 that he would sell fifty tickets at twenty dollars each, the lucky drawer to receive his girl Amelia, thirteen years old.[21]

[Footnote 19:  Charleston, Md., Telegraph, Nov. 7, 1828.]

[Footnote 20:  MSS. in the New York Public Library, MSS. division, filed under “slavery.”]

[Footnote 21:  Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Aug. 17, 1819.]

The long distance trade, though open to any who would engage in it, appears to have been conducted mainly by firms plying it steadily.  Each of these would have an assembling headquarters with field agents collecting slaves for it, one or more vessels perhaps for the coastwise traffic, and a selling agency at one of the centers of slave demand.  The methods followed by some of the purchasing agents, and the local esteem in which they were held, may be gathered by an item written in 1818 at Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley:  “Several wretches, whose hearts must be as black as the skins of the unfortunate beings who constitute their inhuman traffic, have for several days been impudently prowling about the streets of this place